In the world of digital marketing, it’s just not enough anymore to only have a modern, responsive site. At a minimum, your site needs to be easy to navigate and click around on. But if you want to win at digital marketing with your dental practice, then it’s time to learn how to engage your patients effectively! What does keeping your patients engaged look like? It means that you must have engagement objects on your site, that not only keep them occupied and engaged, but also happy with your practice and level of customer service. So how do you truly keep patients engaged with your site and dental practice?
Self Tests
Using a self-test like a smile evaluation is another great opportunity to engage your patients. With just a few simple questions, your patients will have something to bring up at their next appointment, which is a valuable use of time. For potential patients, a smile evaluation can be the thing that finally makes them either pick up the phone for an appointment, or book an appointment online (more about that later). It often takes an action or reason to bring someone through the door to your dental practice. Sometimes it’s as simple as they need a cleaning and are looking for a new dentist. But other times, it may be a cosmetic issue that is bothering them, but they haven’t decided to deal with yet. With self-tests, patients are kept engaged, and get answers quickly. You get their contact information, ensuring contact is initiated and they are converted from lead to patient.
Online Scheduler
MDProspects
When you receive a prospective lead, how are you making sure they stay warm, and of course, engaged? If your answer involves an Excel spreadsheet, it’s time to find a new way of keeping organized! You may not realize it, but Excel spreadsheets are often full of duplicate content, and are likely to cost you your dental leads, rather than increase them. The easiest solution: investing in software with an online scheduler built right in, like MDProspects. Online schedulers allow your patients and leads to schedule appointments with you, without ever having to deal with the stress that comes with picking up the phone. This means that your potential leads end up coming directly to you, when it’s most convenient for them.
After office hours, online schedulers are great because that’s the time when most people are on their phones after work. During a typical work day, most of your leads are probably at work, making it impossible for them to call and schedule an appointment with you. Imagine getting more leads, simply because you are giving your patients the option to schedule on their own time. After all, it’s been shown that having an online scheduler can lead to an increase in leads! We’ve got the data to back it up: “In a 2015 study on 13,000 appointment requests from 182 medical websites, researchers found that 34% of the appointments booked online were scheduled while the office was closed.”
Just think about what you could do with not only more leads, but an increase in appointments that were being scheduled.
Online scheduling is only one small part of what MDProspects can do. MDProspects can also be used as a lead nurturer. Being a lead nurturer means that it will consistently keep your leads warm by sending leads inviting content throughout the period that they are classified as a lead. If you haven’t realized it yet, to convert a lead into a customer, it must consist of more than just calling them once a year, and keeping your fingers crossed that they’ll pick you to be their dental provider. MDProspects lets you take absolute control of the lead process, which allows them to move through the lead system. When talking about online scheduling, many dental practices are afraid that there will be an increase in the number of no-shows. With MDProspects, you can send out automated appointment reminders through email and text messages. These messages go straight to the patient and are the primary way to prevent no-shows.
Videos
Look at a well-designed website, and one of the first things you’ll see is that they are anything but boring! One of the best ways to keep your leads engaged is to have video be a key component on your site. The kinds of videos that you can use can be varied, including local news segments that feature your dental practice, live video of your practice completing the Mannequin Challenge together, or in depth information about dental issues or procedures. When the topic of engagement comes up, it’s been shown that entertainment is key, rather than having to read a long article or blog post. This means that videos are one of the best ways to engage your patients, which means patients that feel connected to your practice.
The use of videos and media goes beyond just websites. There are several different ways that you can take advantage of videos by using social media, like Facebook. You can put video ads on Facebook, by either promoting posts, or using Facebook Live. No matter which avenue you go down, video consistently performs remarkably well on Facebook. A written status can only get you so far, so it’s important to remember to mix it up when you’re posting on Facebook to get a higher reach. Although photos perform excellently on Facebook, video is really the leading way to keep your followers and patients engaged. When Facebook video ads are running in people’s newsfeeds, they play automatically, leaving it up to the person watching if they want to continue. Running video Facebook ads also allows you to target who you want to see your content, which gives you a larger pool of people to choose from. All content has the ability to go viral, but videos are much more likely to, simply because of the ease of share-ability that they lend to social media. You never know who could end up seeing your videos five years from now!
In a digital age, it is crucial to know how to be appealing to everyone who sees your content. Engagement objects like self-tests, online schedulers, and video are some fantastic ways to stand out in a sea of competitors! It’s engagement time, are you ready?