How Your Dental Team Can Promote the Office
Effective Marketing Is a Culture
It’s common for marketing to become one of many duties that sustain your dental practice, a chore to be crossed off a list. Often, someone in the office is responsible for marketing; this person reports to the team from time to time about social media followers, the status of your Facebook ad, and new advertising opportunities. This type of marketing strategy is typical when it comes to promoting a dental practice brand, but in our modern, online world, it limits your growth potential. Truly effective marketing in our cyber world means the entire staff becomes a kind of marketing team; one person still organizes the main effort, but everyone contributes to promoting the brand online. In this way, your dental practice establishes certain habits over time that eventually form a consistent marketing culture.
Engage with Office Posts
One of the easiest ways to boost your office online and leverage staff marketing has to do with algorithms or computer programs that control the reach of social media posts. Understanding how this software works can help to expand your reach and exposure online, which leads to more traffic and more new dental patients. Basically, social media algorithms, like search engines, are looking to promote the best content. Social media companies have one main goal: to increase user engagement. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube understand that user engagement leads to more advertising revenue, so they program algorithms to promote the best content. How does an algorithm recognize good content? Answer: user engagement—in the form of likes, comments, and shares. Each time your office posts, the algorithm notes the interaction from users; this engagement data determines the reach of your future posts. So basically, more engagement leads to more reach, which leads to more engagement, etc.
Understanding how these search engines work helps to explain how your staff can easily create a marketing culture—ask your dental team to engage with office posts as much as they can. If your staff routinely likes, comments, and shares office social media, the algorithm will view your office posts as high value and distribute them to more people.
Encourage Staff to Take Pictures and Video
Today, everyone carries around a mini recording studio in the form of a smartphone. The image and video quality of these camera phones has really improved over the years, and most people can’t tell the difference between smartphone video and footage captured with a high-end camera. For this reason, you should encourage your staff to watch for significant events throughout the day (dental work reveals, debondings, etc.). One of the most challenging aspects of social media is just collecting images and videos. Unless someone is designated the official camera person, events often pass without any pictures or videos. Therefore, encourage staff to use their camera phones, and you’ll increase the chance that important moments are recorded; and if you have a brief permission form ready for patients to sign as well, you can easily prepare a great social media post. Learn more about the power of video marketing (blog post: “Engaging, High-Quality Video Content Is the Future of Dental Marketing.”)
Build a Dental Portfolio
How to Make a Dental Portfolio for Prospective New Patients Dentists Need to Prove Themselves Today Dentists who began practicing before the internet dominated our lives, will remember when reputation and referral were the most important aspects of practice growth. Before Google turned smartphones into our personal vetting machines, dentists
Patient Google Reviews Matter—A Lot
One of the most essential parts of your brand involves positive Google reviews. In an online world, patient feedback is critical. Along with your website and social media, prospective patients rely on these reviews to direct their decisions. Unfortunately, many dentists fail to get Google reviews because they don’t ask for them.
Your patients are busy, and most don’t even think about writing reviews online, but the truth is that many of your patients would be glad to support your office by sharing their thoughts. So the question is how to ask. Many dentists feel uncomfortable soliciting reviews because they view it as a conflict of interest (which is understandable given that they’re holding a dental drill). For this reason, many offices rely on support staff to make these requests. By creating a marketing culture, hygienists, dental assistants, and front desk administrators are in a great position to ask for Google reviews, so they should look for organic moments that naturally lead to such requests.
The mistake that many offices make is asking every patient for a review, thinking that every patient will write a 5-star review. The truth is that some of your patients would not write a glowing review, so it’s best not to ask them to share their opinions online. Instead, plan your requests ahead of time. At your staff meetings, determine what patients would write a glowing review; go down the schedule and look for patients who seem especially pleased with their experience at your office. Also, determine who is in the best position to ask for the review. Learn how to reply to Google reviews (blog post: “Respond to Online Patient Reviews—Period.”)
Recognize and Reward Your Staff
Maintaining staff morale is one of the most challenging parts of running a dental practice. How can you motivate staff members to care about the office the way you care? There are certainly those employees who just put 100% enthusiasm into everything they do, but most of your team will need inspiration. As your practice becomes more successful, share the fruits of this collective effort by planning staff outings, recognizing achievements, and providing bonuses. If you want to create a marketing culture that continues to grow, you’ll need to reinforce it.
