Dental Marketing Strategies

Dental marketing has changed a lot in the past decade—even in the health sector. Are you still getting enough bang for your promotional buck? By Lucy Robertson

Using the internet as one of our dental marketing strategies our has undoubtedly made our lives easier in the past 15 years, there are nevertheless many dentists who’d secretly like to go back to the simple old days when marketing their practice meant renewing the annual Yellow Pages advertisement and dusting off the signage in the window.

Connecting with potential clients can be as complicated as it is immediate in the modern world, and practitioners need a whole lot more than the local classifieds hotline to effectively market their services.

The steady shift to online communications has brought with it an explosion of new ways to market your business, including some cost-effective and highly measureable alternatives like SEO-optimised websites, blogs, coupons, and online booking systems.

But which methods, if any, are worth the steep learning curve often involved in negotiating the complex world of search engines and outsourcing? And do dentists really need to broaden their reach beyond the immediate neighbourhood with the use of global platforms? SEO expert and director of health website advisor, Wellsites, Carolyn Dean, says the new frontier of online marketing is more than worth it. And, she says, there’s often less involved in the online world than many first expect.

“A lot of dentists come to us because they’ve had patients come into their practice who say they’ve found them online, and these practitioners are alarmed because they didn’t even know they were on the web,” Dean explains.

“And that’s the truth of the online environment today: With traditional advertising methods like the Yellow Pages and White Pages now going online, there’s been a very interesting blurring of old and new technologies, and the net result is that people are finding themselves having an online presence whether they intended to or not.”

Wellsites works with business owners to build their own websites, blogs, Facebook pages and other highly trafficked, SEO-optimised listings. An increasing proportion of the company’s work recently has been for dental practices.

“We find new dentists to the profession want to do everything themselves, so we work with them to target some specific keywords based on what services they want to focus on, and then simply provide an advisory-type service,” Dean says.

“The older guys are usually more resistant to learning about the technology, so they come to us for the whole setup. But interestingly, once they see how easy it is to update their sites, most of them become more active online than they ever imagined.”

Organic Search SEO

No matter what your intentions to begin with, Dean advises there are some simple things to consider about using SEO to attract more patients. “There are basically two areas you can focus on: organic page rankings and paid traffic,” Dean says.

“Organic searches require time and effort in building links, writing blog posts, and creating keyword-rich content. It can sometimes take six months to see results, but once that’s done, it’s permanent, and all you need to do is keep posting at regular intervals to maintain your results.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

“The other form is paid traffic generated with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which offers the same volumes of traffic, but is immediate instead of gradual. Depending on your targeted keywords, it can be very expensive, and the results will only last while you keep advertising—as soon as you stop paying, the traffic stops.”

In this way, Dean compares PPC advertising to the traditional print advertisement, which can be highly effective, but ends up in the bin at the end of the day or month.

Why you need a blog for your dental practice.

Whichever method most suits a particular practitioner, recent research indicates that having some form of blogging platform attached to the practice makes solid business sense.

Google recently revealed that regularly updating a blog (anywhere from once a week to once a month) with relevant content means a website will receive an average of 70 per cent more clicks than a site which is static (that is, those which remain unchanged).

When that 70 per cent directly equates to a potential number of new patients through the door, it makes writing a short post on what’s happening in your practice every week seem like a very profitable exercise.

“While many dentists these days have websites, the reality is that the majority aren’t doing this one little thing, which means you can get an edge over your competitors very quickly and easily in the online space,” Dean says. In the same way, narrowing down your services into a niche market can also speed up online results.

“If you search for ‘Sydney dentist’ online, for example, you are literally competing with seven million other results,” Dean explains. “But narrowing that down to ‘pediatric dentist Sydney CBD’ or ‘cosmetic whitening dentist Blacktown’ means you’re competing with far fewer practices. You’ll be attracting a far more specific kind of client, and you’ll probably end up with more leads at the end of the day.”

Reproduced with the kind permission of  Bite Magazine - www.bitemagazine.com.au

The post Dental Marketing Strategies. What you need to know appeared first on Wellsites UK.

If you know anybody that may be interested we would love to hear from the

The Details

Duration: 6 months

Commitment: 1 day per week (and very flexible on working hours and location)

Location: Chatswood, Sydney, NSW

Remuneration: Volunteer internship

The Company

Wellsites are the specialist in website and graphic design for the health care, medical and dental industry. We are a small a passionate company who care about delivery great products and services to our customers with exceptional service.

The Role

• Help build WordPress websites
• Configure hosting
• Research and play with plugins
• Set up security
• Integrate into social media
• Learn about website design development
• Mobile websites research
• Upload content
• Set up seo & key words
• Theme manipulation
• Shopping carts
• Full training will be provided

Ideal Candidate

• Great communication – verbal and written
• Willingness to learn
• Strong team work skills
• Passionate about technology
• Have a passion to learn about how businesses are using websites / blogs / social media in the real world
• Self starter – we will need to research and try out new technology / plugins and ways of doing things
• Experience of WordPress would be a huge advantage

This opportunity would suit a final year student or freelance junior.

We are looking for someone one day per week ongoing with opportunity for career progression.

We would love to hear from you.

Please submit your resume, cover letter and examples of work you have done to jobs@wellsites.com.au.

Your cover letter should address the following questions:

• What excites you about this role?
• What experience do you have that is relevant to this role?
• What are the skills that you hope to develop in this position?

If this sounds like you, we can’t wait to hear from you.

Due to the high volume of applicants, only successful applicants will be notified.

The post Intern Wanted! appeared first on Wellsites UK.

What Makes a Great Medical and Dental Logo Design

A great medical and dental logo design tells a viewer about whom you are as a professional (or a collective of professionals). Your logo should create brand awareness for your practice, so  that when people see it, they automatically associate the image with your medical or dental business.

Your medical and dental logo design should be :

• Unique
• Adaptable
• Relevant
• Timeless

Great Medical and Dental Logo Design Traits

Your Logo Design Should Be Unique

A good medical logo stands out among the others in your industry. Companies with great logos do not feel obligated to incorporate overly used icons, like an arrow, globe, hand, heart, teeth and the like. Keep in mind that a logo does not necessarily need convey what your company does. For example, the Starbucks logo isn’t a coffee bean, and Apple’s logo isn’t a computer .

Your Logo Design Should Be Adaptable

When creating a medical and dental design, designers evaluate how it looks on different mediums, such as business cards, billboards, magazine advertisements and company letterhead. When reducing the size of a good logo down, you can scale it down to one inch without compromising any of the design details. Furthermore, a great medical and dental logo that is in color also looks good in black and white, for the times that you need to send a fax or make a photocopy.

How Relevant Is Your Logo?

A great medical and dental logo appeals to a company’s target patient or client, and their culture. At the same time, it must also reflect the organization’s values and culture because the logo design expresses the essence of the company. The colors in a great logo design are thoughtfully planned and echo the services that the organization offers. For example, the color red may not be a wise main-color choice for a medical or dental logo if a company advertises a peaceful experience.

Your Logo Should Be Timeless

Familiarity can breed popularity and prosperity. Take the Australian Medical Association’s logo, for example. It’s a simple cross with Asclepius’ staff and winding serpent standing in the vertical part of the T-shape. By keeping a logo simple, a medical or dental company never has to fear that it will go out of style, and can make simple changes to the design as needed.

Summary

The basic act of seeing and understanding a brand is vital. A great medical and dental logo design adds value to a brand, gives it meaning and can bring a sense of satisfaction to a viewer. When an individual looks at an excellent logo, it respects his or her sensibilities and rewards the entrepreneurial venture.

The post Characteristics of Great Medical and Dental Logo Design appeared first on Wellsites UK.

Depending on whom you read or speak to, spinning is the best or worst thing to come along because blogs. Sentences, paragraphs and articles can all be spun.

If you change 1 or two phrases in a phrase then you have a new but recognizable sentence. It will most likely pass the copyright software test. The same applies to paragraphs and even articles. Alter them around enough to get some new kind but comparable content material. Political spinning is a entire different animal.

What is Article Spinning?

Article spinning is a search engine optimization technique by which blog or website owners post a unique version of relevant content on their sites. It works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles, and replacing elements to provide a slightly different perspective on the topic. Many article marketers believe that article spinning helps avoid the feared penalties in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for using duplicate content. If the original articles are plagiarized from other websites or if the original article was used without the copyright owner’s permission, such copyright infringements may result in the writer facing a legal challenge, while writers producing multiple versions of their own original writing need not worry about such things.

Website owners may pay writers to perform spinning manually, rewriting all or parts of articles. Writers also spin their own articles, manually or automatically, allowing them to sell the same articles with slight variations to a number of clients or to use the article for multiple purposes, for example as content and also for article marketing. There are a number of software applications which will automatically replace words or phrases in articles. Automatic rewriting can change the meaning of a sentence through the use of words with similar but subtly different meaning to the original.

Article Spinning Example

For example, the word “picture” could be replaced by the word “image” or “photo.” Thousands of word-for-word combinations are stored in either a text file or database thesaurus to draw from. This ensures that a large percentage of words are different from the original article. Article spinning requires “spintax.” Spintax (or spin syntax) is the list of text, sentences, or synonyms that are embedded into an article. The spinning software then substitutes your synonym choices into the article to create new, unique variations of the base article.

Google and Duplicate Content

Contrary to popular opinion, Google until 2010 did not penalize web sites that have duplicated content on them, but the advances in filtering techniques mean that duplicate content will rarely feature well in SERPS (search engine results pages). In 2010 and 2011, changes to Google’s search algorithm targeting content farms aim to penalize sites containing significant duplicate content.

Source – Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning)

The post Article Spinning – what is it? appeared first on Wellsites UK.

Online marketing for your dental & medical practice can be a daunting task if you have no experience. It is not really that difficult though, you just need a start in the right direction. Here are a few simple tips that will give you a good starting point to your dental and medical online marketing.

Dental & Medical Website Design

Your website is the first point of contact for people looking at your business online. This is your first chance to engage a customer and you need to be sure you are maximizing that first impression. This is not an area you want to “do yourself” if you are not an experienced web designer. Trust us, web design is better left to a professional unless you want people to know you did it yourself, especially when it comes to dental & medical website design. You also need to be sure that your medical and dental website is optimized for web searches. This is another place where it is best to leave it to the experts.

Dental and Medical Blogs

Creating original content online is probably the best way to bring traffic to your site and increase your online presence. By setting your business apart as an industry expert you create demand for your knowledge and give credibility to the services you offer. A blog allows you to post articles and interesting information related to your practice in real time.

We highly recommend that you have your web design professional integrate your blog with your company website. Having this integrated with an e-newsletter services is another great idea.

Social Media

Along with a solid website and a blog you should use social media to increase your dental and medical online presence and marketing efforts. They are free and effective and, if you use them right, are one of the most effective ways to generate online exposure. At a bare minimum your company should have a Facebook and Twitter page to start and once you get comfortable with those you can venture out in to some of the others.

Starting Your Dental and Medical Online Marketing

So where do you get started? Google is a great place. Just type your company name in and see what comes up. Did you find anything? Did you like what you found? Don’t worry, with a little work and proper guidance your online profile can improve and even flourish.

More Information?

Wellsites is the award winning specialist in website solutions, graphic design and online marketing and for health care, dental and medical professionals. Our clients range from single practitioners to hospitals and large health organisations, giving us unrivalled experienced in meeting the unique needs of health businesses like yours.
Contact Wellsites today to see how we can help you with your health care website and graphic design – use our online form or call us on +61 (0)2 9411 1214

The post Successful Dental and Medical Online Marketing appeared first on Wellsites UK.

Dental and Medical Facebook Page Admin Roles

There are now five different roles that your dental and medical Facebook page admins can have. These roles are “Manager,” which has access to everything, followed by “Content Creator,” “Moderator,” “Advertiser” and “Insights Analysts,” which has the least amount of abilities and can only see a page’s statistics.

The table below explains each role:

See Facebook’s help page for more information 

How Can I  Use This For My Dental and Medical Facebook Page?

Why might you do this? A couple of ideas are below.

You could be the practice manager and want to have sole control of updating and commenting on your dental and medical Facebook page. Your practice owners may wish to be able to see the Facebook page statistics but you don’t want them to change the page. You could set them up with the  ’Insight Analyst’ role.

Or perhaps you have a new social media intern who hasn’t quite mastered your dental or medical social media strategy. You   want to get her immersed in your social media presence so she can learn it. Maybe her role as a page administrator is ‘Moderator’ so she can do some social media monitoring, but doesn’t start messing with the page’s apps and status updates.

How To Set Up The Admin Roles

To set these permissions on your own page, go to the top right corner of your screen and hit ‘Manage,’ then select ‘Settings‘ in the drop-down. That will take you to this screen where you can manage all of your Facebook admin roles for your page:

Need More Help With Your Facebook Page?

The post Facebook Admin Roles For Your Dental or Medical Page appeared first on Wellsites UK.

This is a great guide for knowing what all of the main social media sites are and what they all mean for your dental or medical business.

There are some new sites added to the guide this year such as  Instagram, Pinterest and Google+. You may have heard of them but don’t know what they are and what they mean to marketing your dental, health care or medical website.

The infographic is presented below in full. However, if you visit the CMO website the visual can be sorted by customer communication, brand exposure, site traffic and SEO. Somewhat surprisingly, CMO rated Google+ as the top social network in three of these categories, with Twitter securing the number one spot in site traffic.*

Still, this is a useful one-stop summary of the pros and cons of the different social networks, and a fantastic resource for both brands and marketers.

* You can draw your own conclusions from this. From our experience , Facebook leads in site traffic by some distance, and both Twitter and Facebook beat Google+ for customer communication and brand exposure.

(Source: CMO.com.)

The post Social Media Marketing For Your Dental, Health Care or Medical Business appeared first on Wellsites UK.

For many dental practices, brand marketing is a foreign concept, but the reality is, if you’re not branding yourself, you’re being branded by your competition. It’s time to take charge. By Amanda Lohan

Carolyn Dean, director of healthcare website specialist Wellsites, warns that if you are not presenting a strong brand to your patients, you will still be assessed by what you’re not saying. “If you’re not saying ‘we can do this’ and ‘we are the specialists’ then people are going to go to the specialists,” she explains. Branding, however, is more than just a logo. The key, according to Dean, is differentiation—“to be called ‘White Smiles’ or ‘Happy Smiles’ doesn’t really differentiate you. You have to know who you are and who your target market is.”

The first step for any dentist in differentiating a practice is to sit down and work through your strengths. “Everybody has a strength,” says Dean. “Once you’ve got that, then you can articulate it.” Dean is quick to note that this does not mean replicating the sleek styling of a dental spa. In fact in some cases Dean says your differentiator may be, ‘We’re not the dental spa, we’re not doing all this funky weird stuff and we’re not doing teeth whitening’. In playing to your strengths, you may instead say, ‘we are the village dentists, we have been here for 70 years and it’s still Doctor Jones’. “That in itself is the brand,” she says.

To see a dental practice that absolutely knows its niche, one has to only look to Natural Dentistry on Sydney’s North Shore. Natural Dentistry offers natural dental therapies alongside a mix of Eastern and Western complementary health services, and targets people who are looking for a holistic approach to dentistry. The practice is a far cry from the classic clinical look, boasting a meditation room and Zen garden. With a close awareness of their niche, and noticing that most of their business was coming from online, the team at Natural Dentistry decided to cut their print advertising and invest in a renewed online presence. This is true marketing strategy.

Trends in the greater business area often take time to appear in the medical and dental fields. “The majority of small businesses have websites, but the majority of dentists are still a little bit behind the eight ball,” says Dean. Creating an online brand however is far cheaper and simpler than it once was and, if used correctly, can serve multiple functions for the practice. “People tend to think of a website as a brochure which has to look pretty, whereas using it to take work off your administrative staff has a far greater benefit on an ongoing basis,” says Dean.

“If you spend thousands on a site today that looks beautiful but can’t change, then you’re going to be behind again,” she says. The reality is the practice today is not the practice it’s going to be in 12 months’ time. Modular CMS websites allow the practice to add functionality at any time, adapting as the business grows and changes. This added functionality can include such things as newsletters, social media and blogging, but can also include educational videos for clients and online forms that reduce administration costs.

Contact Wellsites today to see how we can help you build your dental brand.

Read the article online 

Reproduced with the kind permission of  Bite Magazine - www.bitemagazine.com.au

The post Dental Branding For Your Practice appeared first on Wellsites UK.

We are celebrating

• how far we have come
• indebted to our amazing customers
• blessed to have an incredible team
• excited about the future!

Thank you everybody for your support so far.

The Wellsites Team xxx

Wellsites Vision

To be recognised as the global leading website design and online marketing provider for the health care, medical and dental industry. Providing solutions that fit with all requirements and budgets

• To have a globally recognised brand
• For health professionals to think of Wellsites first when looking to expand their brand online

Purpose

To provide attractive, purposeful, effective websites that attract new clients and streamline processes for health care, medical and dental businesses • Customer Satisfaction – Exceed the customer’s expectations. • Team Satisfaction – Employees want to come to work and do a good job. • Profitability – Deliver all work and projects on time and within budget

Wellsites Values

1. Quality

• Highest quality of work communication to all clients, partners and team members
• Looking for opportunity to work smarter and to strive for continuous improvement
• Establish Clear Mutually Acceptable Expectations
• Managed Expectations, Consistently Achieved

2. Professionalism

• Respect and courteous communication with clients and team members
• Open, Honest & Timely Communication

3. Profit

• Required for Our Success • Allows for Growth & Investments for Future • Everyone is Responsible for Profitability

4. Team Work

• Respect Each Other
• Take time to celebrate our successes
• Say “Thank You” for a good job done
• You’re Accountable for Your Commitments
• Recognise that every member of both the wellsites team and client team is of equal importance.
• Without everybody working together as a team there is no business and no future

The post Wellsites is 3! appeared first on Wellsites UK.

The new Timeline format has been available for people’s personal Facebook pages for a couple of months. The new  Facebook Timeline will be standard for business pages from the end of the month. We have had a chance to play with the features some and some area really great. We have put together a  list of features that we think you need to be aware of.

Add a cover photo to showcase your brand

You can now create and upload a Timeline cover photo.

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines.

Cover Image Dimensions

By uploading an image or a photo of the exact size at 851px x 315px as your Facebook Timeline cover, you can have complete control over the look of the cover without Facebook messing with the size.

Cover Content

There are strick rules about what your cover image may and may not include.

Covers may not include:

• price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “download it at  yourwebsite.com”;
• contact information such as a website address, email, mailing address, or information that should go in your page’s “about” section;
• references to Facebook features or actions, such as “like” or “share” or an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features; or
• calls to action, such as “get it now” or “tell your friends.”

In other words, Facebook would like your cover photo to illustrate your story in pictures /photographs vs. excessive text.

Contact Wellsites if you need help producing a new Cover Image for your Health Care Businesses Facebook Timeline

Pin your favorite post

You can highlight important posts for up to 7 days at a time. these posts are ‘pinned’ to the top of your page

You can place a post at the top of your Timeline.

To do this – simply hover over a post and click on the star icon if you would like to make it wider or on the pencil icon to place it on the top of your Timeline.

Click photo to enlarge Timeline for Facebook pages photo

Page tabs display at the top under the cover photo

Page tabs are now more prominent and display at the top of the page. We think this will enable page tabs to get more clicks from people who are visiting your page.

You can change the page tab icons

The ability to change a page tab icon on installed apps has been one of the most widely asked questions. You can now easily do this by hovering over the page tab photo and go into edit settings to change the icon photo.

Default landing tabs are gone

You can no longer set a default landing tab. Businesses did this to push people who have not yet liked their page to a branded default landing tab. Fan gates are still active and working though. So in order to push new users to a tab with a fan gate you will need to point your Facebook ads to your tab or link to the specific tab from your web properties.

Page Tabs are now wider

It appears as though page tabs will now allow for 810 pixels width. This will be a huge plus because businesses now have a ton more space from the previous 520 pixels limit.

How Can Timeline For Facebook Pages Help?

First of all the Timeline layout is more appealing than the previous page profile. The large Timeline Cover Image is great for branding and can really help a business page place their branding front and center. The history log within the Timeline can also help companies showcase their history, past news and product releases and showcase their loyalty to their fans.

Want to know more?

Other Articles

Have a read of these great articles

• http://mashable.com/2012/02/29/facebook-timeline-brands-prepare/
• http://www.businessinsider.com/how-businesses-are-responding-to-the-facebook-timeline-2012-3
• http://www.business2community.com/facebook/prep-your-business-page-for-facebook-timeline-5-lessons-learned-from-old-spice-and-other-big-brands-0141456

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