Dentists have reached an increasing chance of losing current and future patients to emerging medical and dental professionals from younger generations if they neglect to learn to utilize the internet to advertise their practices. Due to the financial turmoil of 2008, a number of professional medical providers lost 20 to 30 percent of their own clientele because of the massive layoffs, which led to many people losing their health and dental insurance. Without health insurance, a good number of people have had to give up their routine medical visits for preventative care. This has countless providers in healthcare scrambling for patients not just to keep their offices open, but the financial problems, consequently, have stunted their conventional marketing efforts to be able to draw in new patients to augment those they have lost. Many small businesses, particularly doctors and dentists, have learned with the economic collapse that traditional medical and dental marketing is n't just costly to the bottom line for a practice, but the final results it produces are minimal at best and therefore are not enough to support the day-to-day overhead associated with a healthcare practice.Doctors and dentists are actually starting to discard traditional advertising methods, that include radio and television spots in addition to outdoor billboards, in lieu of using dental internet marketing, which has helped to significantly reduce marketing costs. While physicians are beginning to understand the strength of utilizing the internet to increase their visibility to their local neighborhoods, several are at a loss on precisely how to implement it effectively to get a top-page standing on the internet and Bing."Dentists have to utilize Yelp! or CitySearch by getting positive reviews as to what their practice has to offer," states Helmut Flasch, a clinical and dental practice management consultant and CEO of Doctor Relations, Inc., a health and dental consulting company located in Canoga Park, CA. "A site like Yelp! is huge, and patient reviews through it may be connected to the dentist's own website," he says.Mr. Flasch suggests that dental practices have to first register with Google's business directory, which will provide additional assistance with ways to get reviews. In addition, he encourages getting the dentist's office staff ask patients as they are leaving from their visits to look at writing a short review by offering them a card printed with the URL link that directs them to the web page. "It is very, very key to amass 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 will not be able to accomplish that without reviews." Mr. Flasch also acknowledges the chance of what an unfavorable review on the index could do using this particular strategy of dentist internet marketing. "Google timestamps every single review, therefore, if a doctor should have a bad report, he then would need to generate lots of good reviews to bring the bad one down. Regardless, even if he receives a bad review, a dentist will get more new patients using this approach," he says.As a word of warning, Mr. Flasch counsels dentists, as well as anyone in a small or medium-sized business, that if they can't stay up with technology in their commercial or internet dental marketing campaigns, they are going to put out of business by the younger generations who are able to swiftly and easily maneuver through the ever-changing technologies. "Participate in whatever the world wide web provides you with and don't hold back until it is proven. It has already been proven," he concludes.
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