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Google Adwords Express for Dentists – A Good Idea Gone Bad

December 4, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Google Adwords Express is a simplified version of their advertising platform Google Adwords, aimed at local business and service professionals like dentists and orthodontists. The main benefit of Adwords Express for dentists is the automation and simplicity it offers over the default adwords campaigns. You can get started quickly and do not need professional to setup a Google Adwords Express campaign. Once you have specified a budget, bid, business category and created an ad, Google handles the rest. However, as we look a little deeper, we find that by removing the granular control over keywords and bids, Google has taken away the primary factors that make PPC advertising so effective.

If you are just testing the waters with ppc advertising and what to assess its performance quickly, Adwords Express may be right for you. However, if you are serious about PPC advertising and are willing to allocate a substantial amount of your marketing budget towards it then you must use the full Google Adwords account. Perhaps that is what Adwords Express is meant for – a stepping stone to Google’s full-fledged advertising program.

My main gripe is that Adwords Express will not produce the best ROI. Since most dentist who opt for this program do not have a big budget, they need a high ROI to justify increasing their spend. But if they do not hit right numbers, they may in fact be turned off by PPC advertising altogether. Then as a dental marketing company it becomes difficult for us to convince a dentist, who has had a bad experience with Adwords Express, that PPC advertising is worth doing.

The main reason why search advertising is so effective is because you can show your ad to qualified searchers only by bidding on selected keywords and excluding irrelevant searchers with negative keywords. This means at that a lot of wasted spend is saved and the campaign can be optimized over time as you gain a better understanding of your audience and expand your keyword list. However, in Adwords Express, you are at the mercy of Google’s algoritms as they decide which searcher is qualified to see your ad. You can only choose your service category eg. dentist. and then try to differentiate yourself with your ad. This can often result in a lot of wasted spend.

But, the worst part of Adwords Express is that you cannot do anything to optimize the campaign and to stop wasting money on unqualified clicks. This means that you will be continue to waste money on irrelevant clicks for as long as you are advertising as there is no negative keyword feature to stop your ad from appearing on irrelevant searches. This is where you lose the main advantage of PPC advertising and then it becomes a bit hit and miss like all other forms of advertising.

If you are considering Google Adwords Express, by all means do it but don’t be surprised if the results are ordinary. In that case do not blame search advertising because PPC advertising on Adwords Express is like a bird without wings.

13 Discount Offer Ideas to Promote Your Dental Office

December 3, 2015 by admin 1 Comment

Special offers are a great way of attracting new dental patients. However, in order to stand out from the crowd you must come up with something different from the other dentist specials in your area. In this post we discuss 15 special offers you can use to acquire more dental patients and increase production.

Free Consultation

A free case evaluation or consultation is a simple but very effective offer. If you are a start-up dental practice and have more time than money, then start offering free consultations to get more new patients. You can also combine this offer with high value procedures like Invisalign braces.

Free Teeth Whiting

This is the most popular discount offer and virtually every other dentist offers some kind of heavily discounted teeth whitening. Some dentists even offer free whitening for life with high value procedures like dental implants. In fact, this offer is best used as a free add-on.

Discount Dental Exam, Cleaning and X-Ray

This is another overused discount offer that has lost it’s effectiveness simply because every other dentists is offering it. If you are just starting your dental office, you may want to join the crowd but do not expect to get much traction.

Promotional Discount on Specific Procedures

If you want to grow your patient base for a certain type of treatment procedures eg. emergencies, implants, braces, dentures etc. then you can try offering a discount on specific procedure. This will attract patients who have already been diagnosed and recommended a specific procedure and are now comparison shopping for the best price.

Patient Referral Discount

Every dental office should have a patient referral program. In order to get more referrals from your existing patients, you can reward them a nice discount on their next dental appointment.

Group/Family Discount

Similar to patient referrals, you can give discounts to patients that visit your office in a group. That could be a group of college friends or work colleagues. You can also extend this discount offer to attract families with children.

Back To School Discounts

If you run a kids dentistry or accept pediatric cases then January and August present a great opportunity to attract more families kids to your dental practice by offering a back to school offer like free exam and discounted cleaning. This offer will give your office production a nice boost at least twice a year.

Student Discount

Is your dental office located near a school, college or university? If the answer is yes then you must test some student discount offers. These offers can be done in collaboration with the school/college or you could create a group discount for students.

Senior Discount

If your office is located in a retirement destination or a neighborhood dominated by seniors, you can introduce a senior discount aimed at attracting older patients.

Veterans Discount

Is your dental office located near a military base or a neighborhood dominated by retired veterans? You can take advantage of this situation by offering discounts to military vets.

Advance Payment Discount

Cash flow can be difficult to manage sometimes so what better then encouraging your patients to pay upfront. You can do exactly that by offering a discount on upfront payments. While this may not bring many new patients, it will help improve your cash-flow.

Loyalty Discount offers

Good dental practice management demands that you reward existing patients regularly to improve patient retention. A loyalty discount offer or card is a great way to improve patient retention and encourage repeat visits from long time patients.

Dental Plan Discounts

Another way to improve cash-flow of your dental practice is to introduce an in-house dental plan. In order to encourage more patients to buy your annual dental plan, you can offer large discounts on expensive dental treatments to make them more affordable for your dental plan members.

As you can see from the list above, creating special offers is not rocket science. Just a little bit of creativity goes a long way in making your discount offer stand out from the crowd and grab the attention of prospective dental patients. I hope this list will help your imagination going and so you can come up with a great offer to attract more patients to your dental practice.

How to Make Patients Fall in Love with Your Dental Office

December 2, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

In order to create a thriving dental practice, getting new patients is not enough. You have to give each patient due attention and provide them with high quality dental care and excellent service. This will help you retain more of your patients for a longer duration. And let’s be honest, most people do not enjoy visiting a dentist – they only do so out of necessity. Therefore, you and your staff must do everything possible to satisfy every patient’s needs. In this post we discuss how you can get patients to enjoy their visits to your office by making a few small but important changes.

Engage with Your Patients

A patient is more than dental case – they are living, breathing human being. Many dentists are so focused on their dental work that they forget to interact with their patients on a personal level. Do you make an effort to remember patient names? Do you know where they work or what school they attend? Have you discussed football/basketball results with them?

If you don’t have a good memory, try keeping notes about each patient, shared interests and hobbies, family news, achievements and career news. This information will help you connect with your patients on a personal level beyond a professional dentist-patient relationship. This personal friendship will ensure high patient retention and your patients would look forward to meeting you on their next dentist appointment.

Invest in Patient Relationship Management

Make your patients feel special – as if they are the only patient your dental office has. Send them a greeting card for Christmas. How about giving a free teeth whitening for their up coming birthday. Ask them for feedback on their last visit. Offer loyalty discounts and accommodate emergency and family block appointments to facilitate long time patients. A patient relationship management software would help you keep a record of all your interactions with each patient so your office can provide them with the best dental care.

Improve Patient Satisfaction

Every patient deserves to get the best dental treatment and support and your dental office has a duty to provide that. Patient satisfaction goes beyond just the dental treatment. Your staff should also hold themselves accountable for providing the highest level of patient satisfaction. Your front desk and receptions must answer patient queries and satisfy their concerns, schedule/cancel appointments and send reminders as appropriate and facilitate new patients. Your hygienists should be thorough in their work and go above and beyond to satisfy patients. And off course you must give due attention to each patient whether it is a 2 minute exam or a $20k dental implant case.

Improve Office Facilities Environment

Would you like to visit an unkempt office? Neither would I. When was the last time you renovated the waiting area or replaced the TV? Does your office still rely on outdated dental equipment? Does the air conditioner need servicing? Is your office refrigerator full? All these things impact your staff morale as well as the patients that visit your office. By keeping your office in tip-top condition your improve staff performance and patient satisfaction. Also consider adding some more office amenities.

A successful dental office needs lots of happy patients that keep returning for more dental work and also refer their acquaintances to your dental office. The next time you find yourself or your staff cutting corners in terms of patient satisfaction just stop and answer this question. Will you accept the same if you were the patient?

11 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Dental Office Name

December 1, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

One of the first challenges any dentist faces when starting their own private dental practice is finding a suitable name. While using your surname to brand your dental office may be a good idea for some, most dentists would be better off choosing a unique name for their dental office. In this post we go over some important points you should consider when choosing a name for your dental practice.

Is it too long?

The first thing you need to be wary of is the length of your dental office name. Ideally you should keep the name up to 3 words long and anything above 5 words is far too long. In case you have to use 5 or more words, then you can develop an acronym for your practice name and use that as your logo mark. Think KFC for Kentucky Fried Chicken and IBM for International Business Machines.

Is it meaningful?

Another important aspect of a good dental office name is that it must immediately convey what you offer i.e. dentistry services. Avoid using ambiguous words that may be used to refer to something else or whose meaning is not immediately apparent. Your practice name must also distinguish your dental office from other dental related businesses like dental insurance companies and dental labs.

What does it look like?

Write the name down on a piece of paper in lower case and upper case and see if it looks okay and reads well. Show it to a few others as well and make sure you are not setting yourself up for an embarrassment like these guys.

Is it easy to spell?

Another point to consider is the spelling of your office name. When you are on the phone and tell a patient or anyone your office name, they should be able to write it down without much trouble. Stick to commonly used words and avoid fancy words unless you want to spell your practice name out to everyone for the next 10 years.

What does it sound like?

In addition an easy spelling your practice name should also be easy to pronounce. Ask a few people with different accents to ready your practice name aloud. Carefully listen to how the name sounds. Can you make out each word? How fast can people say it? Are there too many syllables?

Does it reflect your positioning?

Another important consideration when naming your dental practice is your positioning in the market. Are you alone or a group of associates? Are you a cosmetic, orthodontic, periodontics, pediatric specialist or a general dental office? Are you affordable of expensive? Your name should be able to convey exactly where you stand.

Is a tagline needed?

If you can’t find a name to fully convey your positioning then try using a tagline. The tagline will support your office name with more information to distinguish your dental practice from the rest. Ideally, however taglines should be avoided because they have become redundant over the years.

Can the City or Location Name be Added?

Since most dentists will only be operating a single city, it makes sense to add the city/town/metro name. This will provide your office a local feel which is important to many patients who wish to support local businesses over national franchises. It will also benefit you with SEO.

Is it unique and memorable?

Another important aspect of a good dental office name is its uniqueness. You want your dental practice name to be different from everyone else in the city so people do not confuse your office with another dentistry. It should also be something memorable to develop better brand recall. This will help you get a better advertising performance.

Is the name still available?

Off course the last step before finalizing an office name is to check it is available. As soon as you have a short list of names, you must check which ones are available for registration with your state and federal authorities.

Is the .com domain name available?

Now that you have finalized a name, you should confirm that it’s domain name is available and register the .com immediately. Do not register any office name where at least the .com domain name not available.

If you have answered all the above questions, then congratulate yourself because you have landed a great name for your dental office. If your shortlisted names are already taken or you are having trouble coming up with dental practice name ideas try our dental office name generator tool.

Monitor the Online Reputation of Your Dental Office FREE

November 30, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Online reputation management has become increasingly important as a growing number of patient now read online reviews before calling or visiting a dental office. As a dentist, it is satisfying to see that your patients are happy with your services when you find positive feedback left by patients on your local business listings. Local residents also rely on these reviews to form opinions about your practice. Therefore it is important that you regularly monitor and improve your online reputation.

In this post I will tell you how to track mentions of your name, practice name and other brand mentions on the web absolutely free. You can do this by setting up Google Alerts.

Make sure you add very specific search queries and select the appropriate channel, otherwise you will end up receiving too many irrelevant alerts in your email inbox. Given below are some example queries I use to setup Google Alerts.

dental marketing direct
dentalmarketingdirect.com
rafay
rafay marketing
info@dentalmarketingdirect.com
dental marketing direct reviews
dental marketing direct scam
rafay scam
dental marketing direct refund
dental marketing direct rip off

You can also search your name and practice name in google and note down what search suggestions google shows. Then setup google alerts on those search terms. The main thing you want to track is negative feedback and mentions so you can respond to them quickly and manage any issues before things get out of hand.

64 Quotes for Dental Offices to Inspire & Motivate Patients

November 29, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Quotes are an easy way to motivate your patients to practice good oral hygiene and preserve their natural teeth and gum. Therefore, every dentist should have a few quotes about oral health displayed on their office walls. If you are looking for some inspiration, we have created a list of 60+ ideas below for your to choose from.

Witty

A dentist at work in his vocation always looks down in the mouth.
~ George D. Prentice.

A man loses his illusions first, his teeth second, and his follies last.
~ Helen Rowland.

An aching tooth is better out than in.
~ Richard Baxter Quotes, Poetical Fragments.

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won’t hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.
~ Johnny Carson.

If a patient cannot clean his teeth, no dentist can clean them for him.
~ Martin H. Fischer.

Some tortures are physical and some are mental, but the one that is both is dental.
~ Ogden Nash.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.
~ George Bernard Shaw.

The tongue is ever turning to the aching tooth.
~ Thomas Fuller.

You don’t have to brush your teeth – just the ones you want to keep.
~ Author Unknown.

You don’t have to floss all your teeth – just the ones you want to keep.
~ Author Unknown.

Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond.
~ Miguel de Cervantes Quotes, Don Quixote, 1605.

Be true to your teeth or they will be false to you.
~ Soupy Sales

Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
~Author Unknown

A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew.
~Herb Caen

The best and cheapest dentistry is when the right thing is done extremely well the first time and it lasts for a long time.
~Author Unknown

Smile

Smiles are contagious so go forth and contaminate as many people as you can!

Be the reason someone smiles today!

A genuine smile comes from the heart, but a healthy smile needs good dental care.
― Wayne Chirisa

Smile everyday!

Teeth are always in style!

Stop. Smile. Breathe. Life is beautiful

A smile is the prettiest thing you’ll ever wear.

Make a smile your signature accessory

Smiles are free but they are worth a lot

A smile is a curve that sets everything straight

Life is Short. Smile, while you still have teeth.

Put on your best smile every day

Smile is the key that fits the lock of everybody’s heart.

Your smile is priceless

All people smile in the same language

You’re never fully dresses without a smile.

Smile, you’re designed to.

A smile takes but a moment, but the memories of it last forever.

Smile, it lets your teeth breathe.

Keep calm and put a smile on.

Smile, it raises your face value.

Dental Hygiene

Two minutes. Two times a day. Stick by these two simple rules for a healthier smile!

Two minutes. Two times a day. That’s all it takes to keep your mouth healthy and happy!

4 minutes a day is all it takes!

Devote 4 minutes a day to your oral health today to avoid troubled teeth in the future

Brushing rule: Two minutes. Two times a day

Remember, Dentistry is NOT expensive – Neglect is!

Keep calm and brush on

Keep calm and floss on

The toothbrush doesn’t remove 6 months of tartar, 30 minutes before your appointment.

Brush Your Teeth

Your teeth ain’t gonna brush themselves!

Oral health = Overall health

Got Teeth? Thank your dental hygienist

Dental care is a process to avoid dental implants & other casualties

Floss like a boss!

Don’t choose favorites… every tooth deserves to be flossed.

Don’t rush when you brush.

With great power comes great responsibility. Use your toothbrush wisely!

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.
~Clifford Stoll

Funny

Cavities don’t scare us!

Be kind to your dentist. Because he has “fillings” too.

It’s all fun & games until a tooth gets knocked out.

Dentists – Improving lives, one smile at a time!

Dental hygienist – sweet enough to make you smile, skilled enough to protect it!

We’re your dental defenders.

Dentists are medical professionals who help you put your money where your mouth is.

A good dentist never gets on your nerves.

A dentist gets to the root of the problem.