Welcome to a new year, dentists want to know how to attract new dental patients. This article explains 7 dental practice marketing ideas for dentists that are certain to get them in front of new dental patients.

People understand the importance of getting a dental cleaning twice a year, but many put off making an appointment. A vast 85% of Americans believe oral health is exceedingly important to their overall health, but 42% do not see a dentist as often as they’d like, according to a 2018 survey conducted by Delta Dental Plans Association.

If you’re looking to get new dental patients into your office, it’s time to get in front of a larger audience. Here are 7 online dental marketing ideas, designed to help expand your patient list.

Increase your number of dental patients with these dental digital marketing ideas.

1. Improve your web presence and web consistency
   If you’re ready to improve your dental marketing and get more patients into your practice, claiming your listing on directories is an important step. Sites like Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp  and Bing Places automatically create profiles for businesses, so it’s critical to claim your dental practice listing. Claiming ownership puts you in control of the page content, allowing you to add and update important areas like contact information, hours of operation and your website URL.
   
   
2. Ask patients to review you online
   Potential patients are in market for a new dental practice for many reasons including, recently moved, relationship changes, insurance additions and even issues with their current dental practice. When they choose a new dentist, these users have become increasingly aware when doing their homework. Once of the first areas they will check when running a search for “dentist near me” is the reviews a dental practice has. Making sure that you are asking patients to review your business online is critical to the success of your 2020 marketing strategy. In addition to asking patients for reviews, responding to negative reviews is equally important.
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3. Create or improve an SEO optimized, mobile-first dental practice website
   Statista reported in Q3 2019 that 64% of Google organic traffic came from mobile devices. If your current website is needing content, optimized solely for desktop devices and lacking detailed information about your services, appealing to new dental patients will be extremely challenging. Officially reported by Google, mobile-first website indexing came to small businesses in 2018 and all new websites in July 2019.
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4. Invest your dental practice in paid advertising
   Getting in front of new dental patients is the only way to grow. Tips listed above are for users who land on your website, local search and reputation management. All of those are great, however, if you are not getting in front of the massive number of online searches then you are giving your competitors a golden ticket to surpass your growth goals. With Statista  reporting 77% of 293 million American internet users use the internet each day, it is critical that your dental practice communicates your benefits at the very moment someone is searching for a new dentist. Dental advertising strategies using Google Ads (paid search), Facebook advertising and retargeting are effective ways to communicate your benefits and services offered by your dental practice.
   
   
5. Use social media to be social
   Knowing that 80% of Americans have at least one social profile and that social apps have become the #1 used applications on mobile devices, your dental practice cannot afford to not be active on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. A lot of dentist ask us how to use social media and this tip can’t be titled any better, use social media to be social. Engage with users on oral health tips and be a part of your community. Join groups such as “All Things [INSERT PRACTICE TOWN]” to connect with the local community.
   
   
6. Start a dental practice blog (right on your website)
   Being a dentist, you have already proven that you are an expert in oral health. Converting your wealth of knowledge to health, dental and oral tip articles will confirm with new dental patients that you are an expert in the field. Creating these unique content pieces will not just allow you to stand out from the other local dentist practices, but will also increase your search ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages) like Google and Bing, but will also enhance your dental marketing strategy. You should be writing dental related content right on your website on a regular basis that is either weekly or bi-weekly.
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7. Create more video about your dental practice
   Google has reported that 55% of internet users used online video before deciding about their health in 2019. Knowing that a lot of smaller dental practices have not added video to their dental digital marketing mix, this is a great opportunity to stand out and attract new dental patients. Nowadays, modern cell phones such as the Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel have camera capabilities like ever before. Creating video content through actual video or even photo collages that can be uploaded to YouTube, embedded onto your website and more is critical in growing your dental practice.
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ImageWorks is a full-service, digital marketing firm dedicated to solving critical business marketing problems and improving productivity and online lead-generation for companies in a variety of industries. Our team has designed and implemented award-winning websites, online-marketing campaigns and video/audio production solutions all with a goal of maximizing ROI.