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that appointment, Twitter does the work for you.
Why not add to that tweet that the first person to call gets $20
off? That may result in a flood of incoming calls. (And if you are
worried that youwill have toomany people calling to get appoint-
ments, we need to chat; I’mquite certain that you can find a space
for all those incoming calls looking for an appointment.)
Now, the big one: Google. Fifty points if you know where
your website ranks in a Google search of dentists in your area.
Companies will charge $500 or more a month for search engine
optimization (SEO) of your business. But there are things that
you can do for free that will improve your search engine rank-
ings. A highly impactful tool is to have a blog associated with
your website. The key is to update the blog regularly, because
Google favors sites that have a steady streamof fresh and relevant
content. The blog can be brief, but it should be updated regularly
and it should contain key words that patients will be using to
search for what you offer. Have your website linked to reputable
websites. Our cerecdoctors.com Academy members are listed on
www.onevisitdentist.net, a relevant and reputable site. (Not only
doAcademymembers benefit fromattendance to the Symposium
in Las Vegas, but they are given tools to enhance their practice.)
Review sites, like Yelp, are here to stay and can successfully
generate more referrals for your dental practice. According
to a recent study by The Boston Consulting Group, a business
that has optimized their Yelp page brings in average of $8,000
more per year from Yelp alone. With more than 100 million
users that have supplied a whopping 39 million reviews, Yelp
is completely free for businesses, and your business page can
be optimized completely free of charge. This is a great way
to reach out to local prospects and monitor your standing in
the dental community. You can also link your website, Face-
book Page and Twitter profile to your Yelp page to supply your
current and future patients with information about you and
your practice.
The best part about all this smart marketing is that if you
just don’t get it and none of this makes sense to you, I can
promise you that there are team members in your office who
understand this completely. Put one of them in charge — with
plenty of guidelines about what is an appropriate “voice” for
your practice — to make sure you take advantage of the online
opportunities available.
For questions and additional information, Dr. Puri can be
reached at sameer@cerecdoctors.com.
cerec dentists are no different than other dentists
in that they all realize that the lifeblood of any practice is the
new patient flow. If you don’t have new patients coming into a
practice, problems occur … lots of problems. As the old saying
goes, “Revenue fixes everything,” and there is no better source
of revenue for a practice than new-patient flow.
Traditional methods of marketing are no longer as effective
as they used to be. Fifty-four percent of direct mail doesn’t even
get opened. So, in an effort to get a one-percent response rate,
you have half the people not even opening your mail, and the
vast majority of the other half ignores your message. Great use
of your marketing dollars, huh?
With the rise of social media, dentists need to take advantage of
the tools available to them for a more effective rate of attracting
patients to the practice.Whether you are themost high-techdental
office,orhaveanofficestillstuckwith’70sdécor,youneedtoensure
amajor presence on the socialmedia platforms available to you.
Raise your hand if you have a Facebook page. I’m not talking
about your personal Facebook page, either. I mean a Facebook
Fan Page for your practice. You may have hundreds of friends
on your personal page, but your practice’s Facebook page is
the more important one and should be updated regularly with
content and information about your practice.
The more patients you can invite to like your practice’s Fan
Page, the better you can inform them about things that are
happening in your practice, including hygiene openings, new
procedures and holiday schedules. This is all done in real time
and all without spending a fortune on your web programmer.
Whether you think Facebook is a fad or not, or whether you
use it for personal reasons, it’s actively used daily by millions of
patients, and you need to be where they are.
You can spend another three years arguing that Facebook
is going to go away, or you can take 15 minutes to establish a
Facebook page for your practice. Chances are you already have
a staff member who is active on Facebook who would jump at
the chance to manage this for you, sending out requests and
responding to any comments or queries. Why not make it a part
of their job description and get some benefit from it?
Next up, Twitter. Do you have a Twitter account? I used to
think that Twitterwas the dumbest thing onEarth. But imagine
a Twitter account that is followed by the majority of your
patients who are active on Twitter. The next hygiene opening
that comes up could be tweeted to your patients and instead of
having your hygiene coordinator spend half a day trying to fill
H A P P E N I N G S I N T H E W O R L D O F C A D / C A M | | | B Y S A M E E R P U R I , D . D . S .
Smart Marketing
Maximizing Social Media to Put Your Practice on the Map