How To’s

How to Attract Millennials to Your Dental Practice!

by Kari Perlewitz | Jan 14, 2019 | How To's, Social Media

Every day, it seems like there’s some news story about Millennials “killing” another industry or brand. It might be easy to say this generation is hard to please or ruthless, but we know there is FAR more to the story than that. Understanding the full story (and knowing how to attract Millennials rather than repel them) is vital if you own or run any kind of business… dental practices included.

Millennials are the people who were born between 1982 and 2000, and as of today, there are about 80 million in the United States. That’s a lot of buying power! If your dental practice is still struggling to attract younger adults, it’s time to reflect on your marketing strategy. After all, Millennials often have young children, so if you also offer pediatric dentistry, you could be looking at A LOT of potential new patients.

What Millennials Want

Recently, an article came out in Dental Economics that claimed Millennials are shying away from private practice dentistry. There’s a few reasons the author of this article believes this is happening. Surprisingly, very few of his reasons have anything to do with actual dentistry. Instead, it’s more about the experience and how easy it is for them to interact with your practice when they need to.

The truth is, Millennials need things to be EASY! They’re working more hours than any other generation, they have less “downtime” and a lot of them are parents. They simply don’t have time to call and make an appointment. They want to be able to do it online, from their smartphone, on the go. In fact, according to the article and a Lincoln Financial Group Dental study, “40% of millennials cite a dentist’s website as “very important” as opposed to 14% of baby boomers.”

Do you have a website that works well on mobile? Do you allow patients to book their appointments online? Making it easy is the name of the game if you want to win over this huge chunk of the population!

It’s Time to Get Social

For a dental practice to attract Millennial patients, you have to show up where they hang out. In this day and age, that means online! Your website must look good and be discoverable through search engines, which means spending a little time and energy on SEO (consistent blogging, keyword research, and website optimization).

In addition to a great website, you need to be active on social media. Just posting once in awhile isn’t enough. Daily conversations with your followers is mandatory, and making your content fun, engaging, and informative is key. It should not be about YOU and how great YOU are. It should be about your followers. Solve their problems, give them helpful tips, and get to know them though actual conversations online. This is how you win over the younger crowd.

Some Key Takeaways

At the end of the day, your goal should be to create content that shows exactly why your practice is the best one for your potential and current patients. Showcase your personality, your skills, your equipment, and your services. Use attention-catching imagery and short videos to really “wow” your followers. Be consistent on social media and have a great website. It can seem like a lot, but if you take it one step at a time and outsource when you can, we guarantee you can grow your audience, not only with Millennials, but across the board.

Do you need help with social media management, content strategy, or do you need to schedule a photoshoot so you have tons of on-brand imagery and video to share online? We are here for you! Feel free to contact us anytime.

5 Questions for Your Year-End Marketing Audit

by Dr. Jessica Emery | Dec 10, 2018 | Branding, How To's, Social Media

Here we are, at the end of another year. Did you reach your goals this year for your dental practice? I sure hope you did, but if you fell short, don’t despair. There is still lots of good information and productive takeaways you can learn from failing. It’s probably the reason C.S. Lewis famously said, “failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”

In this blog post, we want to go over five questions you should ask yourself as you do your year-end marketing audit:

What was your biggest success?

Why not start with the good stuff! What do you think was your biggest success when it came to marketing your business? Can you tie that success to any one decision you made about your marketing strategy? Examining what worked (and why) is a very important step to making sure you can replicate it moving forward!

Has your target market changed?

A year is a long time, and in that time, many changes can happen. Your business or your community may have shifted in such a way that the target market you started the year with is not the same target market you have today. It’s important to know who you are trying to reach with your marketing so you can tailor your strategy to reach the right people. Otherwise, you’re just shouting into the void and hoping that someone will hear you!

Who was your biggest competitor?

Sometimes we get so busy we are just focused on keeping our heads down and doing our best work. Nothing wrong with that! However, the end of the year is a great time to finally come up for air and assess what’s been going on in the industry. Who do you consider your biggest competitor? Knowing this will help you as you think of creative ways to differentiate yourself in the new year.

What was your most popular service?

Did any one service rise to the top this year? If so, you might want to consider putting a little more advertising dollars into promoting it over the next year. Your customers are showing you that what you are offering is something they need and want — which is VERY valuable information that you’re getting absolutely free! During your year-end marketing audit, make sure to consider your most popular service and assess how (and how often) you posted about it on social media.

Which social media post performed the best on each platform?

Every year, it’s important to sit down and spend some time auditing your social media profiles. Make sure everything is up-to-date and accurate, but also pull up those analytics! See which posts performed the best on each platform and see if you can identify a common theme. This will help you clearly see which content your followers want to see more of so you can start the new year off on the right foot.

If you decide to outsource your dental marketing in the new year, we would love to help! Dental Soiree specializes in creating engaging social content for dental practices with the specific goal of helping them grow and become more profitable. Learn about our packages or get in touch with us to discuss your needs by filling out our contact form. It’s time to kiss traditional marketing (and the non-stop hustle) goodbye!

Four Instagram Hacks to Rock Your Dental Marketing

by Dr. Jessica Emery | Nov 26, 2018 | How To's, instagram, Social Media

Instagram is an absolutely AMAZING resource that can transform the way your dental practice shows up online and reaches new potential patients. This photo sharing social media platform allows practices (and all businesses and brands) to reach new audiences and spread the word about their services. Here are four Instagram hacks you can use to really rock your dental marketing strategy!

Post Consistently

The first Instagram hack we want to share is not really a hack at all. It’s just a reminder to be consistent with your posting schedule. Consistency is key on Instagram. In order to be seen by your followers, you should aim to share content every day if possible. The regularity of the content will help your audience grow at a steady pace and keep you one step ahead of the algorithms.

It’s also important to stay consistent with the type of content you’re sharing. As a dental practice, sharing a picture of your family pet may not make the most sense. Keep your content “on brand” by consistently using the same editing styles. Try using the same filter on all your photos. They’ll look more cohesive and when people see them, they’ll know they came from you.

Hashtag Properly

Hashtags are a free tool that you can — and should — use to help spread the word about your practice. They’re like tiny little Instagram hacks that can connect your photo to a network of similar content on the platform.

Let’s say you’re looking for photos pertaining to veneers. You can log onto Instagram, search #veneers and instantly see all the photos that have been shared. More importantly, your potential patients can do this, too.

Hashtags are helpful for people who want to look for content about a specific product or service. If a user is trying to find a dentist in Chicago, they can search #chicagodentist or #chicagodentaloffice to see the practices in the area. Don’t forget to make your posts searchable using relevant hashtags!

Interact Within Your Community

Interacting with your followers on Instagram is important, especially as a dentist. Your Instagram feed can act as a new form of communication between you and your patients. By creating a positive relationship with patients online, they’ll form a sense of loyalty to your practice. The more positive the experience, the more likely they’ll be to continue visiting your practice.

Don’t stop there, though. Interact with other members of your community, like neighboring businesses. People in your geographic area will see this and click through to your page to learn more about this fun dental practice that’s going out of their way to be kind on Instagram!

Why Blogging for Dentists is Crucial for Growth

by Dr. Jessica Emery | Nov 19, 2018 | Blog, How To's

Have you been wondering whether it would pay off to start a blog for your dental practice? Blogging is one of those things that seems to rise and fall in popularity, so sometimes people wonder if it is worth their time and energy. Well, since you’re reading this blog post, you can probably guess that we think blogging for dentists is crucial for marketing success.

How will a blog benefit my dental practice?

We recommend blogging for dentists because of the huge impact it has on website traffic. When you create content on your site on a regular basis, you have the immediate benefit of getting people on your website, where you can then direct them to other areas and hopefully get them to click on your content or schedule button!

In a less direct way, it’s a great way to get patients and potential patients to see you as a thought leader in the industry. It’s a way to build trust and establish yourself as a dentist who knows what they’re talking about. The next time they need to schedule an appointment, or if someone is thinking about leaving their current dentist, it’s you they’ll think of first!

Let’s talk about SEO

A well-maintained blog will also help with SEO. Producing helpful content that users are actively searching for will help your website appear higher on the search engine results. This is obviously great for business, because 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. If you’re showing up in the first page of results, you’re already at least halfway there!

Blog posts are especially good for SEO, because longer content tends to rank better. Additionally, the longer form nature of blog posts allows you to use your targeted keywords more often and incorporate them more naturally than you can with short website blurbs, for instance.

How to Start Blogging

Are you convinced? If so, you’re probably wondering how to start. The best way to start blogging is just to start. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to become part of your marketing strategy and your monthly routine. If you’re stretched for time, aim to blog once or twice a month at first. Eventually, you’ll want to consider making it a weekly task, but for now, just getting started is key.

If you’re not sure how to create a blog on your website, reach out to your web developer. It’s likely not a complex process to get a blog up and running, but you want to make sure someone who is knowledgeable about websites is setting it up for you. Once it’s set up, adding new posts is easy; you might even be able to outsource it to a virtual assistant or someone in your office!

Don’t forget, imagery matters, even in blogging. It isn’t *just* about the words. You have to hook people in with great imagery, especially when you’re sharing your blog posts on social media. If you need help with great imagery, our sister site, Soiree Stock, is the perfect resource. Download unlimited styled stock photos for one flat fee each month. Use them in your blogs, your social media feeds, your website… wherever you need great images!

How to Find the Right Hashtags For Dental Marketing

by Dr. Jessica Emery | Nov 5, 2018 | How To's, instagram, Social Media

Whether you’re a social media maven (like the team here at Dental Soiree) or you’re just getting started on your dental marketing strategy, you probably know hashtags are those few words preceded by the pound sign (#). But if you’re not that familiar with them, it may seem confusing and you may not want to use them. After all, what do they actually do? Well, the answer is they do A LOT! They are a great way to find like-minded people online, and on many platforms, it’s one of the only ways you have to grow your following.

The hard part isn’t how to use them. We could teach that in a minute or two (and there’s plenty of resources out there already on this topic). We want to help you find the RIGHT hashtags for your dental marketing strategy because that’s 99% of the battle right there.

So here’s our favorite techniques when we need to find the right hashtags for our latest social media post:

#1 – Research in the app

The easiest way to find new hashtags is just to search right in the Instagram app. You can see what hashtags other people in your industry are using and if you tap on a hashtag, Instagram will tell you how many times it’s being used. You don’t want to use too many hashtags that are under 10,000 uses, but you also don’t want to use hashtags that are all in the millions because your post will easily get lost in the shuffle.

Spend some time tapping on hashtags you like to see how they’re performing and make a list. Once you have a good list to pull from, you can use a hashtag tool (see below) to help you make the most of your research!

#2 – Use a hashtag tool

Yes, there are (many) tools out there that exist specifically to help you find the right hashtags for your posts. Our favorite right now is called Display Purposes. We love it because it actually filters out any banned or spammy hashtags so you won’t accidentally use them.

All you have to do is put in a hashtag or two that you know you want to use in the search bar and it will give you up to 30 hashtags that are related to the one(s) you entered. All you have to do is copy and paste the hashtag list into your posts and you’re good to go! It’s best to do this for every post so you have a unique list of hashtags, but if you repeat a list a few times, that’s okay!

#3 – Get creative

At the end of the day, social media is a creative pursuit. If you come up with a clever or witty hashtag, but no one is really using it, who cares? Use it anyway! It will show your followers that you are a creative person with a sense of humor and playfulness. It will make you more human and relatable and that’s what we’re all striving for on social media, anyway!

Likewise, if you come up with a good hashtag that includes your name or your branding, use that and try to use it on every post, too. It’s a great way to make yourself and your posts more searchable since when someone clicks on that hashtag, they’ll easily be able to see more of your great content.

Have questions about hashtags? We can help! We made a course all about Instagram (including an entire section on hashtags) over at The Soiree Suite! This is our little digital classroom where we teach everything we know about marketing and social media. You can check it out here!

The Harsh Truth About Building an Online Presence

by Dr. Jessica Emery | Oct 29, 2018 | How To's, Productivity, Social Media

If you run a busy dental practice, you probably know that building an online presence is very important for your practice to succeed. However, you probably also know that doing that is far easier said than done. There’s tons of effort, strategy, and planning that go into having a strong presence online, and even after you “achieve” your goals, the work is not over. You have to consistently put in effort to maintain your rankings and follower count.

Which brings us to the harsh truth about building an online presence that we’re going to focus on in this blog post:

Online marketing success often does not come quickly or easily.

Why are we telling you this? Because first of all, we believe it’s important to be honest. A lot of the people reading this blog are dentists. They are not marketing professionals. They likely do not know the inner workings of the various social media platforms. Many people just starting out on social media think that they just need to post content every once in a while and the followers will come. However, it isn’t that easy.

Building an online presence is about more than posting photos on Instagram once in a while or posting a reminder to your Facebook followers to book an appointment at your practice.

Unfortunately, there are complicated algorithms at play that all but ensure only a tiny portion of your fans are seeing your posts. Hashtags are great, but just like fashion, trends change all the time and the hashtag list you’re still using from last year is probably outdated and ineffective at this point.

So how do you succeed online?

Consistent effort and strategy.

If you don’t post consistent content on social media (and your blog) and have a strategy in place for doing so, building an online presence is going to be a very tough uphill battle.

The only way to “beat” the algorithms is to share enough content that your followers will see it, whether it’s yesterday’s post, today’s post or tomorrow’s post… because they probably won’t see all three unless they’re already highly engaged with your page.

However you can’t share any old photo or post and call it a day. Your content needs to be strategic. You must have a consistent voice and brand, as well as consistent photo styles in order to build a feed that people will want to follow. Constantly changing up your style online is a sure fire way to confuse your followers.

On top of that, mixing up your messaging is crucial. If you post salesy sounding posts like “book an appointment” and “come see us for this service” all the time, people are going to get sick of it and guess what? They’ll unfollow. Instead, you have to build a strategy where you mix up call to action posts, informative posts, fun, more lighthearted posts, behind the scenes photos, etc. Take your followers on a ride instead of boring them or selling to them all the time.

If you need content that will make building an online presence a breeze? We can help with that! We specialize in show-stopping content that disrupts the norm on social media. Would you rather be “just another dental practice” or would you rather be the practice that gets people EXCITED about dental care? We can help get you there!