Let’s explore the digital marketing intelligence quotient of your dental practice.
According to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, Digital marketing is the promoting of brands using all forms of digital advertising channels to reach consumers. This now includes Television, Radio, Internet, mobile, social media marketing and any other form of digital media. 
Which digital marketing avenues are you using to promote your brand – i.e. dental practice?
For those fortunate practices out there that already use TV or radio as part of their dental marketing plan, they’ve most likely already integrated some forms of digital marketing into the mix.
After all, what’s a TV commercial without a Facebook and Twitter mention these days?
For the DIYers, we’ll concentrate on local Internet, mobile, and social media as the main pillars of your local dental practice digital marketing scheme. And we’ll look to identify value and return on investment as your major indicators of success.
But how do we measure that success?
First we need to understand the environment you will be using to communicate your services. Secondly, we need to set attainable goals for your digital dental practice marketing. And lastly, we must track the results and actively participate in the success of your digital marketing, or suffer the consequences.
Understanding the environment will up your digital marketing IQ immediately.
- How do local people use Facebook or Twitter to communicate about dentistry?
- Do they share experiences, talk about products, and recommend cosmetic procedures?
- If you ask patients to share their dental experience, where could you direct them?
- Would an increased knowledge of who your patients are, and why they choose your practice allow you to better serve the surrounding community?
- Do local people use their mobile phones to connect with local business deals…and how can your dental practice participate?
Some easily attainable goals for the average digital dental marketing neophyte:
- Integrate your dental practice website with social media and local search efforts. (Kill three birds and get a no cost mobile website app for your practice when you confirm your Bing Local listing here!)
- Initiate a promotional campaign targeting new patients using social media, and track progress/results.
- Develop a mobile (abridged) version of your practice website.
- Pen (1) blog post per week directed at your local community – dental health tips, news, info.
- Write a press release announcing your maiden social media sojourn.
- Ask your patients how your practice can best use technology to improve relations & communication.
When it comes to digital marketing for the average dental practice, the research necessary to understand the environment, and the goal-setting needed to gauge success are the easy and fun parts of owning your digital dental identity.
Right?
Tracking your results and actually participating in the success of your localized digital dental marketing is a bit more difficult. Don’t make the mistake of playing around on Facebook all day or waiting for Charlie Sheen’s next #winning tweet.
Devote time to all three pillars of your digital dental marketing directive. Get SoLoMo connected.
Be sure to track your results and maintain active participation in your own success.
If we set goals for using social media and local search to acquire more new dental patients, we need to know when we’ve achieved those goals. This means using such things as tracking codes, mobile downloads, referral codes, local phone numbers, or even handwritten notes in a marble notebook.
Whatever your DIY method is, make sure you know what you don’t know about your digital marketing efforts.
We’ve also previously mentioned some low to no cost digital marketing tools to help you calculate success in this old blog post about measuring the benefits of social media.
- How many Facebook and Twitter connections resulted in actual feet in the door or butts in the chair?
- How often do your social connections interact with your practice online?
- Have you seen an increase in online visibility of your practice across multiple online channels?
- Did that press release result in any check-ins to your practice Foursquare profile or Facebook Places page?
- What is the value of your ‘Likes’ and ‘Followers’? (What are your goals for building a group of fans and followers?)
Here’s what eMarketer says about that last one:
How would you calculate the value of your local Facebook Fan?
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