According to a range of data sets, between 60% and 90% of sales/services (depending on the market) are planned before visiting a shop or establishment. This means that people search for information online. This is referred to as the zero moment of truth – when your potential client finds your advertising, reads it and, hopefully, keeps it in mind. Fighting for your client begins at this zero moment of truth.
Ways to attract patients online
There are multiple ways of attracting clients online. Let's take a look at the five most popular ways:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - By publishing content topics that your prospects are looking for, it allows you to create a feeling that the customer made their independent choice instead of following an advertisement. On the plus side: good SEO will provide stable long-term organic results.
- Contextual advertising - Contextual advertising such as Google AdWords – provide the paid-for service that shows your ads to the customers searching for the service in question online. On the down side: the significant cost of popular queries due to high competition as dentals clinics want to be in the top search results for the most common searches. Using low-frequency queries is a promising technique.
- Reputation management - Clients value feedback from other patients, the clinic's working style. Positive info background is a great way to gain user trust. Note that whereas clients’ feedback published on your website can be chosen selectively, those posted by your patients freely on Google Business or Facebook Business Page have to be tracked to make sure that your reputation isn’t damaged.
- Social media accounts - A must-have of a modern clinic is the social media accounts. You can inform your patients and engage in direct communication. (add here a link to the social media post)
- Media ads - These are banners on the industry sites. On the downside: it is usually costly and hard to forecast return on investment (ROI).
Which information should your website contain?
As described earlier, relevant professional content can help you to attract visitors to your website either organically or via paid promotion. In any case, once visitors arrive at your website, it’s highly important to provide them with the information they are typically looking for. Remember, if viable information is not available on your website, visitors will look for it somewhere else…
This should include but not limited to:
- Price list of your services
- Service description including level of expertise and years of experience
- Information about your doctors and their photos
- Information about the materials/tools/implants used
- Photographs of dental offices, before and after pictures, photos of equipment, units and constructions
- FAQs
- Location and details for all means of transportation to reach your clinic
What actions are required to keep your website attractive
Fortunately, there are several platforms available on the market, such as Wix and Squarespace that allow non-tech individuals to easily set up a nice website with no coding knowledge or past experience in website development. At the same time, it is highly important to maintain and improve it constantly.
For that purpose you should consider the following:
- Monitor other sources regularly to make sure you are ahead or in line with the competition.
- Structure the site according to the rules of friendly interface.
- Integrate user-friendly services such as callback request forms, online consultations and online appointment taking.
- Pay attention to the number of clicks and visits on your website – you should look for positive growth. This is a bit of an advanced operation but today, platforms as those mentioned above provide a relatively simple interface that allows you to see how much time visitors spend on your page for example. This will let you understand if your SEO contractor's work is efficient.
To summarize, with digital assets online it’s not always a matter of quantity but rather of quality and relevancy. Establish your digital presence where your audience expects to find you but also where you feel more comfortable with and can provide you with the most value to your business.
