Weeks back, we had committed to publishing a digital marketing checklist for dentists. And here, we fulfil our promise. In one of our previous blogs, we have shed a light on the most anticipated digital marketing trends in the healthcare industry to watch for in 2018. This blog will open your eyes in doing dental digital marketing in a correct and organised way.
Dentistry is a dynamic world. More and more dentists are joining the ranks of corporate dentistry. According to research, the number of applicants to dental school has impacted dental school enrollment appreciably for the past half-century.
In all, dentists are growing in huge numbers across the globe. Naturally, when there are more numbers of service providers, the intensity of competition would be high.
Are you a private practice owner of a dental clinic who is tired of competing with corporate dentistry?
Read on how to survive in this intense dental digital marketing competition and beat your competitors. And, don’t forget to access your dental digital marketing checklist!
The tactic of carrying out digital marketing activities is almost similar to any business. The only important thing to note is the buyer persona of the business in the question. Here, we are specifically talking about dentistry. What do all dentists need to survive? Patients – right? To get a pool of patients, practitioners need to have a good online presence and reputation in the market.
All these aspects are well-taken care by a correct approach towards digital marketing. The more precisely we can say dental digital marketing.
Elements of dental digital marketing
The dentists who are little aware of online marketing would be well versed with the basic terminologies like online presence, website traffic, search engine optimisation, and social media marketing. Anyways, there is no need to go to the deepest level. This knowledge is enough to strengthen your marketing efforts.
We will quickly give you a brief of what exactly dental digital marketing requires and how is it being carried out.
1. Website designing and development
To build your online presence is a must. This can be done better with the help of your own customised website. If you own your dental clinic website, you will be in a good position to reflect your philosophy on patient care and what experience your patients can expect from your dental clinic.
2. Search engine optimization
Once you have your website, the real fun starts. Did you know: 70% of patients search for new dentists online?
Promotion of your website, both organically and inorganically, is must in the initial phase. Later on, you can rely more on organic marketing and lessen your paid marketing budgets. Optimise your website, it’s content and images to make search engine friendly. The set of such activities is called search engine optimization.
3. Social media marketing
One of the most effective ways to market dental services is social media marketing. Almost all people have one or more social profiles and they stay active on it. Take the most possible advantage of this fact. Establish your social media presence and interact with your targeted audience. Do not sell anything directly on social media. Rather use your social networks to respond to patients’ queries, share dental hygiene tips, respond to inquiries and expand your network.
4. Content marketing
Content is the central part of any sort of dental digital marketing activities. Create a content with which your targeted patients can connect with. Share your content in your social networks.
QL Tech Tip: good and targeted content acts as an efficient salesperson.
A dentist in his network can be proved as an expert on orthodontics if he wants to be. This can be done by writing enough blogs and articles on ‘orthodontics’ and sharing it in front of the right audience.
5. Paid marketing
Paid marketing helps – period! We did not mean that you should empty your pockets in the hunt of patients. But, logically done paid marketing can boost your website traffic, generate leads and increase conversions. Overall, it results in a great ROI. Be it Facebook marketing or Google Adwords, you can spread your presence quickly and offer your services to the patients who are actively looking for it.
High performing keywords also help in correcting your organic promotions.
Last but not the least and very important thing is – online reputation management (ORM). ORM is the practice of attempting to shape public perception of a person or organization by influencing online information about that person or the entity. It works towards bridging the gap between how a dental clinic sees itself and how others see it. ORM monitors the reputation on the internet by handling and addressing content that can have a potential negative impact on the reputation or the status of a particular person, brand, or an organization.
Here comes treasure for you…!
A lot of talk on what to do in dental digital marketing is over. Let’s help you guide on how to do it. Access this dental digital marketing checklist and ensure that all activities are going in the right direction with the right efforts.
Once you read your checklist, do not forget to share it. Also, drop your takeaways in the comments box. We’d love to hear from you.
Note: Since the checklist content is thorough, we have created a Google file for your easy access.
Social media marketing is the course of gaining website traffic or catching the attention of your target audience through social media sites. Social media is a powerful and influential place. If you follow the right tactics, you can not only earn engagement and increase followers but also generate leads and grow your revenue.
QL Tech Tip: If you devise your social media marketing strategy by keeping the social media trends in centric, you will surely come up with a winning strategy.
Social media marketing provides strong support to your advanced SEO efforts in increasing website traffic and boosting brand awareness.
In this blog, we will take you through the most anticipated FIVE social media marketing trends for the year 2018. In addition, this blog also comprehensively covers social media marketing tips and tricks on how to succeed in your digital marketing campaigns.
Social Media Marketing Trends and Tips
Peep into the upcoming trends that will be your secret sauce to social media marketing success
1. More preference to personalization
Social media is a crowded place. A lot many users post their content on lot many social media advertising platforms. It is, hence, a challenge for marketers to get noticed prominently. Here, personalization acts as a saviour.
Personalization helps to reach the correct audience and track their buying behaviour based on their search preferences. You can use social media marketing tools which allow you to incorporate personalized targeting feature. Post your content on social media in front of your high potential customers.
2. More attention to visual marketing
By 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 79% of all consumer Internet traffic
Approximately 80% of the consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. Video content is on its peak and it is not going anywhere soon. It emphasizes the need and upcoming trend of visual marketing.
On the other hand, live streaming versions are on spree. Be it Twitter Periscope, Facebook Live, Instagram Story, video sharing features of DubSmash and others, live feeds are getting way popular. Such videos can engage with your audience very well.
All you need here is powerful graphics which can fascinate your viewers.
If you rely on a traditional way of social media advertising, your brand will hardly survive in the highly intensified competition. Audience nowadays is more intelligent and aware of what they want, and probably from where.
Based on research, native ads are expected to reach more than $21 billion by 2018.
Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. Along with the growing importance of native ads, native content will also grow.
Brands want their native advertising to look as similar as possible to the third-party site’s content.
4. More admiration of brand sponsorship by marketers
Brands are looking for various alternate means to reach their target markets. This is because traditional advertisements have reached their saturation level. This will shift the focus of marketers towards brand sponsorship, also known as advocate marketing.
QL Tech Tip: Popular brand advocacy tools are LinkedIn elevate, Klout, Ambassador, and Influitive.Most B2B marketers (89%) agree that customer testimonials are among the most effective content marketing tactics, and 88% cite case studies as well. www.marketingprofs.com
Brands will make efforts to activate micro-influencers such as employees, customers, partners, and others.
5. More focus on Marketing Automation
If you are in digital marketing, to sustain the intense competition, marketing automation is a must for you. The future of social media marketing in 2018 is hyper-focused on the context. To create these contextual experiences for users, social media marketers must realize the need for automation tools, especially marketing automation tools.
According to Marketo, 91% of users believe that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels.
Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Nucleus Research
Marketing automation will see an upward trend in the year 2018. Automation tools can help you in lead management, conversions, retention and feedback as well as provide insights for evaluation and future planning. The main purpose of using automation tools is to automate tasks that are monotonous and don’t require personal attention.
You need to formulate your social media marketing strategy by keeping these anticipated trends in the notice. If you are wondering how to do social media marketing, we have come up with social media tips and tricks.
Adhere to these top 10 social media marketing tips and tricks and maximize your ROI on social media
1. Formulate social media marketing policy
For being an active and influential social media marketer, you need to formulate your social media marketing policy.
QL Tech Tip: Create a plan strategy document (PSD) for all possible media, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus, and others.
Your PSD should precisely sketch the way of how to accomplish your goals. You can incorporate your content plan, scheduling of posts, target audience, etc under this document. Further, your policy should also include action points for the plan. All your efforts should be in line with your buyer persona.
2. Follow the action plan and monitor your activities
Only PSD will not help to boost your social media marketing, all you need is discipline and consistency. Whether you use one social media channel or multiple, you should use a social media management system. This will help you schedule your posts, know your analytics, and manage your repetitive tasks in a timely manner.
Once you know your best time to post, you can then use a tool like Buffer, Post Planner or Sprout Social – all these are excellent social media management tools. Usage of these tools can help you plan or schedule your posts at specific intervals. Such tools also help in spreading scheduled posts out to publish throughout the day and engagement time. Moreover, its analytics also provide a social media audit report. This report provides you with enough insights on the likes, shares, impression and engagement of your posts.
Most of the digital marketers make a mistake here. Once they share their blog or any business update, they keep waiting for someone to “like”, “comment”, “share”, or “retweet”.
Let’s be practical and accept that every person in the industry would be following a lot many people. Even after a refreshing feed for every five minutes, there are chances that your content gets lost and may not appear in the top of the feed. That’s why repost your posts. Schedule your posts wisely.QL Tech Tip: You can try out varied versions of your titles and images/ GIFs for the same blog post. It really helps!
4. Try A/B Testing for Ads
Among all social media networks, Facebook advertisements are the most popular. And this popularity is going to remain as is in the year 2018 too.
Now the question is how to ensure that your Facebook campaigns are up to the mark? Well, Facebook Ads A/B testing is the most effective way to successful campaigns. Its targeting options are robust.
Facebook will display your ad to the right audience only. A perfect ad can magically boost your ROI and radically increase the reach of your posts. To increase the likelihoods of your social media success, analyze the performance of your ads.
Pay special attention to your social media content. It is the online face of your brand. Keep it authentic, non-plagiarized, relevant and updated. Your images, links, and titles should be fresh, engaging, and intriguing for your readers.
A tool we found to be very nifty when it comes to posting evergreen content is Tailwind.
Use visual content as much as possible. Approximately 64% of the consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. As mentioned above, video content is at its peak and it is not going anywhere soon.
6. User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is the most trusted content by the users. It has more weight age than brand content. Your social media marketing activities should encourage your fans and followers to create such content.
The best example of UGC campaign was embarked by Coca-Cola on Instagram. They had used hashtag #ShareACoke and it has generated tons of UGC. All you need to do is create a buzz for your brand through various quizzes, contests, chats, puzzles or other tactics. Leverage the power of hashtags. Create unique hashtag for your brand.
Don’t just create content when it is time to post. Instead, prepare your social media content bank. Based on the recent trends and updates, you can make quality amendments in your content bank.QL Tech Tip: Create your content bank now, if you haven’t yet.
It should include blogs, articles, info graphs, tutorials, webinars, videos, eBooks, cheat sheets, templates, reports, case studies and others.
8. Make the most use of visual content
Did you know 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual? It taps into the intuitive psyche of your audience and motivates them to discover more about your brand.
Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than the text.
3M Corporation
Visual content has the ability to present complex information in a quick and clear manner. Images, info graphs, videos, memes, presentations, and screenshots are some of the types of visual content. Visual content is easy to understand and handy to share. Your visual content will get more shares as compared to your textual content.
9. Explore the benefits of contests and promotions
People on social media love to interact. They enjoy participating in quizzes, contests and polls. Social media is a beautiful place for engagement. Try to get the attention by vote contest, photo contest, caption contest, and others to promote your brand.
If you promote any special offer, include discounts for your audience. It is an exceptional way to offer value through your social media channels and award people an incentive to keep on following you.
10. Keep an eye on your competitors
Sarcastic but true, competitors are real motivators. You should keep an eye on what and how they are doing on social media platforms. Notice their way of engagement, what they post, when they post, what is unique about them, etc. This will help you frame your marketing strategy in a much better and healthier way.
QL Tech Tip: Following your competitors does not mean that copy what they are doing. But it means to understand what is right and follow the best industry practices.
11. Stay updated with the industry trends
Last but not least; stay updated with what’s going on in the industry you serve. Industry trends can significantly impact your business and marketing strategy. If you identify the market trends early enough then it is easier to plan for changes. You can grow your business successfully. The best way is to subscribe to social media blogs to keep you aware of recent news, amendments, and advancements.
Conclusion
Social media is gaining huge traction for digital marketing. All you need to know about powerful and effective social media marketing is wrapped up in this blog, including trends, tips, tricks and strategies for social media agencies. Keep the latest and upcoming social media trends into notice and accordingly devise your social media marketing strategy.
Get started now with social media marketing that results in success to reach and engage your target market.
