Getting your dental services business online is about connecting with potential patients. But gone are the days of having a website merely to publish your office address and phone number, and expecting new patients will find you! These days most dental offices treat their website effectively as another sales and service channel, undertaking business development and patient support 24 hours a day. A professional web site can provide significant benefits in helping you market your business and service your patients.
Basic ways your web site can support your marketing activities
Today you can use your web site as the center of your overall marketing activity. Your web site can help you expand your messages to potential patients, especially if the services you offer are complex and not easily explained in a short advertisement. There is a limited amount of information that can be included a radio, TV or print advertisement and these mediums can be very expensive. However, if you include your practice's domain name in a small advertisement you can direct your patients to your web site and guide them through the services you offer in detail. But there are many more ways your website can help you manage and grow your business.
More advanced marketing techniques
With a little imagination, your web site can be a lot more than simply an expanded brochure about your services. If you already offer a printed newsletter, you can offer this online instead, reducing the costs of printing and mailing, while helping the environment too! You can send the newsletter out via e-mail, and then archive previous editions online. By adding a sign-up box on your web site, you can potentially reach out to prospective patients and showcase your expertise by regularly sending them your newsletter.
If you offer a service that can be best explained using audio, video or photographs, you can include links from your e-mail newsletter to multi-media files housed on your site
For example, dentists can showcase their work by displaying "before" and "after" photographs of their patients, and even letting potential patients submit questions online about specific procedures. You can even welcome your patients and potential new patients into your office with a virtual office tour, similar to the virtual home tours posted for homes for sale. This not only provides a high tech image for your practice, but also lets potential patients get a feel for the way your practice operates.
Another way to share your expertise with potential patients is to start a blog about a topic you understand intimately. You can blog about a variety of things, not just related to your practice; for example you can write posts about new trends in dentistry, new services you are offering, case studies about your existing patients, and post reminders about seasonal events such as special offers for particular procedures during quiet times of the year. Search engines like to index blogs because their content is often updated frequently, and other bloggers will often link to a post that they find valuable, which can bring your site lots of inbound links. A well-written blog can give you great credibility in your field.
Creating 24 hour Service
A lot of your staff's time is probably spent answering the same questions over and over again, such as directions to your office, or the services you provide. These are the questions potential patients will ask before they engage your services. Displaying the answers on your Web site and will free up a lot of time for your office staff, and ensure that there are no miscommunications with potential patients.
Forms, forms, forms - many ways to enhance your patients' experience!
By putting a contact/ inquiry form on your site you enable patients to contact you on their own schedule, rather than during regular office hours. This can be very convenient if your patients have a busy schedule.
When your office sets appointments for your patients, you can streamline this activity and make things easier for your patients by setting up an online appointment service. Many patients would rather schedule their appointments online because it gives them the option to look at their calendar rather than potentially juggling with a cell phone and calendar while driving in their car, or having to make appointments while in the office where other people can overhear them. An added benefit is that your web site is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week so, again, patients with busy work schedules don't have to worry about remembering to call during office hours.
By integrating your online calendar with an automatic e-mail service, you can even e-mail a reminder to your patients a couple of days ahead of their appointment. This is more convenient for many patients and saves you the expense of having someone call to confirm your appointments.
If you offer prescription services, you can also make it easier for patients to call in prescription requests or refills, by providing an online form that they can complete and submit ahead of time. This form can generate an e-mail to your front desk or technicians to enable them to prepare the prescription ahead of time, rather than when the patient arrives at the office at the busiest time of the day!
If you are offer non-prescription products for sale in your office, you can even go a step further and offer them for sale through an e-commerce shopping cart. For example, dental offices could sell tooth whitening or specialized mouth-wash products online, to save patients a trip into the office. This could be especially valuable to your patients if your practice is in a remote area where they may have to drive many miles to reach your office.
Another use of online forms could be to qualify patients for a financial service. These types of forms can be very useful for expensive procedures or patients without dental insurance. While you may not be able to provide a quotation automatically online, you can easily create a form that can be sent via e-mail to someone in your practice who can generate the quote and call the potential patient back.
Additionally, forms can be a great way to gather feedback from your patients. You can post forms or online surveys and ask for feedback from your patients. The advantage to this is that you can obtain opinions almost instantaneously, especially if you e-mail your existing patients to ask them to complete the survey. By describing a new or existing service and asking for their ideas, you can gain valuable insight into how to position your service in a fast, economical way. Involving your patients in the development of new services not only makes these services less risky, but also gives your patients a sense of engagement with your firm.
Improve employee effectiveness
A web site is also the fastest, most economical way to disseminate information within your organization. Instead of relying on the haphazard distribution of memos and e-mails, employees can visit their company's Web site at their convenience. You can password protect an employee-only Web site, or intranet, so that sensitive information remains within the practice.
Your web site can also function as the online repository of all of your service and patient information, reducing paper work and filing of patient records. It is fairly easy to create an online content management system to store important documents.
In summary, you should think of your web site as more than just your address on the internet. Your web site can be a valuable tool to increase your firm's productivity and radically improve patient satisfaction.