Lenora Milligan
Salt DPM Consultant
Part 2 of 2
External marketing can also be effective. Traditional ways: direct mail, news papers, magazines, billboards, radio and television ads, can all be very effective, although they tend to be more costly. If you choose this route, spend the money required to hire a professional to assist you. Some tips: Your advertisement should showcase one item, have a call to action and a time limit. Decide how you want the prospective patients to contact you and provide one way only. Simplifying choices lessens the opportunity for confusion and provides better results. Come from an emotional place with your wording. Most financial decisions are based on emotion, not logic. If you doubt that, think about the car you drive. You need transportation; does that mean it has to be a Hummer or a Porsche? Of course not! But those cars make you feel….special? It’s emotion.
What about Yellow
Page advertising? Do you use
it? Or do you Google everything? The
newer, exciting and sometimes confounding area of marketing today is the World
Wide Web. The land of web
crawlers, cookies and tweets, oh my!
Where do you begin?
Hopefully you have a website. If not, there are companies that can provide
you with a very professional site quickly. If you are not
asking patients for their email addresses, then get started today. It used to be the more elaborate and flashy the website the
better you were perceived. Now,
you may want to consider something more simplistic that loads quickly on the
computer screen. People are unwilling
to wait for pages that load slowly.
Your website
won’t help your practice if it doesn’t show up in search engines on page one
during routine, non specific searches, for example: “Riverside general
dentist”. If the only way you can
find your website one page one is by typing in your exact name or practice name
then you have a little work to do.
To create an online presence is becoming a little more challenging than
it used to be. Years ago clicking
repeatedly on your web site helped get you to the top of the list.
Now you need
more than a well-clicked site to get on page one. Search engines now want to
know how relevant you are. They
are beginning to consider where else you are mentioned, i.e.: Face Book fan
pages, tweets on Twitter, or online surveys and blog entries. There are companies that provide reasonably
priced packages that collect surveys from your patients and post them online. Make use of free tools like Google
analytics and Google places. Google
it, you will be guided through the simple process which can help you show up
during online searches. Create a
fan page, if you have a Face Book page scroll down to the bottom and on the
right it will give an option to “create a page.” It’s easy, just follow the instructions. Once your page is complete you can send
a mass email to patients and referral sources to ask them to become a fan. You want fans, not friends. Once that is accomplished, periodically
post comments that will go out to all the fans. Keep your posts short and interesting. You may post about special services you
have added to your practice, offers you have in place, or links to health
information that may be relevant. So go ahead and tweet, blog, post, and use
banner ads on your website. It’s
the future of marketing.
If you would like more information, please contact us at info.saltdpm.com
Join us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SaltDentalPracticeManagement.
This article was originally published by Tri-County Dental Society Bulletin
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