Dental Practitioners Should Implement Internet Dental Marketing to Raise Their Public Profiles to Ob

Dentists are at a critical risk of losing current and would-be patients to younger-generation physicians when they fail to learn how to makes use of the internet to promote their practices.

With the fiscal turmoil of 2008, numerous healthcare providers shed 20 to 30 percent of their own client base because of the massive layoffs, which led to many people losing their health and dental insurance policies. Without health insurance, quite a few people have had to abandon their routine medical appointments for preventative care. This has many providers in healthcare struggling for patients not just to keep their clinics open, but the financial challenges, as a result, have all but stopped their standard marketing initiatives to be able to attract new patients to supplement those they have lost.

Many small business owners, particularly doctors and dentists, have discovered from the Recession that traditional medical and dental marketing isn't just costly to the bottom line to a practice, but the final results it brings are marginal at best and are therefore not enough to sustain the daily overhead of a medical or dental clinic.

Doctors and dentists are actually beginning to discard traditional marketing methods, like television and radio spots as well as outdoor signage, in place of using internet dental marketing, which has helped to significantly reduce marketing budgets. Though physicians are beginning to understand the strength of utilizing the internet to increase their profile for their local neighborhoods, several are at a loss on the best way to use it effectively to get a top-page ranking on Google and Bing.

"Dentists need to make the most of Yelp! or CitySearch through getting positive reviews as to what their practice provides," states Helmut Flasch, a clinical and dental practice management consultant and CEO of Doctor Relations, Inc., a health and dental consulting company based in Canoga Park, CA. "A website like Yelp! is massive, and patient reviews through it may be connected to the dentist’s own website," he says.

Mr. Flasch suggests that dentists need to first create an account with Google’s business directory, which can also provide further guidance on ways to get reviews. In addition, he encourages having the dentist’s office staff ask patients as they are leaving from their visits to think about composing a brief review by giving them a business card printed with the URL link that points them to the webpage. "It is very, very important to accumulate reviews from the patients," says Mr. Flasch, "because the dentist has to get to the ten-block of local listings on the very first page of Google and he won't be able to do that without reviews."

Mr. Flasch also acknowledges the potential for what an unsatisfactory review on the listing could do using this particular technique of dentist internet marketing. "Google time-stamps every single review, therefore, if a doctor should have a poor report, then he has to generate a lot of good reviews push the bad one to the bottom of the list.. Whatever the case, even if he receives a bad review, a dentist is going to pull in new patients using this method," he says.

As a word of cautionary warning, Mr. Flasch counsels dentists, in addition to anyone in a small or medium-sized enterprise, that if they do not stay up with technology in their commercial or dental internet marketing campaigns, they are going to put out of business by the younger generations who can quickly and easily maneuver through the ever-changing technologies. "Participate in whatever the internet provides you with and don’t hold back until it is proven. It has already been proven," he concludes.