Search Engine Optimisation (part one)

Using search engine optimisation

NEIL SANDERSON DENTAL MARKETING EXPERT

You are probably aware that Google now gives the top three search results to it’s paid advertising e.g. pay per click or Google Adwords. This is without doubt the most effective and quickest way to get your website to the top of Google’s rankings.

However there is also a case to be made for being near the top of the rankings organically or free listings. Some people just prefer to click on the free area rather than clicking on an advert. So whilst I would always advocate using Google Adwords as your first choice, I’d like to talk a little about search engine optimisation.

Search engine optimisation is effectively trying to make your website rank towards the top of Google’s listings. You must remember that fourth place is probably the best you will ever get because of the pay per click.

But if you can get yourself to position four of five it’s certainly better than being on page two. So  what do you need to do?

Search Engine Optimisation must do’s

1. Video You must have video on your website, this is now crucial. Not only does video move you up the rankings but it also is a brilliant tool for keeping people on your page and remember to make your video autoplay. Ideally the video should be on either YouTube or Vimeo with a link to you website rather than being embedded in your site.
2. Blog Write a regular blog, between 300-500 words. A blog is also extremely effective in influencing Google, make sure you put lots of links back to your website into the blog and also have outbound links. you also need to optimise any images you put into your blog. You also need to think of the keywords you are trying to influence Google with.
3. Google local business. This is an area often overlooked by most practices but is highly effective at getting you up the local rankings. Put as much content into this area including video, images, your opening times, any special offers, in fact as much as possible. Then get as many reviews from your patients as possible.
4. Metatags These are the short descriptions you see when you search for something and are presented with the listings, ensure that these are relevant and have your key words in them.
5. Links. If you have any links in you page ensure that they still work, Google will check for broken links, if you have lots they will mark your site down.
6. Navigation Analysis ensure that your site has good navigation and all links within the site work.
7. URL names ensure that your URL (the name of the page) is relevant and has your key words in it.
8. Content Change you need to make sure that your content changes regularly, Google doesn’t like static sites, it wants to see things changing regularly, just as you update your Social Media ensure that you regularly update your website too.

I’ll go through some of the other SEO tactics in later posts, but if you start to adopt these you should see your rankings improve, although this isn’t guaranteed and you are at the mercy of Google. As I said earlier, the only tried and tested way to get your site to the top of the listings is to advertise with Google.
 

If you would like help with your digital marketing, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk Facebook page

Mobilegeddon

From the 21st April Mobilegeddon happens, you need to act now
 

For some time now I’ve been banging on about how your website should be mobile ready because 60% of all search is now carried out on mobile devices and you should have your website ready for these visitors.

Well things are just about the heat up even more. Google have announced major changes to their algorithms, (the industry is calling this Mobilegeddon that will do two things.

1. They are going to tag all websites in the search listing that are mobile ready.
2. They will lower your ranking if your site isn’t mobile ready.

The marketing press have been full of this, Read This Article. So just what does this mean to you as a dental practice? Well basically everything. As I have mentioned on many occasions 60% of all search is not done on mobile devices. This means that if your site isn’t mobile ready, people searching for you will probably never see your site listed.

But and it’s a big but, if your site is actually found by someone who is searching for you, your listing will not have the Google mobile stamp of approval so they may well decide not to bother with your site.

This Google update is not some small thing that they will roll out as they have been doing over the last two years with most people not noticing, this is a major deal for Google, (Mobilegeddon), this is why they have been flagging this up for some time.

So what do you need to do to ensure that your website is mobile friendly and you won’t fall foul of Mobilegeddon?

1. Ensure the mobile version of your site is active and functional. Responsive designs are the most popular, these are the one’s that we supply, but you can also have a separate hosted mobile version of your site. Google doesn’t have a preference, as long as mobile users’ experience isn’t interrupted.
2. Ensure Google’s mobile bots can crawl your site. If Google can’t see it, it may as well not even be there.
3. Check each individual page of your site on a mobile device to ensure navigability. Just because your home page is mobile friendly doesn’t mean the rest of your site is.

In addition Google are offering you a new tool to test your website, click here to check your website and ensure that it is mobile ready, this tool is completely free and safe, it will give you all the information you need to ensure your site is mobile ready.

Incidentally Google are also checking to see if you have a mobile app too, and again if you pass this test they will rank you higher than if you don’t so you might want to think about getting yourself a mobile for the practice (we sell these too) click here to see how our Mobile App can build your practice, it’s been designed specifically for dental practices.

We are now very busy converting many websites to make them mobile ready, if you would like us to give you a quote on making your website mobile ready, call us today on 01767 626 398 or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk or check out our Facebook page.

Why Would Your Patients Want Your Mobile App?
 

When the developers of the dental mobile app first approached me this was the first thing I said to them. Let’s face it why on earth would anyone want to to got the trouble of downloading your mobile app?

First let me explain what a mobile app is. If you have a smart phone either Apple or Android, you will almost certainly have lots of apps on it. For instance to access the iTunes store, Google maps, etc. etc.

Apps are now the best way for all companies to communicate to their customers, but why would anyone want a dental mobile app?

The answer is you make it worth their while to download and use your mobile app!

Firstly you have to advertise the app, particularly in your practice. Patients can download the app simply by pointing their mobile phone at a QR code in your reception. But they need a reason to download it in the first place.

So here’s why they will not only download the app but use it.

Mobile app Loyalty Scheme

There is a built in loyalty facility on the app. Each time your patient comes into the practice they scan a QR code in reception and this puts a tick in a box for them. When they have a certain number of ticks on their app they get a reward from you, maybe an electric tooth brush or a free hygiene session of a bottle of wine, it can be anything. This feature not only guarantees that your patients continue to come and see you but they use the app every time they come to the practice. The app does all this for you automatically.

Mobile app Referral Feature
There is the most amazing referral feature on the mobile app. Did you know that the average Facebook user has between 50 and 100 friends on it? The apps referral feature will send a message to every one of their friends urging them to download the app. If just 100 of your patients do this for you, you’ll reach between 5,000 and 10,000 new potential patients.

But why  would the do this for you? Because you reward not only the referrer but also the person being referred and the app does all this for you. When one of your patients gets let’s say five of their friends to download your app, they are rewarded by you, when a person is referred, they get something off their first appointment, you win, your patient wins, the new patient wins.

You can’t buy advertising like the mobile app

Why because just think of this, if you advertise with Google or Facebook, the press or any other media it is just that “an advert”. Whereby when your patients send a referral to their friends this is a thousand times more powerful. Because it’s word of mouth advertising, but on an industrial scale.

It’s estimated that 50 of your patients sending our a referral to all their friends is worth £1,000 of Google advertising, and that app costs just £50.00 per month. A fraction of the cost.

So don’t hesitate you need to call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at enquiries[at]dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk  or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk or visit our Facebook page

Your Landing Page

Neil Sanderson

Most people think of a website as an entity in its self, this is not the case. A website is a series of pages of which you need to think about landing pages.

What is a landing page? Well the description is in the name really, it’s where people land when they first come to your website.

Most people think that the place people should first see when they arrive at your site is the home page, this again is not the case, ideally you need people to land on the correct landing page, let me explain.

I’m sure that all of you have at one time or another gone to Amazon. Can you ever think of a time when you arrived on a home page which had menu options across the top for you to find what you are looking for?

No of course you haven’t. You always land on the page that you wanted. For instance if you are looking for a camera. I typed in the search “Canon EOS 70D” and below is the search I got.

Camer search screen

All the search items are about the EOS 70D which is what you would expect, some are reviews and technical pages others are sales pages, but effectively all of them are about this particular camera.

So whenI click on the search item which takes me to the “landing page”. It comes as no surprise that the page I land on is about the Canon EOS 70D.

Because Amazon is so good at this you are presented with everything you need to purchase this camera, there are reviews, things that people also bought when they buy this camera etc. In fact just about everything you need to make a purchase, this is a typical Amazon landing page and they are very good at it.

Amazon Canon landing page

So what has this got to do with your website and the landing page that your prospective patients land on?

Well it’s about this, we have all been tought by the likes of Amazon that we want to land on exactly the page we are interested in. We don’t want to land on the “home” landing page, we know what we want and we want it right now.

People are not prepared to come to a “home” landing page and navigate around the website until they find the item they are looking for, this is why you have to promote your landing pages all the time, so that your visitors get exactly what they are looking for immediately.

If someone is looking for teeth whitening, most dental websites are set up so they will come to the “Home” landing page, they will then click on the treatment tab, then they will find the whiting link and click on that, do you see the issue?

If you want people to visit your teeth whitening page you need to start optimising this page so that Google can pick it up and display it, this needs to become your whitening landing page.

The same goes for all your other treatment, such as facial aesthetics, implants, straightening etc. etc.

Writing a blog is a great help but having the right key words on the page is also crucial, along with the correct meta description. Get ahead of your competition and ensure that your treatment pages are optimised to be your landing pages.

However you can bypass all this an just use Google Adwords, which will always send people to exactly the page you require, this is one of the huge benefits of Adwords.

If you would like more information on your website, call me on 01767 626  398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit our Facebook page.

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Website Traffic, How Facebook Can Increase Yours Completely Free Of Charge

Neil Sanderson

We all know that saying thank you is a great courtesy and makes the person who is receiving, feel much better don’t we. Well here’s a tip to make those two little words “Thank You” increase your website traffic too.

As I’ve said on many occasions before, there are two things you need to concentrate on with your website, (1) you need to maximise your website traffic. (2) you need to converts as much of that website traffic as possible into paying patients.

So here’s a little tip that will cost you absolutely nothing, it may endear you to your patients and you’ll get more traffic to your website and if your website has the right things on there when they land you’ll start to get more new patients too.

70% of the population now owns a smart phone, which is quite staggering, and just about every person who has a smart phone knows how to use an app. Additionally 50% of the population use Facebook for at least half hour per day every day.

So when you have done a great job for one of your patients and they say “thank you”, why don’t you ask them to put a link onto their Facebook page and just say thank you, it’s as simple as that.

They can even do this whilst you are with them on their Facebook app!

Let me elaborate on how powerful this little “thank you” can be to increase your website traffic. Let’s say you see fifty patients per day and one in five of them post this link to your website on their Facebook page.

The average person has 500 friends and likes on their Facebook account, this means that the link to your website could potentially be seen by 5,000 people every day.

Now I know that not everyone is going to do this for you, however much you try and persuade them. So we’ll scale this down (a lot). Let’s say that only 50 people per day get to see a link posted by one of your patients. This means that upwards of 1,000 people will see the link every month (12,000 per year).

Even if only 10% of them actually click through to your website, this means that 1,200 new patients will visit your site, simply because you asked your patients to say “thank you” on their Facebook page with a link to your site.

The best thing about this is that all this new website traffic is completely free, you’re not spending a penny on advertising anywhere.

But you also need to remember that you have the right wording, graphics, video etc. on your site to convert them from website traffic to paying patients and that is a whole different subject and incidentally even more important.

If you would like to know how I can help you grow your dental practice, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk, or you can visit our FACEBOOK page too.

Your Dental Website, What’s Important?

The answer to this question “Dental Website, What’s Important?” is incredibly simple really and it’s this: (1) You need to attract as much traffic to your site as possible (2) You need to convert as much of that traffic as possible.

Most businesses view their website as something that they have to tick the box and can say, yes we now have a website. The fact that the only people who know it exists is themselves, friends and family never seems to come into the equation.

Having a dental website built can cost many thousands of pounds and take up a great deal of your time and effort, only for it to lurk in the shadows never being seen by anyone. It’s a little like setting up a new dental practice in the middle of a field and wondering why nobody is coming!

The best and most reliable way to drive traffic to your website is to use Google Adwords. This will take you to the top of page one of Google in most instances or at worst you’ll be over on the right hand side of the first page see below.

When someone looks for your site on a mobile device this is even more important as normally you’ll only ever see the websites that are using Google Adwords advertising or pay per click (PPC).

Google normally allocates the top three slots for paid advertising which means that if you don’t advertise your website with them the best you can ever hope for is position number four and to get to this position you have to be very, very, very good at optimising your dental website.

So let’s assume you’ve decided to pay Google an amount each day to display your dental website and people are landing on the particular page you want them to land on. You now have to convert them from browsers to buyers.

Take a look at the two websites below:

I’m sure you’ll think that the page on the right is much prettier than my page and you’d probably be right, but my page will outrank the other page in Google rankings and also out convert the one on the right by a factor of 1000% here’s why.

On the left of my page is a video which automatically starts running when someone lands on the page, this immediately gets and keeps their attention. On the page on the right is a nice photograph.

On the right hand side of my page is a picture of my book, and a line saying click here to download my book or have one sent in the post for free. However to actually get the book you have to give me your email address and name and this is key.

If you are selling anything that is of a higher value such as an implant on your dental website, invariably people will not just pick up the phone and book an appointment now, simply because whenever we buy things of a higher value we want more information and this is where the email comes into play.

When someone gives you their email address it is placed in what we call an auto responder, this does exactly what the name implies, it automatically responds. So you can have a series of emails spaced out over the next three or four months that will automatically be sent to your subscriber.

This means that when they do eventually decide to have that implant or have their teeth straightened or have a smile makeover, invariably they will choose you because you have been sending them information for that last three months.

That’s how we convert browsers into paying patients on your dental website.

If you would like to know more about our website service, with video and auto responders built in, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me a This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Start Using Facebook For Research

Neil Sanderson

It wasn’t so long ago whenever you took to the high street or went to the supermarket that there was a nice lady or gentleman with a clip board who would ask you if you had a few minutes spare to answer a few questions was it?

It seemed that they were everywhere asking you questions on every subject from which biscuits you prefer to where you go on holiday or what car you drive etc. etc.

But now you barely ever see one of these people, because the smart corporations have started to use Social Media or more particularly Facebook for Research.

Using Facebook for research is not only a lot cheaper but it is much more accurate too. So what do you need to do to use Facebook for research in your dental practice?

Once you have a couple of hundred fans of your page you can start to see patterns. The best tool for this is the insight tool under people, which gives you just about every bit of information you can think of about the people who “like” your page.

You can see the split between gender, how many people fit into particular age groups, when people are online and looking at what you do, the information is invaluable to build your audience and communicate with them, Facebook for research purposes really has no rivals at all.

If you are thinking of launching some sort of promotion or launch a new product or service, you can test this out on Facebook before you invest your time and effort into it.

There are several aps you can run on Facebook that will let you run surveys. So for instance one of my clients was thinking of changing his opening hours and offering late opening or weekends. We ran a survey for him on Facebook and it turned out that most people didn’t actually want late evenings they wanted to come to the dentist before work e.g. early mornings.

A section of Facebook insights

You might think of going on a course for straightening or offer a new type of whitening, so run a survey with your likes and find out if there is a ready market waiting to take your new products or services.

But you don’t really have to go to the time and effort of running a survey if you don’t want to, simply ask your fans what they would like to have on your page.

Facebook is a very interactive medium and is ideal for simply asking your audience questions. So once you have decided that you are going to launch a particular service or you are going to make a special offer Facebook is also great for telling you how large your market is too.

First you create an advert for something like teeth whitening, you can then target it at exactly the audience you want and Facebook will tell you how many people fit that profile. Let’s say you are going to launch straightening and your Facebook research told you that the best age group for this would be 30-40 year olds.

You can specify that you want to just target this age group in your area and Facebook will tell you exactly how many people your advert will reach. As far as I know there is nothing that comes close to this type of market information and how this can give you laser focus with your advertising.

If you would like more information on Facebook for research or any other type of Dental marketing information, call me on 01767626398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

To Promote Private Dental Treatment You Have To Tell People What You Do!

Neil Sanderson

Just how do you promote private dental treatment? Your private dental treatment may just be one of the best kept secrets in your practice! I don’t think I have been to a dental practice yet where the private treatments offered are being promoted.

If you don’t believe me just have a look around your practice! What information are you currently offering your patients on the services you offer, I suspect if you are like just about every dental practice you aren’t.

Let’s face it dental implants, veneers, bridges, invisible braces are not cheap are they? A couple of implants may well set your patient back many thousands of pounds, a course of Invisalign runs into thousands, these aren’t easy decisions for your patients to make.

When you are thinking of buying a car, holiday, TV etc. you don’t normally make a snap decision, you gather as much information as you can get and hopefully make an informed decision.

This normally means visiting websites, getting brochures, going into a showroom and gathering as much material as possible, which means that you have to do the same to promote private dental treatment in your practice.

Car manufacturers, holiday providers know that they have to promote their products both online and in the showrooms or travel agents, they provide brochures, sales people, downloads etc. and you are no different, people have to have information to make a decision.

So just how do you promote your private dental treatment? Incidentally you have an even more difficult task than a car manufacturer or a holiday company because a large number of your patients and prospective patients don’t even know that your private dental treatment exists.

Many don’t know what an implant is or that they can straighten their teeth without metal braces and if they do they don’t know that it may apply to them. If you take nothing else from this article remember this statement.

It’s not your patients job to find out what you do, it’s your job to tell them!

So just how do your promote private dental treatment in your practice?

Well if you want to do it really well you buy my Practice Information System, but you can do this yourself too if you have the time and can find a good graphic designer, printer, video production company etc., here’s what we provide you and what you need.

1. Get rid of Sky or BBC news on your reception TV and start to show patients what you do. We provide you with a bespoke video which is branded to you. It has testimonials from your patients, it has you explaining what you can do and it has incredible animations which really grab your patients attention.
2. You need a brochure and I don’t mean a little tri-fold thing which one of your suppliers has provided I mean a high quality A4 brochure that is produced by you and promotes your treatment, explaining what you can offer and how it can benefit your patients.
3. We provide you with banners which draw your patients attention to your video and your brochures, but at its simplest just highlights what you can do for them.

We call this our Practice Information System and is designed specifically to promote private dental treatment in your practice.

But it gets better, standing out from your competition is crucial and not only will the video run on the TV in your reception from a standard DVD player, it will run on your website, you can email it (or parts of it) to your patients, it will run on an iPad in your surgery, in fact just about anywhere.

Dental Marketing Expert’s Practice Information System is your one stop shop to promote private dental treatment in your practice.

If you would like more information on Practice Information System, call us now on 01767 626 398 or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

How To Grow Your NHS Dental Practice

I wrote part one of How To Grow Your NHS Dental Practice a few weeks ago, the reason that there has been a little delay is that I have been putting into place a new product to help solve this problem.

So let's have a look at the issues for most NHS dental practices. Unless you can get the local PCT to give you some more UDA's you simply can't grow your NHS dental practice revenues and because staff costs, and inflation continue to grow this in effect means your revenues fall every year.

Add to that the growing uncertainty about the new contract, it puts practices that are wholly or mainly dependent on an NHS contract in a difficult position.

So what is the solution? Well of course there really only is one solution to grow your NHS dental practice and that is to sell private treatment, which I assume doesn't come as any surprise whatsoever, in fact it is blindingly obvious.

But here's the catch, just how do you grow your NHS dental practice with private work, because there are some very difficult obstacles to overcome when trying to sell private treatment when you depend on your NHS patients and that contract.

Let me put one myth to bed straight away, it doesn't matter where your practice is or what the demographics are, there are people out there who will find the money for private treatment, however deprived your area is, please believe me on this one. despite what your associates may tell you.

However there is one practical problem to growing your NHS dental practice you will have to overcome and that is this. Can you actually deliver the private treatment e.g. straightening, whitening, implants, smile makeovers. If you can't deliver then you need to find a way to do this. But I am going to assume that you can deliver private treatment in some form or other.

So we know what the problems of how to grow your NHS dental practice are, how are you going to overcome them. The biggest problem you have to solve is letting your patients know what you can offer them.

If you take nothing else from this article remember this statement... It is not your patients job to find out what you can do for them. It is your job to tell them what you can do for them!!!

So how are you going to sell private treatment, let's just remind ourselves of the issues again:

1. You don't have time to discuss with your patients the various private options you offer.
2. Your patients subsequently don't know what you do.
3. There is now an information block, your patients don't know what you can do for them and you don't have time to tell them.

It's not often I plug my products or services in these blogs but I now have the perfect solution, it is our  "Reception Information Centre", this comprises of three elements.

1. The first is a bespoke video which will run on your TV from a DVD, computer, iPad, YouTube etc. etc. It tells your patients exactly what you can offer them in a 5-10 minute video. This video can either be an animated type of video or a professionally shot video where we bring in a film crew, not only can it run in reception but also on your website, via email or on a tablet.
2. The second element is a practice brochure which matches the video EXACTLY it is designed specifically for your patients to take away and remind them exactly what they saw when they were waiting to see you.
3. The third element are pull up exhibition stands which will have the bullet points of what you can offer and again matches exactly the style of the video and the brochure. It will guide them to watch the TV and pick up a brochure.

In order to grow your NHS Dental Practice you need time to tell your story and you simply don't have it in an NHS practice so this system does exactly that for you, it will encourage your patients to ask what you can do because they are now informed, even asking for a white filling rather than a standard one. All the above is bespoke to you with your logo, colours and even YOU in it. It is the perfect solution to the age long problem of how do you sell private treatment to NHS patients.

I will have examples of the above in a couple of weeks with pricing to match.

There are other options for informing your patients what you can do and I'll cover these in a couple of weeks, but they all involve much more expense and time and effort on your part.

So if you would like more information on the "Reception Information Centre" or how to grow your NHS dental practice or any other dental marketing issues, call me on 01767626398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Blogging For Your Practice

Neil Sanderson

Blogging is now essential if you want to have a successful Social Media presence and at the same time get your dental practice website up the Google natural rankings, so first things first, what is a blog?

Well you are reading one now, this is my blog and I write one every week, for two reasons, the first is to communicate with my clients and potential clients, the second reason is that blogging is one of the best ways to keep your website on the first page of Google.

A blog is simply an article written by you, usually on your website, but you can have a separate blog area too if you don’t have this as part of your site. I would recommend to anyone that if you are thinking of building a new dental practice website or changing your existing one you must have the ability to write a blog.

I recently asked for a quote on behalf of one of my clients to have upgrade his website which currently doesn’t have the ability to start blogging. Both he and I were staggered when I was quoted £950.00 + VAT.

All websites should have a blog built into them, if you build a website in one of the two major “content management systems” e.g. WordPress or Joomla, this will be provided for you automatically. Don’t buy a website without either (a) a content management system or (b) a blog section. Incidentally all the websites we build have both as standard see my siteDental Website Design and Build.

So why is blogging so important? Let’s look at Social Media first. The two main Social Media sites you should have your practice on are of course Facebook and Twitter. Neither are really geared up for having lots of content in a single post, in fact Twitter limits you to 140 characters in total.

So if you are going to engage with your patients you have to link to something else, this is where blogging really comes into its own and this is how you do it. First you write your blog (remember a blog can be any size you want) on whatever special offer you are running or something interesting about the practice. You then create a post on either Facebook or Twitter and put a link back to your blog.

This does several things, firstly it takes the person who is reading your post back to your website which is ideally where you want them. Hopefully they will take advantage of your offer or maybe have a look around your website, either way this is what you want to achieve.

Secondly Google loves this type of traffic, so the more traffic you have coming to your site from Facebook and Twitter the higher Google will rank your site. This is the modern equivalent of “link building” but one that Google approves of and rewards you for doing it.

Blogging has another great positive effect on your website ranking. Google is encouraging everyone to update and create new content for your website. A blog is the single best and easiest way to do this. If you start to blog ideally once per week or once a month even once a quarter, your website rankings will improve.

So remember, if you are ordering a new website, insist it has the ability to blog (all ours do). Insist it has a content management system (all ours do). Start blogging and see your website rise up the rankings and your Social Media engagement soar.

If you don’t have time to blog yourself, we can do it for you, simply call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

What Can Happen When You Do No Marketing

Neil Sanderson

Oh the perils of not marketing yourself. I had my first customer default on me this week, apparently he is ceasing to trade from next month. I took on this customer in good faith just before Christmas.

The customer called me early January to say that he was in financial trouble and that his creditors were letting him continue to trade, (I know its strange that he would take my services in December and then tell me he is struggling to pay creditors in January.)

Strangely I had gone to see this dentist nearly two years earlier and he had decided not to proceed with any marketing at that time as he was doing lots of other things to his practice and taking on new staff etc. etc.

I could see at that time, that this practice was in trouble and needed help. The first thing that struck me as odd was the fact that he had a practice management system that had 18,000+ patients on it of which only 3,000 were active.

Now it could be that this guy might be a rubbish dentist and just loses patients, I have no idea of that and can’t comment, but whilst I was there, patients were coming into the waiting room and he was speaking with them as friends so I have to assume that he got on well with his patients.

The second thing that made alarm bells go off was the fact that he’d done little or no marketing whatsoever over the past five years, not to existing or new patients.

Whenever I write these columns I stress the importance of saying that as part of your marketing you have to communicate regularly with your existing patients to make them feel loved, just as much as you spend time trying to get new ones. It’s absolutely imperative.

Time and again I see potential customers and they tell me that they can’t afford marketing, whilst at the same time telling me that they don’t have enough patients and the patients they have aren’t spending enough with them.

I hear this statement over and over again, don’t you think that there is a certain irony, “I don’t have enough business, but I don’t want to spend any more money getting any”. Let me say to everyone reading this now. If you continue to do what you’ve always done that’s what you’ll always get. Or even more to the point, doing nothing gets you exactly nothing.

The economy may be coming out of recession but very few of the people I deal with feel that way and patients aren’t just going to start queuing up at your door waiting for your services. Sorry I have to say this, but if you want more patients or you want to sell the higher end services you offer you have to spend money marketing them.

The problem is that most businesses view marketing as a cost not an investment. This week I am spending £3,000 on a 3 x 2 stand for two days at the Dentistry Show. But I know that this will generate me business (without fail).

Unless you start to look at marketing as an investment and not a cost your practice will continue to perform exactly the way it is. Here’s another saying I love to quote “If I gave you £10.00 for every £5.00 you gave me at which point would you like me to stop?”

This is effectively what marketing is about, if you don’t do it, don’t expect your business to grow.

If you would like help marketing your dental practice, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website, www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Facebook Advertising For Your Practice

Neil Sanderson

I’m sure when you think of Facebook Advertising you probably think of having to post all the time and interact with your friends or the people who have liked your Facebook page, which by and large it is, but there is another way to manage Facebook Advertising.

As I mentioned in a recent blog, Facebook recently became a publicly listed company, which means that is now has to answer to its share holders, and they are interested in just two things (a) increasing their share value and/or (b) getting a regular dividend.

In order to satisfy this requirement, Facebook has suddenly become very business minded and they now offer a wide range of advertising opportunities for the likes of you and I and Facebook Advertising has become a very good and relatively cheap way to get your message out there.

To advertise on Facebook you have to have a Facebook page and of course be the administrator of it, but you don’t have to post regularly on it, the advert will do the job for you. Facebook Advertising works very similarly to Google PPC (per per click). This means that whenever someone clicks on your advert and is taken either to your website or to your Facebook page you are charged a fee.

Compared to Google this fee is very reasonable (usually about a quarter of the price), however it has to be said, it will never be as targeted as Google is simply because there is nothing that is as targeted as Google Adwords.

However if you are trying to reach a particular group of people with a particular profile, Facebook advertising (PPC) is very, very good.

With Facebook advertising you can not only decide which area you want to aim at e.g. your postcode but you can also target whether the person who sees your advert is female or male, what age group they are, what is their marital status (even if they are engaged). You can specify particular interests they may have.

So for instance you could run an advert that will only be shown to someone who is female, who is between 25 and 35, who is engaged, who likes dogs, who likes going on holiday etc. etc.

There are no other platforms that will  let you get down to this level of detail for display advertising (Google is search advertising). You can set up a Facebook Advertising campaign for just a couple of pounds per day and so long as you get your targeting correct it will almost certainly pay for its self.

Facebook advertising is also the quickest way to get people to like your Facebook page and the best part is that you will only be getting likes from the people you are directly targeting, as opposed to buying likes from disreputable sources (don’t touch them).

The best thing about Facebook advertising is that you can send traffic from Social Media to your website with is where you ideally want people to go.

If you need help and advice with Facebook advertising, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

What is the best marketing plan for your practice?

Neil Sanderson

I’m often asked what is the best marketing I can buy or do. Let’s face it there are now dozens of ways to market you and your practice.

Not very long ago you really only had two choices 1. You could place an advert in the Yellow Pages or 2. You could send out a mail shot. Those of you who were a bit more ambitious might try telesales too.

Today you have literally dozens of ways to market your practice, but which is the best marketing?

But out of all these different types of marketing e.g. Direct Mail, Social Media, Posters, Leaflets, Text Messaging, Email what really is the best marketing?

So if you said to me I can only do one form of marketing which would you choose, the answer would be Google Adwords (or pay per click). This is without doubt the most cost effective and best marketing for  you and your practice.

Why do I say this. Because unlike Search Engine Optimisation which may or may not get your website to the top of Google rankings. Google Adwords can pretty much guarantee this.

What makes this even more the best marketing, it that Google will only show your ads when someone searches for it. So just think of it this way. If you could place an advert in a local newspaper and only pay when someone looked at your advert and took action would you buy that ad, you bet your life you would.

Google Adwords does exactly this, they only show your advert when someone searches for whatever it is you are advertising e.g. implants or teeth whitening etc. But you don’t pay anything to Google until someone actually clicks on your advert and goes through to your website.

It is the ultimate form of “best marketing” and Google gives you hundreds of tools to test and hone your marketing. They are the only advertising provider that encourages you to get better at your advertising, and rewards you with cheaper ads and better rankings.

Quite literally the better you become at pay per click, the less you can spend and the more your ad will be shown. That’s why we spend so much of our time at Dental Marketing Expert, making sure that we are the ultimate experts in Google Adwords pay per click.

On average all our clients are normally in position 1 or 2 on the search and the amount we are paying Google for the ads is a fraction of what people who don’t know what they are doing are paying.

If you don’t understand how wot work Google Adwords, you can spend an awful lot of money for very little reward. In fact Google’s default settings are generally design to get you to pay them as much as possible. This is why they are now the second biggest company by value in the world.

I have spent the last two years honing my skills the best marketing (Google Adwords) and as a result I would say that I probably know more about this form of marketing than anyone in the dental profession.

I have personally spent thousands of pounds with Google, but last year I grew my business by 100% and this year we are aiming for 400% growth, using this best marketing technique.

So if you want to make a massive difference to your dental practice’s fortunes and start to benefit from the best marketing on the planet, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

10 Ways To Get A Patient Referral

Neil Sanderson

I think just about everyone is in agreement that a patient referral is the best way to get new patients, even I as a marketeer would have to agree with that, however you can only get so many new patients by referral only, so I would still recommend a proper marketing strategy. That said if you are going to increase the number of referrals you get, here are a few hints and do’s and don’ts.

Most dental practices have no patient referral strategy in place at all, getting patient referrals has to be ingrained into the philosophy of the practice, you should view every single patient you see as someone who is going to recommend your practice and services to someone else.

Obviously to do that you have to offer great dentistry, that goes without saying but simply doing this isn’t good enough, because you patients expect you do deliver that anyway. Your services are no different to any other service or product that they are willing to spend their money on, you simply have to deliver quality.

So now we have that part out of the way how can you increase the number of patients who are willing to give you a patient referral?

1. Strange as it may sound Social Media is becoming more and more important in this area. Quite literally social media is the new “word of mouth” marketing, so if you have an active Facebook and/or Twitter account which has lots of interesting content on it you are likely to increase the number of referrals you get.
2. The appearance of your practice is incredibly important. If you have a practice that looks shabby, do you really think that your patients are going to refer you to their friends and relatives, I don’t think so.
3. Don’t think that only long term patients will refer you, in fact quite the opposite is the case. You are just as likely to get a patient referral from a new patient than you are from someone who has been using you for years.
4. You don’t have to deliver fantastic results to get a patient referral either. Courtesy, smart appearance and attention to detail and giving them exactly what they want is just, if not more important.
5. Just because a patient has referred you once don’t think that they won’t do it again, you should encourage your patients to refer you as often as possible and reward them for doing it.
6. Your staff are incredibly important in getting patient referrals, you might be the best dentist in the world and offer a fantastic service, but if your patients don’t have a great experience on reception, you won’t get those much needed patient referrals, reception staff have to be well trained, just as you do.
7. Communicate regularly with your patients, a newsletter is a great way to share things with your patients along with social media. It’s not rocket science, the better they think they know you the more they’ll give you a patient referral.
8. Market your referral program everywhere in your practice. Tell them what you are prepared to offer in return for a patient referral, it could be a bottle of wine or a big thank you, but you need to have a rewards system of place and tell everyone about it.
9. Every new patient that comes to your practice should be given a welcome pack and that should include information about your patient referral program and the benefits they can achieve if they refer a friend or relative to you.
10. Finally and here’s the real big one. ASK FOR THEM you’ll be astounded the difference this simple little thing does.

If you would like more information on implementing a patient referral program or how to promote this using your social media or training your reception staff, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

The Social Media Phenomenon

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Around two years ago I wrote my first book called How Your Practice Can Survive The Recession, there is a section in it about Social Media, which I was somewhat dismissive of.

I have recently updated the book for several reasons but one of the most important reasons was that Social Media has now moved firmly into the mainstream of business and because of this, all dental practices need to take it very seriously.

My business now receives around 15% of all the enquiries I receive from either Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, this is a massive change from just twelve months ago. Thats quite staggering, a year ago I could count the number of leads from Social Media on one hand, all that has now changed

It is also a fact that 50% of the U.K population spends at least one hour per day on Facebook. This creates a huge opportunity for your business, both advertising and posting in in general.

I regularly speak with my clients about the opportunities of Social Media and whether or not they should be active in this area, the answer is always a resounding yes.

However there is a problem, in order to have a healthy Social Media presence means you have to be active pretty much every day, its no point trying to get people to “Like” your page if you never put anything on it, and the majority of practices don’t, for one simple reason they simply don’t have the time.

So whilst Facebook, Twitter, Google Circles and LinkedIn may be free to use, they take up a great deal of time and that is the one thing that the majority of dental practices simply don’t have.

So you could give the task to one of your employees, but are you sure that (a) they will post items that are suitable and (b) will they have the time to post on Facebook and Twitter too as well as doing all the other tasks they have to achieve.

So you have a dilemma, you know that you should be regularly communicating with your patients and potential patients via social media, but neither you or your staff have the time to do it!

That’s where my company can help. Until recently I simply told my clients that they should be posting regularly on social media, but didn’t have a solution to the problem of creating the time to do so.

I can now offer a service to any dental practice, or indeed any company involved in the dental profession, whereby we will post on social media sites at least two times per day, Monday to Friday, to find out more about this unique service, go to my website http://www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk/social-media-dentists/ and you will be able to watch a video where we tell you exactly what we can offer you in this area.

I don’t know of any other organisation that offers this social media service, I suspect we may well be a trail blazer in this area.

So don’t waste any more time visit http://www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk/social-media-dentists/

Best Regards

Neil

If you would like us to increase your patient numbers, revenues and profits call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Blogging Is Essential To Promote Your Dental Practice or Business

For those of you who are not quite sure what a blog is, you are reading one right now and blogging is becoming more and more an essential part of any dental practice’smarketing strategy.

Why I can hear you all saying? Well hopefully you recently read my series of articles on search engine optimisation which over the three articles outlined what you need to be doing to raise your website’s ranking on Google. One of the things I mentioned was that you need to add new original content to your website, and the best way to do that is blogging.

Blogging is effectively you writing anything you like on any subject really. Because it is your ideas and your thoughts, you can write on any subject and be an forthright is you wish. Ideally you need to make it interesting to your public. So for instance if you are a dentist the subjects you might want to cover would be around oral hygiene etc.

Having said all that don’t make your blogs too serious or technical as you’ll just lose your audience, they have to understand what it is you are trying to convey to them, equally don’t use jargon, or scientific dental terms.

Blogging is one of the best ways to increase the rankings in the natural Google search. As I mentioned in my earlier articles, Google wants to present websites to their audience that are fresh and have new original content on them. Blogging is the most natural place to put this new original content. It will quite literally do wonders for your rankings, quite often my blogs out rank my overall website.

Blogging also has the effect of ranking you for many subjects too so for instance you might want to highlight that you offer implants in your practice, well the best way to do this is to write articles on the subject, use slightly different headlines and titles for the blog and you can start to rank for implants as well as general dentistry etc.

Blogging should also be part of your social media strategy. Every time you write your blog you should be promoting this with both Facebook and Twitter, not to mention Google Circles, this again helps immensely with your Google rankings.

Being seen to be an expert in your specialist field is essential if you are to sell at premium prices. For instance if you are regularly blogging on a  particular subject and your patients and potential patients read them, it is highly likely that when they actually want to use this service that they will turn to you rather than your competitors and they will pay a higher fee because of this too.

We call this in the industry “being the trusted expert”. The down side of this is that you have to give lots of information freely and regularly, which of course takes time and effort. But you’ll see that in the long run you will gain from it immensely, the other way to achieve this of course is to have someone else write them for you and this is one the services I offer my clients.

If you want to increase your revenues and profits, increase the number of new patients and encourage existing patients to spend more with you, call me on 01767 626 398, email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Multimedia You Need To Cover Every  Channel

You only have to think back five or six years ago and marketing your dental practice was pretty straight forward, basically you could put an advert in Yellow Pages and one in the local newspaper and you’d pretty much done it. Today is very different, multimedia is the norm.

Wouldn’t it be easy if all your patients and prospective patients were the same, you could then market to them using one platform or media and everything would be taken care of. For instance you might only have to advertise on Facebook, or Google, the truth is that everyone is different and that’s why you have to cover all the bases, with multimedia.

There is an amazing statistic that 50% of the population spends at least an hour on Facebook every day. But that also highlights another statistic and that is 50% of the population don’t spend an hour or any time whatsoever on Facebook. So if you only use Facebook as your marketing platform, you’ll miss half of your audience.

The same can pretty much be said about any media you choose to look at, for instance did you know that 12 million people buy a newspaper in the UK every day? And when you ad the free newspapers that figure grows to around 15 million, quite a sizeable market.

In 2012 21 million people took action as a result of receiving direct mail. nine out of ten people who receive direct mail open it, which compares to around twenty percent who open email. Without doubt whilst direct mail is relatively expensive in comparison with online, it is one of the the most effective way to grow your patient base, do you see where I’m going with this multimedia thing.

I am asked all the time by my clients “can’t we just email them”? Well yes you could, but ask yourself this question, “how many emails to you receive every day?” If you’re like me probably between 50 and 150. Then let me ask the same question about direct mail, “how many envelopes drop through your door every day?” I suspect the answer is probably less than five and certainly less than ten, quite often it might only be one or two packages each day!

The same can be said for text messaging, how many of you use text messages to market your products and services? I suspect very few, but think again, how many text messages to you receive each day? Just about everyone looks at a text when you receive one, for the simple reason that most text messages come from friends and family and you probably only receive one per day (maybe two).

So just have a think about the multimedia that you can now market your practice with, they include:

• Social Media (Twitter, Facebook Google Circles etc.,
• Your Website,
• Your Google Places Page,
• Text Messaging
• Direct Mail
• Leaflet Delivery
• Video (You Tube)
• Google Advertising
• Facebook Advertising
• Local press advertising
• Local radio

To name but a few and the only way you can ensure that you reach as many of your potential patients is to have a presence in all these platforms, some may will perform better than others, but it is essential that you address all these areas. So when I say Multimedia is a must for your practice I hope you understand what I really mean.

Because marketing is now more and more complex, you almost certainly need help and that’s where Dental Marketing Expert can help you. Call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Blogging Is Essential To Promote Your Dental Practice or Business

For those of you who are not quite sure what a blog is, you are reading one right now and blogging is becoming more and more an essential part of any dental practice’smarketing strategy.

Why I can hear you all saying? Well hopefully you recently read my series of articles on search engine optimisation which over the three articles outlined what you need to be doing to raise your website’s ranking on Google. One of the things I mentioned was that you need to add new original content to your website, and the best way to do that is blogging.

Blogging is effectively you writing anything you like on any subject really. Because it is your ideas and your thoughts, you can write on any subject and be an forthright is you wish. Ideally you need to make it interesting to your public. So for instance if you are a dentist the subjects you might want to cover would be around oral hygiene etc.

Having said all that don’t make your blogs too serious or technical as you’ll just lose your audience, they have to understand what it is you are trying to convey to them, equally don’t use jargon, or scientific dental terms.

Blogging is one of the best ways to increase the rankings in the natural Google search. As I mentioned in my earlier articles, Google wants to present websites to their audience that are fresh and have new original content on them. Blogging is the most natural place to put this new original content. It will quite literally do wonders for your rankings, quite often my blogs out rank my overall website.

Blogging also has the effect of ranking you for many subjects too so for instance you might want to highlight that you offer implants in your practice, well the best way to do this is to write articles on the subject, use slightly different headlines and titles for the blog and you can start to rank for implants as well as general dentistry etc.

Blogging should also be part of your social media strategy. Every time you write your blog you should be promoting this with both Facebook and Twitter, not to mention Google Circles, this again helps immensely with your Google rankings.

Being seen to be an expert in your specialist field is essential if you are to sell at premium prices. For instance if you are regularly blogging on a  particular subject and your patients and potential patients read them, it is highly likely that when they actually want to use this service that they will turn to you rather than your competitors and they will pay a higher fee because of this too.

We call this in the industry “being the trusted expert”. The down side of this is that you have to give lots of information freely and regularly, which of course takes time and effort. But you’ll see that in the long run you will gain from it immensely, the other way to achieve this of course is to have someone else write them for you and this is one the services I offer my clients.

If you want to increase your revenues and profits, increase the number of new patients and encourage existing patients to spend more with you, call me on 01767 626 398, email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Search Engine Optimisation is Dead It's All About Adwords

Search Engine Optimisation has changed dramatically over the last five years as you may have read in my two previous articles (read part one), (read part two). But there are still ways that you can improve your rankings as I highlighted in part two.

But even if you are really successful with your ethical and correct search engine optimisation efforts, you are still likely to be fairly well down the list of the front page, assuming your site has made it to the front.

The main reason for this is that Google now gives the top three slots to its paid for offerings, which are called Google Adwords.

Google is effectively now an ads engine rather than a search engine, let me tell you why. They announced their third quarter results a few weeks ago and revenues for that quarter were $14.89 billion, which makes them one of the largest and most profitable company's on the planet.

Of that £14.89 billion 96% comes from advertising!! Only 4% of their revenues comes from the likes of their Android operating systems or their Nexus tablets. So where do you think Google are going to concentrate their efforts over the coming years?

You might delude yourselves into thinking that surely they won't give advertisers all the front page, surely Google is about search. Well just think back a couple of years when Yellow Pages was the search tool of choice. Did you really care that all the entries which stood out were paid for adverts (still are actually), of course not.

So don't think for a minute that Google won't dedicate more and more space on its front page of a search to advertising, because I fully believe that this is what is going to happen, and sooner rather than later.

And to really hammer home that point just think about this. At present 20-25% of all searches are done on smart phones (tablets are fast catching up). Just go to your smart phone and do any search you like.

Unlike a desk top computer, there isn't lots of space on a mobile or tablet, so you don't see lots of entries below the bottom of the screen. Strangely enough you normally see the top three results. Yes you've got it, they are the paid for adverts, not organic search.

So you may do all the search engine optimisation you like (ethical or otherwise) to improve you natural organic listings, but they still won't show on a smart phone or tablet, unless you scroll down the page and most people don't do this they simply click on what comes out top.

So let me state again Search Engine Optimisation is dead, or definitely dying. Google is now a publicly listed company producing massive revenues and profits for its investors, do you really think that it is going to let you or your search engine optimisation company or person out smart them?

If you want to be at the top of the Google rankings the best thing you can now do is to use Google Adwords, which is the modern Yellow Pages. But even then you have to be good at this.

simply paying more for your ads will not guarantee that you will be at the top of the rankings, far from it, you have to ensure that the page you are sending your audience to is good, that the advert is relevant, that your keywords are correct and that you are regularly checking and updating your ads.

If there is such a thing, this is now the modern day Search Engine Optimisation, e.g. keeping your advert above that of your competitors and that is another skill you are going to have to learn or employ somebody to do for you!

If you want to increase your practice revenues, profits and increase you patients numbers, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website www.dentalmarketingexpert.uk

Is It Worth Paying For Search Engine Optimisation For Your Practice?

Search Engine Optimisation as we have known it for the last 5 years or so, in my opinion is now dead and buried and to be quite frank good riddance. Because effectively Search Engine Optimisation is all about fooling the search engines into ranking your site higher than other sites using tricks of the trade rather than having good content.

Google is working very hard to deliver what the person doing the search is looking for (even in paid for ads) and this is good news for all of us who play by the rules and try and offer good content on our websites.

So whilst Search Engine Optimisation as we have known it e.g. keyword stuffing, link building, article marketing etc. may be much diminished if not finished altogether, there are ways to improve the rankings of your website on the natural search, unfortunately it involves work on your part (or mine if you use someone like me).

Effectively Google wants to give people who use its search facility a good experience so it is looking for things like the following:

1. Connectivity to Social Media
2. Video (ideally on You Tube)
3. New original (good) content on your site
4. Blogs
5. Mobile Friendly sites
6. Local Links

Incidentally Google doesn’t really give you brownie points for having pretty pictures on your site, so this may come as a bit of a shock to those of you who have spent a lot of time and effort having lovely graphics of smiling people put on your website.

So lets’ look at the above. Social Media connectivity, Google likes to see lots of traffic coming to your website from Social Media (whatever the flavour). This is because it shows them that the site is interacting with real human beings, not robots.

You Tube Video. Are you aware that Google actually owns You Tube and that You Tube is the second most used search engine on the planet? Because of this Google really likes You Tube, so all you need to do is create some good video, put it onto You Tube, then embed it into your website. This will do wonders for your rankings.

New original good content It’s no good having a website built, publishing it and then forgetting about it. Your site needs to continually be updated, new video, new graphics (optimised), but most of all new written content. If you do this you are really ticking a box with Google.

Blogging Probably one of the best ways to improve the rankings on your site is to write a regular blog or article. This is relatively time consuming, but will reap great rewards, it’s well worth the effort.

Mobile Friendly Site 20% of all internet searches done today are made on a mobile device (growing rapidly) and Google wants to offer mobile users a great experience too. So for instance if your dental practice has a mobile version of your website and the practice down the road doesn’t, guess who will rank higher on a mobile search, because Google knows what you are using to search the web.

Local Links These are links to other companies similar to yourself in your area, so for instance you could ask the local chemist, hairdresser, beauty salon, chiropodist, osteopath, chiropractor, doctors surgery to put a link on their website to yours.

So whilst Search Engine Optimisation may be dead, you can very much influence Google by doing all the above. Unfortunately all of this takes time and effort, but if you want to rank on the natural search you really need to implement all of these things sooner rather than later.

However if you would like me to help with all the above, call me on 01767 626 398 ore email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website at 

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

The Importance of Frequency in Dental Marketing

When I’m talking to me clients about their dental marketing programs (or lack of them). I’m often asked “how often should I do this or that”. The answer is that frequency is all important in marketing your dental practice, in fact it might just be the most important thing tool you can deploy.

Most practices or businesses have at some time or another tried to send out a postcard or leaflet, which either they have delivered themselves or got a professional organisation to deliver and in almost every case they are disappointed with the result.

A leaflet or postcard campaign should be just that “a dental marketing campaign” if you only ever send out one you will not achieve the results you desire. Just think about the amount of leaflets you receive through your door for pizza, Indian/Chinese restaurants etc. The vast majority of them you’ll throw away, however if you continue to receive them from a particular restaurant you may just stick it up on your notice board or keep it somewhere.

The reason for doing this type of marketing is to get your name in front of your audience so that when they actually do want to buy a pizza or have an Indian meal etc. or indeed visit the dentist, they remember the name they’ve been seeing for the past couple of months.

You see we aren’t always in the market for whatever it is that people are selling. Just because someone totally ignores five of the six postcards or leaflets you send them in our dental marketing campaign, doesn’t mean that they don’t want to see a dentist, it means that they aren’t interested at that point in time, but when they are guess who they are most likely to want to see.

Its the same with every other type of dental marketing including email text and the dreaded newsletter. 95% of your patients probably aren’t interested in having their teeth whitened at the time when you send them an email or text message making them an offer, but 5% may well be, and the next time you send out an email or text or leaflet, a different 5% may be interested.

Do you see the pattern that is building up here. Most dental marketing is an attritional process, you will only ever have the interest of your target audience when they actually want your product or service.

I get lots and lots of information through from my BMW car dealer. Now its quite obvious that most of the time I’m not interested in buying a car, because with the best will in the world I only ever change my car every three years or even more. So 95% of the stuff that they send me is of not interest whatsoever.

However it just happened the other day that the existing lease on my car expired and I needed to take it for an MOT. One day that week a leaflet came through the door from the BMW dealer who was offering low finance on a range of used BMW’s. Guess what! I bought a new car from that dealer, simply because he was in the right place at the right time.

So when you start thinking about sending out leaflets, postcards or simple text or email dental marketing campaigns, think in the long term, do it every month, it works.

If you would like to increase your revenues and profits, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Marketing Your Dental Practice It’s About Trust

Have you ever thought what it is that inspires you to buy something? You might think about these hints when you are marketing a dental practice!

I hear people saying things like the following:

• People buy on price!
• People buy a brand!
• People buy for convenience!
• People buy on impulse

Well the truth about all the above is that before they part a single penny they need to trust the person who is selling the service or product they want to buy. Even if something is very cheap, normally you still won’t part with your money until you trust the person who is selling the product you want to buy, the same goes for brand, convenience, impulse all of them depend on you trusting the person who is selling.

So when I talk to my clients and they tell me that they are struggling to get new patients do they forget the above when they are marketing a dental practice.

I want you to understand something. Recently I had a stand at the Dental Showcase in Birmingham, during the quiet periods I was talking with quite a few of the other exhibitors, many of which don’t sell exclusively to the dental profession.

Without exception their perception of dentists was this:

1. They are all very rich!
2. They charge well over the odds!
3. They have a very easy life and don’t have to work too hard!

I work hand in hand with my clients so I know that this isn’t the case, in fact the opposite is generally true.

So when you open your dental practice door and expect people to flood to you because you are a good dentist, don’t be surprised when they don’t.

To make matters worse many dental practices also expect their patients to pay a huge premium for the first consultation.

Marketing A Dental Practice

I was recently engaged by a dentist to help him market his dental practice. This practice was in deep trouble, they were getting around 1-2 new patients per month (not per week, per month). Their average patient age was in their sixties and their numbers were dwindling. But their initial examination was £120.00.

Just think about this, people at the moment are scrutinising every penny they spend. By and large they think that dentists are rich and overpriced. There are many other dentists in the area both private and NHS, and they couldn’t work out why new patients were not joining them!

People need to build trust before they will part with their money, so why would someone part with £120.00 when they had no idea what this dental practice was like, whether they were any good or if they offered value for money!

So  the very first thing I advised them to do was to lower their cost of entry into the practice. This didn’t mean they had to reduce the price of any of the treatment, just make it easier for someone to say yes to coming to the practice.

We then embarked on marketing their dental practice. In the first month we booked 20 new patients, in the second we booked 30 new patients, in the fourth month we booked 35 new patients. That is where we currently are.

Yes you could argue that they have a professional helping them get new patients and obviously I wouldn’t argue with that, but the biggest breakthrough was to lower the point of entry, so that they could show the new patients that they could be trusted, that they do offer value for money and they offer great dentistry.

Sometimes you have to go right back to basics when you are marketing a dental practice, its not all about technique and clever marketing, its all about trust.

If you would like to increase your revenues and profits, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Marketing Your Dental Practice “Provide Proof”

It’s strange isn’t it, when we are going to buy something we normally like to try and get some information on if before we buy. The very best example of this is when you buy from Amazon, they are simply brilliant, strange that barely anybody copies them when they are marketing your dental practice.

Here’s what I mean, you Google something and up comes an advert for Amazon, you go onto the page and there it is, clear as a bell, with maybe some alternatives, a variety of places you can buy and some reviews of the product “perfect marketing”.

So why don’t dentists do this when you are marketing your dental practice? I have been in many different practices, at the end of the day it’s my job. I usually sit in the waiting room and I always look around for marketing material.

I don’t think I have ever seen a brochure of the practice or a book of photographs of what the practice can do for you the patient. Just think about this, if you want to sell implants these aren’t cheap and the patient has a big decision to make, we are normally talking in terms of thousands of pounds.

So you would think that there would be a catalogue of past work wouldn’t you (or at least I would). But to date I have never once seen a book of photographs of what the dental practice can achieve available in the waiting room, this is so simple it’s ridiculous but nobody does it.

When you are marketing your dental practice, you can spend thousands on adverts, Google, leaflets, posters etc. etc. but a simple book of photographs of before and afters which are your own work costs a few pounds, you can make them up yourself on websites such as Photobox.

Also why not have testimonials from other patients on posters, booklets, your website telling people what a great dentist you are, this is in effect free marketing and so powerful when you are marketing your dental practice.

When we are booking a holiday or weekend away, my wife inevitably looks up the hotel on Trip-Advisor, your services are no different all you are doing is offering proof that you can do what you say you can do and you have other patients who will testify to it.

If you don’t already take photographs before you start work on your patients and then take one afterward, start tomorrow, ideally buy a DSLR with a maco lens, (this will help you with any legal cases too). Start to build up your portfolio of work and create a photographic brochure for your patients, its so simple and costs next to nothing.

If you would like to increase your revenues and profits call me now on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk

Everyone wants to be top of the natural (free) Google listings don’t they? This has usually needed something called Search Engine Optimisation! Which effectively means using a variety of techniques to get your site to rank well with the search engines.

I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t get an email (usually from India) with a company promising to get my website to the top of  Google search, by search engine optimisation. Occasionally I have enquired how they are going to do this and how much will it cost.

They are normally a little vague as to how my site is going to get to the top of  (actually it normally is), but they usually want between £300 and £1,000 per month for doing this, incidentally with no guarantees and the process will normally take between three and nine months to achieve.

Search Engine Optimisation has always been a black art, basically individuals or companies are trying to fool Google and the other search engines into getting their site to the top of the natural listings (none paid for or Google Adwords).

When I last enquired, Google had around $30 billion in cash reserves. They are renouned for employing the best brains in the world, so just think about it how likely are you to fool Google?

Google has just announced its latest change to the algorithm they use for search, called Hummingbird, as usual they are very coy about what they have done, but basically its going to make things even more difficult for search engine optimisation, especially if you don’t have good original content on your site that is being regularly updated.

You may have a clever search engine optimisation company getting you links and writing articles with links back to your site and maybe even worse, filling your site with keywords. But at the end of the day you really have to offer a good meaningful website that is being constantly updated with new and interesting information for the people who are searching for you to rank better on Google, especially with these new updates.

Most search engine optimisation used to be about link building, that is having other sites link to yours and this still has some validity today, however you can’t just have any links. The links need to be relevant and rank well with Google themselves, the difficulty is finding relevant sites that are in the dental industry and that are willing to put a relevant link to your website from theirs!

If you offer one of the branded products such as Invisalign or Cerec for instance you might be able to get a link from them to your site which might boost you rankings, but ideally you will need many more than this and it still might not work.

Another trick is to write articles and get them published throughout the web with a link back to your site, but again this is very hit and miss, it might or it might not work.

The very worst search engine optimisation trick you can try is to stuff your website with keywords, these are literally the words you think that you patients will search on, if Google thinks you are doing this, not only will they not boost your ranking, but they could actually penalise you for it.

So how can you get your website to rank well in the natural listings of Google? Well the simple answer to that is to have a quality website, with lots and lots of content, that is also continually being updated and added to. Simply putting a website up there and doing nothing with it will also do you not good at all.

So be very sceptical about anyone who claims they can simply improve your rankings by paying them £500 per month, the best way is to do the right thing and make you website lively, have lots of content and be relevant to the person searching for you.

If you want to increase you patient numbers, revenues and profits, call me on 01767 626 398 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit my website at

www.dentalmarketingexpert.co.uk