Dental Internet Marketing Should Be Incorporated into a Recession-Era Marketing Plan to Boost Practices - Home

Dentists are at a critical risk of losing existing and would-be patients to emerging medical and dental professionals from younger generations if they don't learn to makes use of the internet to advertise their practices. With the fiscal turmoil of 2008, a number of professional medical providers lost 20 to 30 percent of their own patients because of the massive layoffs, which concluded in thousands of people losing their health and insurance. Without health insurance, quite a few individuals have had to abandon their routine medical appointments for preventative care. This leaves countless providers in healthcare struggling for patients not just to keep their clinics open, but the budgetary setbacks, consequently, have stunted their traditional marketing initiatives in order to draw in new patients to supplement the ones they have lost. Many small businesses, especially doctors and dentists, have learned with the Recession that standard medical and dental marketing isn't just costly to the bottom line to a practice, but the outcomes it yields are marginal at best and therefore are inadequate to maintain the daily overhead of a medical or dental clinic.Doctors and dentists are now starting to discard traditional marketing methods, such as tv and radio spots in addition to billboards, in place of using dental internet marketing, which has helped to drastically reduce marketing budgets. Even though physicians are beginning to understand the power of utilizing the internet to increase their profile for their local communities, several are at a loss on precisely how to implement it effectively to obtain a top-page standing on the internet and Bing."Dentists need to make the most of Yelp! or CitySearch by getting positive reviews about what their practice has to offer," states Helmut Flasch, a clinical and dental practice management guide and CEO of Doctor Relations, Inc., a health and dental consulting organization located within Canoga Park, CA. "A website like Yelp! is massive, and individual reviews through it can be linked to the dentist's own website," he offers.Mr. Flasch suggests that dentists need to first create an account with Google's business directory, which can offer further assistance with how to get reviews. Furthermore, he encourages having the dentist's reception staff ask patients as they are leaving from their appointments to think about writing a short review by giving them a business card printed with the URL that points them to the website. "It is very, very crucial to accumulate reviews from your patients," says Mr. Flasch, "because the dentist has to reach the ten-block of area listings on the very first page of Google and he won't be able to do that without reviews." Mr. Flasch also recognizes the potential of what an unfavorable evaluation on the index could do using this strategy of dentist internet marketing. "Google timestamps every single review, therefore, if a doctor should have a ne gative report, he then needs to bring in a lot of good reviews to bring the bad one down. No matter what, even if he gets a bad review, a dentist will pull in new patients using this method," he says.With a word of cautionary warning, Mr. Flasch counsels dentists, in addition to anyone in a small or medium-sized business, that if they neglect to stay abreast of technology in their business or internet dental marketing campaigns, they will be put out of business by the younger generations who are able to swiftly and easily maneuver with the ever-changing technological innovations. "Participate in whatever the internet offers you and don't wait until it is proven.