How to Effectively Market
your Dental Practice Online

Having an effective digital marketing apparatus is now a standard expectation of businesses across nearly every major industry. Dentistry is no exception. As a dental provider, you will find that developing and maintaining a refined online presence will yield very positive results for your business. Online spaces can be used to facilitate more opportunities for potential customers to discover you and more avenues to interact with returning customers in order to build a community and generate loyalty. Here are a few things you can do to get started in building an advantageous digital presence:

Establish a modern and engaging social media presence

Adrian Lefler, VP of My Social Practice and expert in dental marketing, suggests that dentists should use captions to their advantage in creating an effective social media presence. Captions should ultimately be used to grab the consumer’s attention – try including hashtags to widen your reach and incorporating the tasteful use of emojis to reel people in. Captions are a very effective way to build and solidify a community by driving engagement – encourage your followers to like, comment on, and share your posts. Include a call to action in your captions by linking them to your website or events – this is a quick and easy way to encourage brand interaction and improve online performance. Remember to always prioritize connections over conversions on social media, not every post needs to be an advertisement to be effective. 1

Utilize search engine optimization principles

Xaña Winans, CEO of Golden Proportions Marketing and industry leader in dental marketing, contends that search engine optimization (SEO) can be extremely beneficial to any dental organization that uses it effectively. Despite scattered views to the contrary, all evidence points to the fact that SEO is a critically important gateway to harness the unthinkable power of the search engine. There are 60 billion unique searches for SEO ranked websites every single day. Naturally, it is very important to competitively position your company as far up in these searches as possible and distinguish yourself from competition. When a patient is searching for a new dentist, they will more than likely use Google to find dental providers near them. You will want your company to appear at the top of their search so that they have a much higher probability of doing business with you than a competitor farther down the results page. Contract a company specializing in SEO in order to tailor your online presence for search engines and drive profitable engagement with your brand. 2

Convert viewers into customers with a well-designed website

Beyond the long-standing fundamentals of business-oriented web design, there are a few other things that should be taken into consideration:

• Ensure that your website is constructed with modern web design standards in mind and consistently updated to stay with the times
• Link your social media accounts to your website alongside traditional contact options such as phone number and email
• Provide clear digital options for appointment scheduling and payment plans
• Make as much information about your practice as possible available on your website
• Maintain a blog with engaging content for your customers
• Contract an SEO company to give your website a competitive advantage in search engines

1 Lefler, Adrian (2022). “How to write compelling social media dental captions” [Blog]. Dentistry IQ. https://www.dentistryiq.com/practice-management/marketing/article/14235243/how-to-write-compelling-social-media-dental-captions [Accessed Mar 21, 2022]

2 Winans, Xaña RDH (2022). “Dental SEO is dead? Poppycock.” [Blog]. Dentistry Today. Available at: https://www.dentistrytoday.com/dental-seo-is-dead-poppycock/ [Accessed Mar 21, 2022]