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Discover effective dental practice marketing strategies to grow your dentist office effortlessly. From online search presence to patient retention, explore expert tips and tactics that will take your dental practice to new heights. 

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Growing a dentist’s office in the United States is not as easy as it sounds.

But the good news is, the U.S. dental services market size will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.2% to reach $72 billion in 2027, up from $47.16 billion in 2021. 

Analysts believe… 

• The growing demand for dental services
• Technological innovation in dental care delivery
• Growing preference for aesthetic and laser dentistry
• Increasing incidence of dental and periodontal diseases

… will drive this expansion.

So, the U.S. dental industry holds the potential for any dentist to succeed.

And to make this easier for you, we put together this definitive dental practice marketing strategies guide to help you grow your business. We believe at the end, you’ll learn what most top dental care brands in the United States do behind the scene to stay above the curve.

Let’s start with the marketing trends you shouldn’t ignore in 2023.

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Top Dental Practice Marketing Trends for 2023

The industry is becoming more competitive than ever.

For instance, Statista research found that the number of active dentists was about 170,000 in 2021. But in 2022, the American Dental Association reported they have 202,536 active professionals, about 18% growth in a year. 

These numbers show a growing competition. 

And if this trend continues, professionals in this field will have to roll up their sleeves to stand out.

The good thing is paying attention to these kinds of trends can help you navigate the industry and grow your dental practice effortlessly. And we have put together some top industry trends to inform your dental practice marketing strategies.

So, let’s begin.

Organic search remains the best traffic generation channel

Organic search drives about 35% of the industry traffic. 

So, optimizing your web pages for search engines puts you in front of your ideal prospects, positioning you for more visibility. Also, it converts at 3.5%, making it the best converting channel after referrals.

Dentists investing in paid search reap the benefits

Like organic search, paid search is responsible for about 35%  of traffic on average. 

Leveraging the two channels exposes you to about 70% of the industry’s traffic potential. Those who ignore these trends will miss out big. Also, the latter lets you target a wide range of search terms, improving your search visibility.

Referral is key to unlocking more businesses

Referrals convert at 3.6%, better than organic search.

Having a solid referral marketing strategy could be key to unlocking more businesses. The reason is people often read customer reviews or ask for recommendations from acquaintances before picking a dentist. 

Those that fail to follow up with calls lose out

About 68% of conversions happen on calls.

Of course, customers’ buying journeys start online, but they often prefer to speak with a human to book an appointment. Allowing this can grow your patient pool more effortlessly than allowing the entire customers experience to be online.

How to Market Your Dental Practice In 2023

Here, we shared our favorite marketing strategies for dental offices. Action the tips to grow and scale your practice effortlessly.

Define your marketing goals

Sadly, several dentist offices don’t even know what they want.

Of course, wanting more traffic, leads, and sales are not enough. They are vague, not measurable, and make you wander aimlessly. Avoid this mistake if you’re serious about growing your practice in 2023. 

Instead, define your goals using hard numbers. Also, include a time frame and align your marketing goals to your overall business objective.

For instance, if your business objective is to generate $1 million within the next 12 months, then specify the number of traffic, leads, conversion rate, and budget you need to meet the target. Of course, the business objective is always intimidating and scary.

So, divide it into monthly and quarterly targets.

Defining goals this way keeps you on top of the entire process, making progress tracking more straightforward.

Get on Google’s front page

In case you are not aware, SEO delivers between 5x and 20x ROI.

Also, pages that rank first on the search results pages get 10x more traffic than those on the 10th page. Additionally, about 68% of online experiences begin on search engines.

So, I guess you now understand the importance of putting your practice on Google’s front page.

Besides these, ranking highly on search puts you ahead of the competition, allowing you to corner most of the traffic. It could also establish you as an industry leader.

However, pulling this off is not a walk in the park.

But following the guidelines in this article can help you rank your pages. You can also check out our Surfer SEO review to see how we use this software to win several top positions on Google.

Boost your domain authority

Improving domain authority is one of the best ways to boost your search rankings.

Domain authority is a ranking score developed by Moz to predict how likely a website can rank on the search results page. A high DA score means you can easily outrank your competitor for your target keywords. With this, you can publish tons of quality content to dominate the organic search competition.

Getting lots of backlinks from high-DA websites is the only way to improve your authority.

Sadly, these websites are always skeptical about linking to new domains.

So, we created an insightful article to show you how to generate these backlinks seamlessly. Use the tips to inform your backlink SEO strategy.

Spy on your competitors

Competitors are ahead of you because there are things they are doing better than you.

Spying on them helps you uncover what they do behind the scenes, enabling you to beat them.

Some of the things we recommend you keep your eyes on are:

• Competitors’  target keywords
• Backlink profile
• Keyword rankings
• Brand mentions
• Paid search ads
• Facebook ads

Use this resource from Biteable to uncover their Facebook ad strategy and improve on it. For others, we have a comprehensive guide on spying on competitors and how to target their visitors with personalized ads. Use the recommended tools to pull it off. 

Additionally, use the Google search operator intext: {competitor website name} -inurl:example.com to find websites and blogs that mention your competitor. Also, it can help you uncover competitors’ press release distribution channels to replicate their strategy.

Please replace the placeholder {competitor website name} and example.com appropriately.

Become an industry thought leader

Now imagine what it means for your brand if people see you as the most reliable source for industry information.

Of course, a lot of dental offices will kill for that and you should aim for it too.

The Western Governor University sees thought leadership as the expression of ideas that demonstrates you have expertise in a particular field, area, or topic [Source]. According to them, it qualifies you as a reliable source of insights and information that can influence others.

They believe that thought leadership boosts your industry presence, builds your brands, and establishes your credibility.

Leveraging it can put you ahead of the pack. 

All it requires is creating helpful content consistently. We recommend you research families’ dental care pain points. Then create valuable content to address them. Also, find out all their questions and answer them as you can. Quora is a good source of these questions.

Use Surfer SEO to optimize the content so that people can find it.

You can check out this resource to see how you can brand yourself as a thought leader.

Convert website visitors to leads

The average online conversion is always between 3 and 5%.

What this means is that only about five people will patronize you out of every 100 that visit your website. So, you’ll have to bring about 1,000 people to your site to close 50 appointments. This doesn’t sound good.  

But you can up your game using Collect Chat.

It lets you create conversational chatbots that can convert those visits into leads.

Use Zapier to pull those leads into your email marketing software to nurture them into paying customers. Collect Chat promises to improve your conversion by three times and combining it with omnichannel automation platforms, like Omnichannel, can supercharge your patient acquisition.

There are several to leverage these tools. But we explained our favorite use cases in our Collect Chat review and small business WhatsApp marketing article. Use the insights to automate your dental practice marketing.

Level the playing ground with social media

About 60% of the world’s population uses social media, spending nearly 150 minutes daily.

The number is higher in North America, with about 74% of the region’s population on at least one social network, meaning at least seven out of ten prospects are on social media. So, a solid social presence can level the playing ground, allowing you to compete fairly with the more established brands.

Join all the social media platforms your prospects are most active on, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, and TikTok.

In addition to posting regularly on these platforms, join ongoing conversations on Twitter with the trending hashtags. Use Facebook ads to reach nearby customers and retarget those who visited your website without converting. Let happy patients share their experiences on Instagram and TikTok.

Quora is ideal for building thought leadership. We recommend regularly scouring the platforms for relevant questions to provide helpful answers to them.

Staying active on all these platforms could be challenging. 

So, use Sendible to streamline the processes. It’s one of our favorite small business marketing tools and we encourage you to try it out. This Sendible review explains what it can do for you.

Scale effortlessly with a patient retention strategy

Being obsessed with getting new patients could cause you to lose focus.

Also, it stretches your marketing budget and team, preventing you from maximizing your existing customers. We recommend you dedicate efforts to getting more from your clients.

And the reason is simple.

Studies show that it costs five times more to get new customers than to keep an existing one. Also, the Pareto principle suggests that about 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your existing customers.

Besides these, happy customers will refer businesses to you, further lowering your acquisition costs. Loyalzoo is our go-to solution for retaining customers and building loyalty. We clearly explained how it helps us achieve this in our recent Loyalzoo review.

Improve conversion with CRO

As you already know, about 95% of your web visitors will not convert.

However, developing an effective conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy can help you improve the number. Your best bet is to identify frictions in your website navigation experience and eliminate them.

For this, we recommend using Hotjar to generate web users’ heat maps and session recordings.

Use the insights to deliver an experience that converts. For instance, move your critical elements, like the CTA button and USP, to the areas that receive the most clicks on your website. Also, learn where users stop scrolling and exit your page. 

Find ways to improve them

Shiv Sharma, the former head of operations at Taskworld said the tool improved their conversion by 40%. According to him, the software showed them where visitors clicked while signing up. As a result, they gained insights on what needs improving, consequently, boosting their conversions. 

Other ways to improve conversion include:

• Embed patient reviews on relevant web pages with Trustindex as social proofs
• Improve website load speed
• Optimize for the mobile experience
• Communicate value in clear, short sentences
• Embed a Collect Chat bot on the page
• Add an engaging explainer video
• Eliminate distractions from the page
• Use compelling CTA

Top Dental Practice Online Marketing Tools

Growing your dental office is not a walk in the park. But these tools can streamline your processes to pull it off effortlessly. They are essential parts of our tech stack and we recommend adding them to yours too.

SEO tools

Use these tools to improve your organic rankings.

Marketing Miner

This tool is our favorite for spying on competitors and researching keywords. So, make it the foundation of your dental office growth strategies. Marketing Miner has over 40 built-in tools you can leverage to simplify your SEO and gain insights to improve your marketing.

Use Cases

• Researching keywords 
• Spying on competitors’ keywords and backlink profiles
• Monitoring brand mentions 
• Tracking and analyzing backlinks

Pricing

Includes free plan, while premium starts at $29 per month

Surfer SEO

It’s useless writing content that doesn’t rank on Google. And that’s where this tool comes in. Surfer SEO provides you with AI-powered suggestions to optimize your content. It does this by analyzing the top-ranking pages for insights on how to outrank them.

Use Cases

• Content brief generation
• Keyword optimization
• Content optimization
• SEO site audit

Pricing

Premium pricing starts at $29 per month.

Adsy

You need a lot of backlinks to outrank competitors and dominate the search. Use Adsy to find them in a few mouse clicks. The platform connects you to thousands of high-authority domains that accept guest posts. You can write the posts or outsource them to the publishers.

Use Cases

• Guest posting
• Link building

Pricing

Custom plans, depending on your business needs.

Rank Math

We use this WordPress plugin for our on-page SEO optimization. We recommend switching to it if your website runs on WordPress. The plugin comes with several built-in features, comparable tools, like Yoast SEO, can’t rival. It’s also affordable.

Use Cases

• Generating schema structured data
• Article optimization
• Rank tracking
• AI-powered content optimization suggestions
• Multiple keywords optimization
• Local SEO

Pricing

The free plan is included, while paid plans start at $59 per year.

Patients acquisition tools

These tools help you acquire new clients with ease.

Collect Chat

The software helps you add a human-friendly chatbot to your website. Use it to collect more leads, book appointments, and get customers’ feedback. It doesn’t require coding and more than 25,000 businesses use it.  

Use Cases

• Customers’ feedback
• Lead generation
• Building landing pages
• Surveying

Pricing

Premium starts at $24 per month, but there’s a free plan.

Sendible

This software helps you manage all your social media accounts in one place. It streamlines social media management, eliminating the need for a large social media team. Sendible also makes collaboration effortless.

Use Cases

• Social posts scheduling
• Audience engagement
• Team collaboration
• Social reporting and analytics

Pricing

Begins at $29 per month.

Patients retention tool

These tools are effective for retaining your clients and building loyalty.

Hotjar

This software generates heatmaps and session recordings of your web visitors. Study them for insights on how to improve your website’s UX, eliminate friction, and optimize the conversion paths.

Use Cases

• Real-time web visitor tracking
• Recording user actions
• Patient feedback

Pricing

Features free plan with premium starting at $32 per month.

Loyal Zoo

The software is our favorite for managing referral programs, driving repeat businesses, and building a loyal client base. The tool has a clean UI and is easy to use. It integrates with multiple third-party applications and features a mobile app.

Use Cases

• Running referral programs
• Rewarding repeat businesses to drive in more
• Clients engagements

Pricing

Premium pricing starts at $47 per month.

Zapier

Run automated marketing with Zapier. The solution integrates with over 5,000 applications, allowing you to supercharge your patient acquisitions. For instance, you can integrate Collect Chat to Facebook Ads to retarget website visitors in real time. 

Use Cases

• Automating leads acquisition and conversion
• Streamlining repetitive tasks
• Improving productivity

Pricing

Paid pricing starts at $19.99 per month.

How to Develop Your Dental Practice Marketing Plan

Building your dental practice marketing plan is now a lot easier with the above strategies. Now, follow these steps to get it done.

Define your strategies

First, specify the strategies you wish to implement.

However, you would benefit immensely if you go for all of them. We recommend making search engine optimization the centerpiece of your growth strategy. From our experience, it’s the most sustainable strategy to scale your customer acquisition. 

Integrate others as secondary channels to support your SEO and build a multichannel SEO strategy.

You can email us at (sam@smartentrepreneurblog.com/us) if you need help with this.

Specify your KPIs

Set objectives for each channel and indicate how to measure their performance.

For SEO, look at metrics like organic clicks, search impressions, keyword rankings, and competitor rankings. Pay attention to engagements for social media, referred and repeat businesses for referral marketing, and conversion rate for the CRO strategy.

 The metrics should be measurable, to make appraisal scientific.

Assign roles

Of course, you can’t pull off these strategies alone.

So, build your team and assign them responsibility. Also, indicate their KPIs and the evaluation criteria. Set a set timeline and establish a clear reporting system.  

Develop your action plan document

Create a document that articulates all these. 

Make it available to team members and always reference it to ensure you are still on track. Also, specify the procedure for updating the document.

How to Measure Your Dental Marketing Efforts

Tracking essential metrics periodically can help you to evaluate your strategy implementation effectiveness. Begin with these options.

Website Traffic

This metric measures the number of visitors to your website. 

Segment this metric to identify each channel’s contributions. Allocate more resources to the best-performing channels to scale the traffic. Also, find out why the low-performers aren’t getting enough traffic and fix it.

Use Google Analytics for this.

Leads generation

Track the number of leads that come in periodically.

Set up conversion tracking to access this information. Segment the data to see where the leads come from and scale the channels that bring in the most leads. Also, check for your peak days and make the most of it. 

Conversion rate

Specify everything that qualifies as a conversion to your business and track them.

The most important conversion rate to monitor is the percentage of your web traffic that converts to leads. Also, track how many of these leads become paying customers. Segment this data to have a bird-eye view of your channel performance.

Repeat businesses

Use this metric to see how your retention strategies perform.

Monitor the number of patients that return after their first business. Also, find out why they return and use the information to improve your market. Track this metric for each channel to see where you focus your retention strategies.

Final Thought On Marketing Your Dental Practice

It is not easy to stand out in the United State’s dental industry.

But following the marketing strategies outlined in this article can win you the customer attention you need to scale your dental office. However, diving heads-on could overwhelm your team.

So, we recommend you take things easy.

Begin with the strategies that best suit your team’s capabilities, and then scale to other areas as results trickle in. Alternatively, you could outsource or hire more talents to fill the gap.

Regardless of the option you opt for, ensure to establish clear KPIs and a reporting system to track their progress. Finally, scale and iterate what is working and discontinue strategies that add little to your bottom line.

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FAQs

How can I market my dental office?

There are several ways you can market your dental practice. Some of our favorite dental office growth strategies include:

• Search engine optimization
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Influence marketing
• Referral marketing

How can a beginner grow a dental practice?

We recommend building your growth strategies on search engine optimization. 

It’s cost-effective and allows you to target prospects when they are most likely to convert. Combine this channel with content marketing to scale your organic search campaign. Also, use social media to expand your reach and build a scalable patient acquisition strategy.

Additionally, list your practice on Yelp, Google Business Profile, and other relevant local business directories.

What is dental online marketing?

Dental online marketing refers to anything you do online to attract, convert and retain patients. 

Some of these activities include SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. We recommend you combine these with offline channels like billboards, flyers, commercials, and transit advertising for the best results.

What are the top challenges of growing a dental office?

Generating enough leads, improving conversion rate, and ensuring return businesses are some of the top challenges of growing a dental office. Others include:

• Ensuring adequate funding
• Hiring the right talents
• Securing the right equipment and tech
• Beating the competition
• Complying with industry best practices