Form a Bridge Across all Communication Tools: About 60% of people are visual learners. By treating all forms of communication with the same care, imagination, and mark, you can direct your marketing efforts as well as help individuals relate any mail, bills, statements, packing slips, or postcards that they receive back to your practice. By having a design that is steadfast among all of your forms of communications, you can form a bridge between your mailings, your website, your social media sites and any other form of communication that you utilize. Small changes often can have the biggest impact. By altering your logo placement on your communication forms, brightening your graphics, or by updating where your main message appears, you can successfully catch the eyes of your patients and unite your marketing strategies across the board.

Make Information Readily Available: Whether you already have an established practice or are just starting one, having information that engages your customers and enhances the dialogue on your social media sites is vital. By regularly communicating with your secretaries and hygienists in regard to frequently asked questions from patients, you can preempt several calls as well as add incremental value to your conversations on your social media sites. By making the most of your website and other forms social media, you can be sure to make the most of your marketing and allow communication to be readily and easily accessible to your patients.

Use Targeted Content: Patients can come in a wide variety of ages and backgrounds. Dentists can use bills, appointment reminders and even notices as opportunities to create a more educated patient: someone who recognizes the value of the relationship with a dentist-or dental practice-that keeps him or her informed. By investing in customized content that is correlated to particular aspects of a patient’s profile, you can engage in their personal interests and cater to individual needs. For example, if you are sending out an appointment reminder for a child’s appointment (whether is is via internet or postage mail), including a few youth dental tips or a fun dental cartoon picture will engage your patient all while adding dynamic content and value. Over time, your libraries will expand to cover a range of diverse topics pertaining to individuals no matter what their ages or needs might be.

Cross Promote To Save Both Time and Money: In today’s economy, often times marketing budgets are tight. However, both time and money can be saved by thinking across various lines. Bills, websites, social media sites, and other forms of communication can all be used to promote as many of your services and amenities as possible. By using your very best material and cross promoting it across all boards, you can allow patients to see what sets your practice apart from the rest. Whether you provide a procedure that most dentists don’t, utilize rare or the latest technology, or perhaps provide care and services that go above and beyond what patients are accustomed to, promoting what people are interested across marketing lines can help drive attention to your practice. The truth is, one individual person who lives in the city sees roughly 5,000 ads per day! This means that patients are being swarmed with marketing messages each and every day. The fragmentation of media only increases the burden on practices to avoid marketing a service or amenity to someone who already knows about. If you allow people to realize that you care about their personal interests, you can hold their attention for a longer amount of time as well as open the door for new prospective patients as well.

Understand Dynamics: Patients  in our modern day society are beginning to have better and more readily available means to communication with their dentists. Social media tools allow people to respond to promotions, understand what new amenities your practice is offering, and see what other patients are saying. By reexamining your customer care strategy, you can see which patients are most likely to leave as well as which patients are more likely to promote your practice by telling their acquaintances or friends about what you offer. By developing a 360 degree view of your patient demographics, you can discover who your marketing goals should actually be directed towards to improve relationships as well as understand your patients on a more informative level. Personalized communication coinciding with a combination of good information, high quality design, and appropriate understanding of patient expectations can provide a wonderful baseline for a newer and better marketing strategy.

Comment and let us know what your marketing strategy entails!

If you are interested in marketing strategies or would like more information on how you can craft effective marketing campaigns, please visit our partner site PROABC. Also, if you are interested in creating a new website, Dental Web Center is a wonderful resource. Their websites will enhance your professional image, experience, and qualifications with an exceptional internet presence and a world-class dental marketing tool.

Rita Zamora is a relationship-focused dental marketer, specializing in referral marketing, patient relations, case acceptance and social media for general and specialty practices.  Rita developed her referral marketing expertise working hands-on in specialty and general dentistry practices. She is the author of the ebook The Referral System How-To Guidebook For Dentists. With over sixteen years experience in dentistry, Rita has trained, coached and motivated dentists and teams in marketing, patient relations, communication and social media. Find more about Dental Relationship Marketing on Rita’s blog.

One doctor recently said, “Asking patients to become my Facebook fan is just as hard as asking for referrals.”  (Over the years, asking for referrals is one of the most common roadblocks I hear practitioners and teams complain about.)  Once the shiny newness of having a Facebook page wears off, it’s time to consider how you can keep the momentum going.  Here are a few tips to help boost your Facebook participation.

1. Will the doctor invite patients to join your Facebook community, or will it be another team member? Whoever is talking to patients about Facebook should be intimate with your page, and the page’s activity.  Discuss this with your team in advance and decide who is best to handle this.
2. Plan what to say when you talk about Facebook. I’m a fan of scripts. Many years ago, I resisted scripts and thought they’d make you sound like a robot.  However with personalization, scripts can be customized to your authentic voice and they can prove invaluable.
3. Determine what you want the “purpose” of your page to be. Will you put root canal videos in your patient’s newsfeeds every week? Or will you be sharing fun news about you and your team, such as the photos of your recent team outing.  When you feel good about your posts, it’s a lot easier to invite patients to join you.

An additional benefit of a Facebook page is to use it as a barometer to show how well you are promoting the page offline (talking about it with patients in your office).  If your page has no recent activity and the fan base is flat, chances are you need to step up the conversation in your practice.  Now, if only there were a measurement tool to determine how often doctors and teams were inviting patients to refer as well: )

Rita Zamora is a relationship-focused dental marketer, specializing in referral marketing, patient relations, case acceptance and social media for general and specialty practices.  Rita developed her referral marketing expertise working hands-on in specialty and general dentistry practices. She is the author of the ebook The Referral System How-To Guidebook For Dentists. With over sixteen years experience in dentistry, Rita has trained, coached and motivated dentists and teams in marketing, patient relations, communication and social media.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media platforms.  They actually beat growth estimates in a recent study.  What they don’t tell you is a large percentage of these users become non-active within a couple of months.  What happens to these users?  Many fail to see what the “big deal” is.  While others make bad choices that affects their experience.

Twitter can be a very powerful marketing tool for dentists.  In fact, my office was featured on the local news today.  How did the news anchor choose me for a story?  She saw one of my Twitter posts about a new dental product.  She thought it would be a great news story.  The post only took seconds to write, and very little creativity, but it landed my practice on the 6 o’clock news.  If I had given up two months after earlier, this never would have happened.  You can avoid the Twitter pitfalls, and go on to have great Twitter success.

Some of the most common Twitter pitfalls:

Pitfall #1 - Focusing only on follower numbers- Twitter followers are like dental patients.  We want a million of them, but we want quality as well as quantity.  Many people try to get as many followers as possible.  They don’t pay attention to quality, and they wind up with a real time stream of fluff and spam.   After a while the copious amounts of spam will become tiresome, and the account will go unused.

The Cure - Follow and connect with users who fit in your goal.  If you are using Twitter to connect with potential patients, connect with people in your area.  You don’t need 1,000 fans in California if you live in Florida.   There are several tools you can use to find users in your area.  The new local trending tool can be a great asset.    Evaluate the tweets of people you connect with.  If they repeat posts or spam, don’t follow them.  They will cloud your feed.    In previous articles we have noted that some search engines will use tweets to populate search results.  We also learned that having connections to spammers and non-qualified accounts, may decrease the rank power of your tweets.

Pitfall #2 - I am not getting any patients, and no one is talking to me.  Your a dentist, so you just go on Twitter and talk about dentistry, end of story right?  Not necessarily.  Several dentists think the public wants to know more about dentistry, so all they tweet about is dentistry.  Newsflash, no one wants to talk about dentistry except dentists.

The cure - Social Media is about connecting with another person.  Talking about dentistry will make you seem like a dental robot, not a person.  When on Twitter or another platform, take a break from dentistry.  Talk about things in the community, your life, or on T.V.  Make your profile seem like a real person.  Then throw in a little dentistry every once and while to remind them that you are a dentist.  Once they need an appointment, they will remember Dr. Xyz, because he seemed like a nice helpful guy.  That is how I got the T.V. interview.  The news anchor saw my only “dental” tweet that week.

Pitfall #3 - I have made connections on Facebook and Twitter and now it is getting tiresome.  I can’t keep up. Many dentists see the social media thing taking off, and they jump into every social media platform at once.

The cure - Start out slow.  Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  Time management can be very important to the success of a social media campaign.

Pitfall#4 – I haven’t posted anything on Facebook or Twitter in a couple of weeks.  Just setting up social media profiles is a big step and can increase visibility.  An account that isn’t active is almost worse than not having one at all.  It makes it look like you don’t care or that you don’t offer up good information.

The Cure - Keep an account active, even if it is one or two posts a week.  Even if the posts are scarce, they will add up over time and will seem like a nice catalog of information.  Once again, time management plays a big part in being successful.  Set a schedule to post content.  It is much easier to post when you have already planned for it.

Don’t get discouraged with social media. When you set parameters for yourself, and use great time management, your social media experience can be very rewarding.  Take a deep breath.  Social media is the new hot topic and “must have” element of your marketing campaign.   Take your time, and educate yourself about social media. Facebook and Twitter will still be waiting for you tomorrow.

Jason T. Lipscomb is a general dentist in Richmond, VA and a co-author of Social Media for Dentists.  Dr. Lipscomb has developed the methods used by Social Media for Dentists after several years of private practice.  He maintains a unique perspective on dental marketing by operating two busy practices and researching social media practices.  Social Media for Dentists is one of the only dental specific Social Media marketing books.  Social Media for Dentists L.L.C. offers hands on training to dentists all over the country.

I think every dentist can tell you a story about their first amalgam.  Mine was in dental school of course.  The whole restoration was probably about 1.5 mm, but it took the whole three hours.  I have heard this story a million times.  In fact it took half the time to put the rubber dam in place, and by the time it was perfect, the fire alarm would go off and we would all have to evacuate.  The fire alarm seems to go off at least once a week at our school.  But that simple filling that took hours at first now only takes a couple of minutes.  Not that I do any occlusal amalgams anymore!  I have learned the processes of placing a restoration, and I have practiced it thousands of times by now, so it is second nature.  Often times we as dentists don’t want to try new things, but we forget that our great successes often come from taking risks.  Sometimes calculated risks like letting a 23-year-old newbie place a restoration.

I like to think of Social Media like that first amalgam filling.  It can be a bit daunting at first to jump into something new, even if you know all the basics.  Many of you have enough knowledge to organize a great social media campaign, but you just don’t know how to get started.  At some point you will have to jump in and just do it, much like that first amalgam.

I also remember mentally preparing for days before my first amalgam.  I had every tool set up in a perfect row, and practiced the routine several times.  I made sure I was first at the dispensing window to gather all the needed items.  These practices can also be great for your first foray into social media.  Take time to prepare.  Watch how people interact on the different social media platforms.  Gather up all the tools you will need to succeed in social media.  Collect great pictures and videos, and save them for later.  Surround yourself with people you are comfortable with at first.  They will foster your new profile.  Make sure your profile is complete, so when you do dive in to social media, it appears that you are a pro.

Start out slow.  I didn’t start out with implants my first day in clinic, I started out with a small amalgam.  The same goes for social media.  Start out slow, learn the ropes and then expand your practices.  As you learn methods and repeat them over and over you will fall into your stride.  Like I said above, that first small amalgam probably took 2-3 hours, and now it would take a couple of minutes.  Your time needed for social media will also decrease for social media when you become familiar with the process, throw in a couple of assistants, and have set procedures in place.  Jump in and do that first occlusal amalgam of Social Media.  You may make some mistakes, but before long you will be a master.

Jason T. Lipscomb is a general dentist in Richmond, VA and a co-author of Social Media for Dentists.  Dr. Lipscomb has developed the methods used by Social Media for Dentists after several years of private practice.  He maintains a unique perspective on dental marketing by operating two busy practices and researching social media practices.  Social Media for Dentists is one of the only dental specific Social Media marketing books.  Social Media for Dentists L.L.C. offers hands on training to dentists all over the country.

In a recent interview with Amit Singhal, Google smarty-pants, the veil over Google’s methods for including Tweets in search results was slightly lifted.  An article by Technology Review nicely reviewed what was said.  Google began to include Twitter “tweets” in real-time search results about a month ago.  Until recently the method in which they filtered these tweets was a mystery.

It is great to find out how these searches are taking place, but it is also a greater validation for the platform.  Social media experts have praised the benefits of Twitter, but much of the lay population fails to recognize the value.  By including Twitter content in search engine results Google helps the visibility of pertinant tweets.  This in turn will help the SEO of the included links, and the SEO of intended targets overall.

Singhal also stated that some Twitter practices can be detrimental to real-time Google results.  The hashtag (#) which is has been used ad nauseum in many tweets may decrease search results.    The hashtag included next to a key word will make that tweet appear when Twitterers click on the same word elsewhere on the site.  For instance a tweet saying “The #dentist can improve your smile” will appear when someone clicks on #dentist elsewhere.  The problem is many people go a bit overboard and use hashtags on three or more words, and it is a favorite tactic of spammers.  While the hashtag may increase visibility on Twitter itself, the Google algorithm does not favor the hashtag and actually tries to filter it out.  So if you want your tweet to show up in Google results, limit your use of the hashtag.

The other surprising factoid from the interview places importance on the “quality” of followers and followees.  Singhal’s interview did not disclose how the quality of users was determined.  It has been deduced that the quality of a user is based on the number of followers, the quality of tweets, and the number of tweets.  This reinforces the advice I have given to dentists.  Don’t worry about the sheer number of Twitter followers.  Try to get followers who stay current, aren’t marketers, and don’t spam.  Too many of these types of followers will diminish the quality of your Twitter experience and will also affect the searchability of the content you put out.  I also advise dentists not to have followers all over the country if you are focused on getting patients in a certain area.  The others will water down what should really be your focus.   If you want to follow thousands of people, create another account.

Google is obviously making great efforts to include quality information from Twitter, while filtering out much of the fluff.  So when you tweet make sure to include great keywords when appropriate.  Don’t over stuff your tweets with dental jargon just to show up in search results.  Use these keywords much like natural speech.  If the words don’t fit, don’t use them.  When using links, try and use the full link if possible.  Some links will be too long, so you may have to use a service like tinyurl.com.  The longtail links will always be more beneficial than truncated ones.

Tweet away, dentists!!

Jason T. Lipscomb D.D.S. is a general dentist in Virginia. In addition to operating two busy dental practices, he educates other dentists how to market their practice with social media. Dr. Lipscomb and his partner Stephen Knight have released a social media handbook for dentists called “Social Media for Dentists”. Social Media for Dentists is available now, and is a must have for any dentist who wants to learn social media practices.
The book, Social Media for Dentists, can be ordered on his website.