Specialists in Dental Care Need Internet Dental Marketing to Raise Their Public Profiles to Acquire

Dentists are at an increasing chance of losing current and would-be patients to younger-generation physicians if they neglect to learn how to utilize the internet to advertise their practices.

With the economic crisis of 2008, a number of medical providers lost 20 to 30 percent of their own clientele because of the massive layoffs, which led to thousands of people losing their health and insurance. Without health insurance, a number of people have had to give up their routine medical visits for preventative care. This leaves countless providers in healthcare struggling for patients not just to keep their clinics open, but the budgetary challenges, as a result, have stunted their conventional marketing initiatives to be able to draw in new patients to augment those they have lost.

Many small businesses, particularly doctors and dentists, have learned with the economic downfall that traditional medical and dental marketing isn't just costly to the bottom line of a practice, but the final results it yields are marginal at best and are therefore not enough to sustain the daily expenses associated with a healthcare practice.

Doctors and dentists are now beginning to discard traditional marketing methods, such as radio and tv spots in addition to outdoor signage, in lieu of using internet dental marketing, which has made it easier to to significantly reduce marketing costs. Though physicians are beginning to comprehend the power of utilizing the internet to improve their profile to their local communities, several are at a loss on the best way to use it effectively to obtain a top-page standing on the internet and Bing.

"Dentists need to utilize Yelp! or CitySearch through getting positive reviews as to what their practice provides," states Helmut Flasch, a clinical and dental practice management counselor and CEO of Doctor Relations, Inc., a health and dental consulting establishment operating out of Canoga Park, CA. "A site like Yelp! is huge, and patient reviews through it can be linked to the dentist’s own website," he says.

Mr. Flasch says that dental practices have to first sign up with Google’s business directory, which will offer further guidance on how to get reviews. Additionally, he encourages having the dentist’s office staff ask patients as they are departing from their visits to look at writing a brief review by offering them a business card printed with the web link that directs them to the website. "It is very, very necessary to amass reviews from the patients," says Mr. Flasch, "because the dentist has to reach the ten-block of community listings on the first page of Google and he will not be able to accomplish that without reviews."

Mr. Flasch also recognizes the possibility of what an unsatisfactory assessment on the listing could do using this particular technique of dentist internet marketing. "Google time-stamps each and every review, so if a doctor should have a weak report, he then would need to generate a lot of good reviews to bring the bad one down. Whatever the case, even if he receives a bad review, a dentist will still bring in new patients using this method," he says.

With a word of cautionary warning, Mr. Flasch counsels dentists, as well as anyone in a small or medium-sized business, that if they neglect to stay up with technology in their commercial or dental internet marketing efforts, they will be put out of business by the younger generations who can quickly and easily maneuver with the ever-changing technologies. "Participate in everything that the internet provides you with and don’t hold back until it is proven. It has already been proven," he concludes.