I have spoken to many orthodontists, and it’s a very lucrative profession, where investing in marketing can be a huge bump to your practice revenues. With each case being between $5,000-$6,000, and a profit margin around 50%, each new patient brought in from marketing can add 6 figures to your income annually.
Most of the new orthodontic patients coming in are from either a dentist referring, or family and friends. But…with that said, there are substantial amount of people who know their child needs braces, so they get online and search.
Just imagine the number of people that are new to your area. They have recently moved and do not have a dentist, but know their child needs braces. That’s your target market online.
With moms being the decision makers for their children, they are getting online, going to google and typing in their city + orthodontist.
Have you checked that lately for your practice? Are you on the first page? If so, are you high or near the bottom? I ask, because the click through rate changes dramatically from the top of the first page to the bottom. And…if you are on the 2nd page or beyond, forget it.
Mothers are not going beyond the first page!
The orthodontists that are at the top, are implementing SEO strategies. We have helped dozens of dentists and orthodontists achieve top of first page rankings, and seen their revenues sore.
As mentioned above, mothers will spend the needed time online reading reviews of orthodontists before they pick up the phone. Whoever has the best online reputation will get the call.
Do you have a reputation marketing strategy in place? Are you building a 5-star reputation in your city? If not, it’s time to get going if you want to beat out your local orthodontic competitors.
Mothers will head on over to Yelp, as that is a very popular review site. Then they might type in the orthodontists name + review in the search bar to see other review sites.
Because getting braces is not a small investment, they will take the time to do their due diligence.
When mothers get online to look for an orthodontist, they are in research mode. They will do what I mentioned above, plus be looking to get their questions answered. The orthodontist who does this on their website, will get all the calls.
We offer a service we call “content marketing” that entails our top dental writers to produce 4 lengthy, educational articles per month on your website, that then get shared on all the social media channels.
1. You are making it easy for your visitor to consume the information to make an informed decision to call your practice.
2. You are “feeding” google new, fresh, unique and valuable content on a regular basis, and google will reward you with an authority website that will rank high in google for hundreds of terms related to what you offer, which ultimately will get you more visitors, and then patients.
So to recap, it can be very lucrative for you, the orthodontist to implement digital marketing in to your budget. With such a high transaction value per patient, and excellent profit margins, now is the time.
The ball is in your court!
Tags: internet marketing for orthodontists, orthodontic marketing