Your reputation is one of the key principles of a successful dental marketing strategy. How patients perceive your brand can have a big impact on your practice. Even though you may be well-known as a dental practice, but what is their opinion of you? You want to start right on the front foot, particularly for new customers, and creating a good first impression is all the more important.
You won’t see any patients speak positively about a dental practice if the practice continues to receive bad press. Therefore, you want to ensure that you’re connecting with your patients more than ever before. This will ensure a positive reputation is shared with wider communities. This will only benefit the growth of your practice and your brand as a whole.
Your goal is to highlight the positive qualities of your brand, but it involves a combination of best practices, which are outlined below as the key fundamentals of reputation management.
Online Reviews
Online reviews are the most popular method for people to form an opinion about your practice. You want to ensure that your dental practice can be trusted. Therefore, the opinions that people form is essential. If you continue to deliver an exceptional service and continue to meet the needs of patients, you’re highly unlikely to go far wrong. Satisfied patients will only be a positive thing, hence the feedback through online reviews will be equally as positive.
Don’t be put off if you’ve received a negative review either. This is an opportunity to put it right by delivering an even better service to catch the attention of the negative reviewer. Use it as an opportunity to build and not regress.
Social Media
Your reputation is equally important on your social media pages. Your engagement forms part of that. If you’re regularly active on social media, you’re more likely to get wider exposure to new audiences. Here are a few things to consider when posting on social media that will enhance your reputation:
- Regularly engage with people online. Answer any questions they may have about the services you provide. This demonstrates that you value other opinions.
- Post and promote your service regularly. By doing this, you’re enhancing and spreading your brand, increasing the chances of patient conversions, interacting with other influencers and improving your organic content ranking.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO should be a key component for your business because it will help rank your dental practice higher on the Google search rankings. With strong SEO, you’re likely to generate more clicks from online users, giving you a better chance to convert them into patients. As part of your SEO strategy, your content needs to be of value so that it provides answers directly to patients for their needs. You may also consider including service promotions to new patients. That’s not all, the content itself needs to be rich containing target keywords to drive traffic. Content should also include blog content that offers the most up to date dentistry information, and also include referral links for optimum searching.
Website Usability
Fundamentally, no matter how quality your website could be, what is the point if users cannot access it easily? When users access your website, they want to not just be able to trust the content that’s on there, but for it to be available immediately upon accessing your dental website. Therefore, ensuring your website is user-friendly must be high on the agenda. It would be a travesty to put in work on your website, but the users immediately turn off because of how complicated your website is to use.
Summary
These four essential fundamentals are a great starting point to build a positive reputation for your dental practice online. The trigger of your reputation starts inside your practice. How valuable is the service you’re providing to patients? Are they satisfied with the end result? As long as your patients walk out of the practice with a smile on their face, you’re highly likely to excel in your reputation and this will be shown online through your website and social media pages.
Do you need assistance with your reputation strategy? Contact us today at Smile and Grow and we’d be happy to help.
