Whether you’re running your own dental office or working in a larger practice, you could probably use more hours to get things done. Between seeing your current patients, managing the financial aspects of an office, and pursuing new patient leads, you have a lot on your plate. You need dental marketing automation.
In a competitive field like dentistry, your practice’s digital marketing strategy is a critical part of your overall operation.
For a busy office already juggling multiple business priorities and roles all while ensuring patients receive the best possible dental care, finding the time to put that marketing strategy into action can feel overwhelming.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Dental Practice Marketing Automation Strategy
The right dental practice marketing automation tools can help your team reduce the time and effort needed to manage different pieces of your digital marketing strategy. There are tools that can help you find new patients, run ad campaigns, and manage your email lists much more efficiently.
Today we’re looking at a few different ways to start incorporating automation into your digital marketing efforts.
1. Automate Your Email Campaigns
Email campaigns have long been a key component of digital marketing strategies. It’s an easy way to connect with current patients and encourage them to schedule an appointment—as well as to communicate important information related to their care.
Email is also a good way to reach out to prospective patients, share information about your services, promoting specials or discounts. Best yet, this type of contact keeps your brand top-of-mind.
There are plenty of tools that can help you automate your email marketing campaigns. Use these tools to set up auto-replies, create customized campaigns to nurture prospective patients, and schedule patient messages like appointment reminders.
At the same time, these automation tools gather data on how your patients interact with your emails. This helps you improve your messaging and reach your ideal target audience.
2. Maximize Your Paid Advertising Campaigns
Word-of-mouth and referrals are crucial to growing your patient base. But don’t discount paid ad campaigns.
Automated ad management tools help you set up and run these campaigns with little effort. You can identify prospective patients and target them with ads across a variety of web and social media platforms.
Automation tools eliminate the hard work of placing ads on each platform separately and let you focus on caring for your patients. Run both small and large campaigns with these tools and scale them as your practice grows.
3. Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience
In the marketing world, knowing how your audience interacts with your content is crucial. Most marketing tools help you gain a deeper understanding by gathering this data and providing options on how it can be reviewed and shared.
The better you understand what drives the needs and behaviors of your current and prospective patients, the more effectively you can create content that meets those needs. Better yet, you’ll provide value by answering the questions they are searching for.
4. Make Your Website a Lead Generator
Creating an exceptional website for your dental practice is a necessity. Your website is the first impression for most prospective patients. This tool positions you to share information about your brand and services.
Beyond those basic but important benefits, your dental practice’s website is a great marketing tool that you probably aren’t taking full advantage of. Fortunately, automation tools will help.
So, start with tools that integrate with your CMS. You should be able to quickly create lead-capturing forms, guide visitors to tailored landing pages, and analyze your site’s SEO.
Automation features like this position you to reach a wider audience while capturing data and boosting engagement.
5. Boost Your SEO for Dental Practice Marketing Automation
As we’ve mentioned, your website is a key piece of dental practice marketing automation. But that means nothing if you never reach your audience.
As such, improving your SEO and helping your dental practice rank highly on search engines has to be a priority.
Luckily, there are quite a few automation tools available to help analyze and boost your SEO scores. These applications suggest new keywords and offer tips to improve on-page SEO. They can even show you how your site compares to your competitors.
Interested in learning more about incorporating automation into your digital marketing plan? Dreamscape can help. Contact us at 888.307.7304 to schedule your strategy session.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in July 2022 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.