Come on, let’s face it, dental practices don’t have an unlimited marketing budget. So in order to get the most for your marketing dollar, it’s essential that you spend your money only on strategies that will be affordable and effective. Online marketing can be one of the most successful ways of building the size and profitability of your dental practice, but only if you go about it the right way.
What’s Wrong with Your Dental Blog?
When blogging for dentists fails, it’s often because the content reads like sales copy. Most visitors aren’t 
Another common problem among online marketing for dental practices is that the content is not focused enough. The 300 to 500 words in your blog aren’t going to give you enough time to ramble on about just any topic. Visitors want to educate, entertained and informed. If you vary too far from familiar subject matters – such as good oral care, a comparison of oral health products, and so on – you can cause your readers to lose interest. And once they leave your blog, they may never come back.
When readers genuinely engage with a blog, it’s usually because the blog offers a consistent voice. Visitors know what they are looking for and they like it. But in smaller scale businesses such as dental practice, it’s usually not practical for you or a single designated person to write every blog entry. If you want to provide your readers with frequent, fresh content, generally you need to rely on other people, either within your organization or outsources blog writers. This can lead to an inconsistency in the tone and focus of your blog, which can be confusing and off-putting to regular readers.
Another common problem with dental practice online marketing is that content producers set out with the objective of “going viral”. For most local dental practices, this is an unrealistic expectation. Your message generally is too localized and targeted to appeal to Internet users outside your geographic area or genre. On the other hand, it’s also unproductive to produce blog content just for the sake of publishing a blog every day or every week. Both of these approaches can hurt you if visitors feel you are “trying too hard” or “not trying hard enough” with your online marketing.
6 Ways to Improve the Blogging Performance for Your Practice
One things your followers want most is consistency, both in style and in your posting schedule. So if you are going to commit to publishing a blog, you need to make sure it is well written, informative, entertaining, and that it is published according to a reliable schedule.
Here are a few techniques you can use to ensure that your blog is going to be effective and consistent:
1. You Write About Your Speciality
People don’t click on a dentists’ blog because they want to know your political opinions or hear what you have to say about your local sports teams. The content of your blog should meet the expectations of your readers. Generally, that means limiting yourself to information relevant to your dental practice. Before you commit to producing a regular blog, it’s helpful to develop a list of topics that you can refer back to for ideas. You can add additional topics to this list as you think of them. This list can be either active – such as a sequential schedule of specific blogs you want to publish – or in reserve, such as a list of “backup” topics you can write about if you don’t have any original ideas. In either case, these topics should include only those subjects your readers would be interested in as it relates to your dental practice. Maintaining an ongoing list can also help keep your overall content strategy organized and on track.
2. You Have Objectives in Place
Before you write your first blog, spend some time considering what it is you hope to accomplish with your blogging. Like most bloggers, your first priority probably is going to be improving client engagement and building your client base. But these can serve as the starting point for something bigger. They can be used to build a blogging strategy that gives you whatever results you want. And as you encounter problems with your blog, you can look back on these goals to help you clarify the message and image you want to project to your clients.
3. You Have Standards
If you are going to hand your blogging duties over to somebody else, you want to make sure they are creating content that is consistent with the style and standards you want to maintain. These can be as simple as “no bad words” or as complex as defining the exact fonts and point size you want. All of these rules can be compiled into a style guide that outsourced producers or guest bloggers can use as reference when producing content for your blog.
4. You Think Locally
Tailor your content so that it is most appealing to people within your geographic area. While there may be people in other cities reading your blog, it’s not likely that they are going to utilize your dental practice.
5. You Engage With Your Audience
Encourage people to leave comments on your blog and respond to them when they do. Invite them to share your contact on their social media pages so you can expand the scope of your influence. These types of things help build interpersonal relationships which can be effective in getting other people to evangelize for your dental practice.
6. You Measure Performance
It’s important to know what’s working with your blog and what’s not working. Using analytical tools can help you identify opportunities for improvement, as well as letting you “double down” on those elements of your online marketing that are most effective.