If you’re a dentist or other dental professional trying to find success in 2022, online marketing and digital solutions are more important than ever before to meet the challenges of the field.

The last few years have been hard on dentists, with patient numbers decreasing even before the COVID-19 pandemic, its associated shutdowns and ongoing shortages in availability of dental staff.

Finding success in the increasingly challenging and competitive field of dentistry today is all about attracting and retaining patients, consistently, month over month.

But you’re a dental professional, not a marketer.

Fortunately, there are digital solutions available today to help your dental practice with online marketing – and they are more accessible and cost-effective than ever before.

By adopting digital solutions for your dental practice’s administration and online marketing, you can streamline and automate administrative tasks, increase your reach to potential clients and staff, and improve the overall experience of everyone who interacts with your practice – leading to higher client and staff retention rates.

Why is having an online presence important for dentists and dental practices?

Any dental practice looking to connect with more potential patients and staff should understand that now more than ever, the average person seeking healthcare or employment spends much of that journey online.

A recent study found that 71% of dental patients search for information online before scheduling an appointment with a dentist (Invoca, 2022). And as far back as 2015, the Society for Human Resource Management was already finding that 79% of job searchers were using the internet to find work – a figure which has only grown since, especially post-pandemic.

Your dental practice’s prospective patients and staff are online – providing a great opportunity for you to meet them where they are with low-cost and highly effective online marketing and digital solutions.

It all starts with the basics – a website and social media presence, updated regularly with relevant, authoritative, and useful content.

Taking the effort to make your online presence stand out and integrating it with powerful but accessible digital solutions will set you apart from the competition and turn your online content into a driving force for your dental practice.

The importance of both website and social media for dental practices

It’s important for dental practices to use both a website and several of the major social networks in 2022, not just for online marketing purposes, but also staff acquisition and client experience.

Your website is your online flagship and your best opportunity to build your brand for a wider audience – even if that audience is just in your local area. As we’ll discuss in more detail, it’s also an important platform for digital solutions like automated marketing, online payments and scheduling, and tracking and analysis software that will streamline and empower the business and administrative aspects of your practice.

Adding social media to your online presence is a powerful tool for reaching your potential patients and staff hires directly.

Of particular interest to dental practices for the purposes of digital marketing are Facebook and Instagram, for their benefits in client acquisition and engagement.

Facebook is still the largest social network in 2022. With close to 3 billion monthly active users, it’s a perfect platform for developing a closer relationship with a broad range of current and prospective clients.

Instagram, Facebook’s sister company, is a widely-popular network focused on sharing images and videos – perfect for dentists wanting to show examples of their work, especially corrective and cosmetic procedures.

Perhaps even more importantly in 2022 and beyond, social media is one of the best ways to connect your dental practice with qualified dental professionals and administrative staff.

While you may find prospective staff hires contacting you through your website and Facebook, having a strong online presence on professional networks and job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed is a must for any dental practice looking to hire new staff in 2022 and beyond.

New research shows that 86% of job seekers in 2022 are using social media as part of their search (CareerArc, 2022).

Professional networks like LinkedIn and job boards like Indeed are part of this equation, and have connected hundreds of millions of job seekers to employers since their foundations.

The internet enables even the smallest dental practices to cast a wide net and dial in precise targeting to find the perfect candidates for their staffing needs, so it’s important to take advantage of every resource it provides in the competitive recruiting market of today.

The importance of regularly-updated content across your dental practice’s online presence

It’s not enough to just put a website or social media profile online and leave it there. Many small businesses do just this and then end up wondering why their web presence drives no traffic to their business. Digital marketing for dentists is built on a foundation of regularly-updated online content.

In order to get the most out of your dental practice’s web presence, treat it like a community hub or an ongoing conversation, updating it regularly with relevant, useful, authoritative content like blog posts, articles, and patients’ before-and-after pictures.

Some of the main benefits of regularly-updated online content for your dental practice:

Project the image of a vibrant, active dental practice.

In most cases in 2022, your web presence is your first impression on prospective clients and staff. If online searchers check out your website or social media profile and see that it hasn’t been updated in months or years, it gives the impression of stagnancy. Something as simple as weekly or monthly blog posts on topics relevant to the field can make a great first impression on your prospects, making all further online marketing efforts more likely to convert.

Provide value to online searchers and demonstrate authority in your field of dentistry

By writing and posting authoritative, useful content on important topics in dentistry, you can use your expertise and unique insights to benefit people searching for the dental information you’re an expert on. You’ll also attract prospective patients and hires to engage with you online and seek your services for their oral health needs and career goals.

Increase your online reach by being featured on search and social media

Part of the power of digital marketing is casting a wide net. The more content you put online, the more likely you will be found by people searching for information on dentistry, oral health, dental practices, and whatever other relevant topic you decide to feature in your content updates.

This will increase your contacts from prospective clients and staff and boost your dental practice’s overall profile online, a positive feedback loop that will improve the reach and targeting of your digital marketing..
What does it mean to optimize my dental practice’s web content, and what are the benefits?

In order to get the most out of your online content, it will need to be optimized. There are three main types of online optimization relevant to dental professionals – search engine optimization (SEO), local SEO, and mobile optimization. All three are crucial if you want your online content to be found by potential patients and staff and make a good impression on them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of methods and practices used to improve a website’s ranking for relevant search terms on search engines like Google. Search engines use algorithms to determine what websites best match a user’s intent – in other words, what sites best provide the information that user is searching for.

Google is the most visited site on the internet, with 99,000 searches per second, or 8.5 billion searches a day (SimilarWeb, 2022).

By improving your dental practice’s web content through SEO, you can gain the many benefits of high ranking organic results for search terms relevant to your practice. Your future clients and staff hires are searching online. If you want your dental practice to be successful in 2022, you must make sure they can find you there.

Up to 90% or more of pages clicked on Google come from the first page of results (Moz, 2017).

If your dental practice’s online content isn’t being found on the first page of search engine results, you have far less chance of being seen by potential patients and staff.

Utilizing SEO best practices on all of your web content – website, social media pages, and job listings – is a must in order to rank on the first page of search results and gain organic traffic from searchers interested in your practice.

That means it’s a must in order for your dental practice to be competitive for attention online.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a type of search engine optimization specifically geared toward increasing the visibility of local businesses online. While teledentistry is a growing trend within the field, most patients and dental professionals will still be looking locally for their dental care and career opportunities.

Google interprets “dentist,” as well as many other search terms related to dentistry, as a search with local intent – in other words, a search that most likely indicates interest in finding local services.

When the Google algorithm determines that a search has local intent, it will serve the searcher the Google Map Pack – a feature that highlights local businesses in the searcher’s area. The Map Pack is also commonly referred to as the 3-Pack, because only the three businesses that Google considers the best local matches for a search will appear without the need for any further action by the searcher.

The Map Pack often appears before all other organic search results, which gives a major competitive edge to any business listed in it.

The higher your dental practice’s online content shows up on Google, the more likely it is that searchers will interact with it. After all, the internet is all about convenience, and most searchers understand that the highest search results are considered the highest-quality by Google – why keep scrolling down if the best matches are at the top?

The Map Pack also contains features that allow searchers to call a listed business or find directions to its location with a single click or tap.

If your dental practice is featured in the Map Pack, you’ll find clients and hires quickly and conveniently transitioning from the web-searching phase of their journeys to direct contact with you.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is the process of optimizing your website for mobile devices. More and more people are using their mobile devices to access information online anywhere, anytime. This makes mobile optimization an important factor in SEO and crucial to user experience on your dental practice’s website.

Over 58% of all web traffic now comes through mobile devices (Oberlo, 2022).

Of particular relevance to dental practices is the fact that mobile optimization can help tie together a potential patient or staff hire’s entire journey. Mobile devices combine internet, email, GPS, phone and more to provide a seamless experience from information-gathering, to contact, to the moment they arrive at your door or schedule a remote appointment.

By optimizing your online content, your dental practice will gain more online visibility, improved user experience, and increased conversions.

What digital solutions can I integrate with my dental practice’s web content and what are their benefits?

Integrating digital solutions with your web content will streamline and automate the business and administrative side of your dental practice, with incredible results for marketing, recruiting, and overall user experience. Here are a few of the most valuable digital solutions every dentist should be taking advantage of in 2022 and beyond:

Tracking and Analysis Software

By implementing tracking software, you’ll gain incredible amounts of data from every action a user takes on your web content. To help you sort through that data, there are accessible, cost-effective AI-driven analysis tools capable of handling millions of data points and producing actionable insights into them – ranging from identifying parts of your website that need maintenance to pre-qualifying leads for your practice’s online marketing.

This data and the insights you’ll gain are the foundation of all your other digital solutions – the fuel for a machine that will soon be driving your dental practice more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a data-driven technology that handles all the repetitive tasks of your dental practice’s marketing automatically. With the data and insights gained from your tracking and analysis software, you’ll be able to automatically identify audiences and serve them appropriate content for their needs, whether by email, text, or social media

You’ll be able to increase your contacts with prospects – both patients and hires – as well as current and lapsed patients. You’ll be able to serve them automatically-tailored messages designed to drive specific actions at specific times – without having to take the time to so much as click “send” for each. You’ll even be able to retarget prospects who interacted with your dental practice online but never made contact – opening up opportunities that would have never existed otherwise.

With marketing automation handling these tasks, you and your staff will have more time to handle other tasks while still maintaining constant outreach.

Digital Advertisement

A perfect supplement to the organic reach of your optimized web content, digital advertisement platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads target specific, qualified users online, serving them ads tailored to their needs and preferences.

Automated and driven by data and AI insights, digital advertising platforms automatically run advertising campaigns that learn over time, constantly improving to deliver the best possible results for your dental practice’s online marketing efforts.

Most digital advertising campaigns operate on a “pay-per-click” (PPC) basis, meaning you don’t pay anything unless a user actually interacts with your advertisement.

And you can set targeting limits that are as specific as you like, such as geographic radius, certain demographics, and even proximity to major life events, to target the perfect audience for your dental practice and specific services you offer.

Ecommerce solutions

ECommerce solutions range from online bill payments to online scheduling to selling oral healthcare products online – anything that enables your dental practice to move business tasks to convenient, streamlined online methods.

According to a 2021 survey by Instamed, a subsidiary of JPMorgan, 85% of patients now prefer to pay their medical bills online – yet most healthcare providers still rely on paper bills.

By adopting online bill pay and online scheduling, your dental practice can immediately reduce overhead, save time, and increase client satisfaction and loyalty.

Ecommerce can also reduce overhead and increase convenience for both your practice and your patients for oral healthcare product sales. Use your web presence and marketing automation to drive patients to your online store, where they can find the products they need for their dental care – supplied directly by your practice or through a partnership with a third party that will pay you a commission on every sale.

Implement digital solutions to drive your dentistry practice’s marketing, recruiting, and payments in 2023

Even the smallest dental practice can benefit from digital solutions, with low-cost, high-return online tools able to transform your practice into a thriving business with the power of automation and machine learning.

Don’t let your dental practice fall behind in 2022. Take advantage of the benefits of online marketing and digital solutions by optimizing your website, social media profiles, and job listings through SEO, local SEO, and mobile optimization. Regularly updating your online content with relevant, authoritative information will increase your online reach and attract prospective clients and staff to your practice. Make sure your dental practice is easily found by those searching for oral health services and career opportunities – start implementing digital solutions today.