Integrating your dental practice’s digital marketing is more important than building expertise in every single digital module.
Strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing are robust in their own right. But when these approaches are combined uniquely, their powers increase exponentially. This leads to an unstoppable snowball effect.
Integrated digital marketing refers to the art of using all online marketing techniques available today in such a manner that each digital module complements the others instead of attempting to increase your revenue and customer base by itself.
There are several important digital marketing processes for practice owners to master.
High-Quality Content
The quality of the content is the primary driver of integrated digital marketing. When people want to choose a new dentist, they no longer place blind trust in advertising. Through the internet, prospective patients can read practice reviews and ask friends on social media for feedback. They accumulate data and information before making their choice.
Rather than spending money blindly on paid advertisements for branding and taking web surfers to your practice’s landing pages, it is much more beneficial to address the needs of these potential patients, create desire, and then present them with your services. This process will make them feel like they were naturally ready to choose your practice.
This type of information can be provided to prospective patients via content marketing—blogs, videos, and other material addressing their oral healthcare needs that they find when they go online to look for a new dentist. Compared to paid advertising, content marketing may seem free, as you are not paying for the traffic. However, creating quality content costs both money and time.
Effective Use of Social Media
Social media can be one of the simplest ways to spread information and share content. It is inherently structured to support discovery and sharing. If your existing or past patients on social networks share links to your content, these links can go viral. So how should you leverage the power of social media?
First, incorporate sharing buttons into your content seamlessly. While people may not actively search for them, they are more likely to share your content when these buttons are placed conveniently. Place sharing tabs within, on the side of, and beneath all of your blog posts.
Next, engage actively on social media networks. Interact with their users. Social media can be a huge opportunity for you to gather information and insight as well. Seek suggestions for new content, and respond to your users’ questions promptly. For instance, if you are active on Facebook, your rank on search engines will be higher, which will enable you to reach a more significant number of people.
Create a well-designed profile on social media. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and various other social networks offer customization options. It also does not cost much to engage a good designer to enhance your profile. Visitors can immediately distinguish between channels that are focused on their followers and those that do not care as much.
Finally, use selective and strategic paid ads within your social media networks to increase followership and engagement on those platforms. For instance, users can increase the number of fans on a Facebook fan page through ads, which typically offer excellent conversion rates.
Organic Search
People used to spend money on building links for SEO purposes before search engines became smarter. However, now the correct strategy is link earning, rather than link building. Quality published content that is shared on social media platforms can attract links naturally. This is the best form of off-page SEO.
Search engines rank websites per their relevance and quality. The relevance and quality of a specific web page for a particular keyword depends on two factors.
The first is on-page SEO, in which the webmaster communicates with search engines about the website’s relevance. The second is off-page SEO, where a website’s users communicate with search engines about the site’s relevance and quality.
Although on-page SEO is an essential factor, there are limits to what you can do. You can place various elements on your web page so search engines can gauge the relevance of your content. However, on-page SEO is limited in its potential to convince search engines about the relevance and quality of specific keywords.
With off-page SEO, a site’s users communicate with search engines about its relevance and quality. Users do not interact directly with search engines. Instead, they interact through their behavior, such as the time they spend on the site after clicking on a search result. If the user instantly clicks on the back button after clicking on a search result, it indicates that the content on the site is either irrelevant or of low quality.
Besides these indications from user behavior, search engines also detect signals from social media. Quality content on social media platforms is public information and available for search engines. It is a clear indication that the content should be good quality.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a significantly powerful tool available to digital marketers. An email inbox is a private space. This makes it difficult to interrupt an online user with a marketing message. However, permission-based email where the user has opted-in to receive messages from the sender can lead to the email subscriber opening the email and paying attention to its content.
Email marketing is useful only when relevant content and marketing messages are sent to the user alternatively. Bombarding subscribers with unlimited messages can make them unsubscribe. If you do not send email marketing messages, then you cannot increase revenue. So, set up a series of automated messages that can be sent once potential customers subscribe to your email newsletter.
Key Takeaway
An integrated digital marketing strategy for your dental practice should efficiently use all practical aspects of digital marketing so each technique’s advantages are incorporated most effectively. Content marketing has been and will always be an effective strategy for generating leads, branding, and sales channels. Integrating content marketing with other digital elements enhances and upgrades content marketing to produce measurable results for your dental practice.
Mr. Arulrajah is president and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education, and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of more than 140 full-time marketers, ekwa.com helps dentists who know where they want to go get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call (855) 598-3320 or email naren@ekwa.com.
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