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November 10, 2015

Marketing Tips for Dentists and Orthodontists

Marketing Tips for our Favorite Teeth Techs

Competition among dentists and orthodontists in Denver is becoming fiercer in many communities. New offices are popping up all the time and every dentist needs a steady flow of new patients in order to replace patients moving out of the area and to be able to grow their practice.

As is the case with most other professionals with stiff competition, it’s often the operation with the best marketing programs that draws the most attention, gets the most leads, and generates the most business.

You worked hard to be able to provide great services. Now put some thought and effort into telling people about yourself and your practice so you can do the most good for the most people.

To help you in your efforts, here are our top marketing tips for our favorite tooth technicians.

Who in the world are you?

The internet knows something about everyone. Take a minute to Google yourself. What did you find? Do you see a link to your dental or orthodontic website? Are you being called the “Butcher of Bicuspids?” Research and look for patient reviews that already exist. And yes, they probably do already exist. What you find out there will greatly affect your strategy going forward.

Develop a plan

Don’t just throw money at the problem. Marketing without a plan will lead you nowhere. Develop a budget and a realistic set of offers and objectives that will set your dental or orthodontic practice apart from your competitors. Then put together a calendar of activities to support these initiatives. You’re good at being a dentist or orthodontist. Consider hiring a marketing agency whose job it is to help you market your business.

Be creative

You’re in the first impression business. You work on people’s smiles. Now it’s time to work on yours. Get yourself some graphic design and copywriting services to produce effective and compelling print, direct mail and digital materials that make you not only look good, but make you stand out in the crowded field. The more you stand out, the more you will be noticed.

Go digital

Direct mail is still a key marketing element for dental offices. It works really well. But it’s not the only thing that works. We live in a connected world. A clean and responsive website is critical, and email marketing, online appointments, and social media marketing are needed to round out a modern dental or orthodontic marketing plan. Hire a website design specialist and build social media channels. Connect them all and make sure the look is consistent with your other marketing materials.

Be social and engage

Simply broadcasting your message and asking for customers doesn’t work. You need to get your audience involved. Master a 360 Degree social media marketing program by engaging, asking questions, listening, and commenting. Learn what patients and others say about you, share, and reply to reviews! Produce content that makes your audience think about their needs and allows them to engage and share their thoughts. Spread the word and build an audience.

Calls-to-Action

Marketing is nothing if it doesn’t inspire people to contact your office. One of the biggest mistakes dental offices make with their marketing is there is simply no “call to action,” nothing telling the audience to pick up the phone or click on a website to make an appointment. Whatever you do, and whatever marketing materials you produce, make sure you include “calls to action.” Believe it or not, a simple “What are you waiting for, call us today for a free consultation,” with a phone number goes a long way. It might seem obvious, but your audience is waiting for you to tell them what to do.

Thinking of improving your marketing? Click here to learn more. Set up a free, 15 minute conversation with one of our marketing experts to talk about ideas that will help you remain competitive in today’s market.

Categories : BRANDING, INTERNET MARKETING, Marketing, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY

Tags : dentists, marketing tips, marketing tips for dentists, orthodontists

Posted by DBC Digital on

March 31, 2015

Is Your Marketing Message Getting Lost?

Do you ever feel that your marketing message is somehow disconnected from your marketing activities? You know what your value proposition is, but when it comes to making it work for you across the web and in social media, something is getting lost.

Here are some important action steps to take to ensure your unique message is getting through:

SEO

Effectively bringing your marketing message in to your SEO efforts means expanding your keyword targeting to include more than just your primary keywords. Your goal should be to turn your tagline or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) into context-building factors that will increase your visibility.

For instance you (or your website manager) should be sure to:

Add a “value proposition page” the same way you would add a mission, vision, and “about us” page. Of course, you don’t need to call it a value proposition page, but including a page that is called something like: “What Makes Us Different” will ensure a clear distinction between you and your competitors.
Use unique Meta descriptions in each of your webpages to ensure that they “talk” to your audience in search engines. (Meta descriptions are those short sentences that are displayed when the search engines show your website listing.) Make sure your descriptions describe why you are better.
Use Title tags in each of your major web pages (like your home page), and don’t just list your keywords but instead highlight your USP or tagline, like “Connecting Realtors, Agents, and Homebuyers, Hassle-free.“
Use “Alt” attributes in images, videos, and other webpage elements that search engine bots can’t read, and also ensure that the file names you use for these images are descriptive and relevant.
Use context building keywords as anchors, preferably Latent Semantic Indexing phrases. For real estate, try “home market,” “real estate agents,” and other similar phrases.
Include branding messages in every webpage in a uniform fashion; but don’t force them. You don’t want to sacrifice readability. Add a tagline such as “Connecting Realtors, Agents, and Homebuyers, Hassle-free” in the template of every webpage, always in the same position, just like a shopping cart button.

In addition, consider including press releases and other promotional blog posts in your blogging calendar with the sole purpose of reinforcing your brand and proving your value proposition.

Email Marketing

Email continues to play a central role in marketing as a powerful lead-nurturing tool that focuses on expertise and relevance to your reader. If you own a CPA firm for example, then:

Show off your core competencies by sending emails that offer tips, tricks, or expert advice. Include personalized ROI calculators or in-depth accounting advice that the subscriber will be interested in.
Send only relevant email by ensuring you have as much information about your subscriber as possible. You can include a small part of a lead capture form to ask what your reader is interested in or in what areas of accounting they need help with. Take their answers into consideration when planning your email campaigns. Also, triggered emails (drip campaigns) are an excellent way of staying in touch with your clients and prospects and we highly recommended them.
Highlight both your expertise and relevance when sending emails when focused on calling your readers to take action, such as downloading material, visiting a blog post, or setting up a consultation schedule.

Social Media

If the key to email in internet marketing is expertise and relevance, the focus when it comes to social media is brand “persona” and engagement. Let’s say you own a law firm and you want to increase your presence in social media. You should:

Effectively communicate your brand persona to your social crowd. Most law firms are seen as more formal institutions, so for the most part you should portray this approach in your brand persona: an advisor who is always available to give meaningful advice. Your brand persona ties in to your value proposition, so be clear about your brand and how you want to portray it.
When possible, be open and ready to give advice in your area of expertise. Use your social platforms as open discussion areas and turn the conversations into calls-to-action for further counsel as a service. It’s an excellent way to drive social engagement since your fans and followers will appreciate your expertise.
Use social engagement as a means to avoid estranging your audience. Since attorneys deal with legal conflicts and issues, many people will view your law firm as a third party trying to settle their legal issues for them. What you want them to see instead is an adviser and partner they can rely on, and social media can help you with that.

In summary, there are a number of ways you can get your message out to your best prospects. Use the suggestions above to help you get a bigger share of your market.

Categories : BLOGGING, BRANDING, Content Creation, MESSAGING AND DESIGN, SEO, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Tags : marketing message, SEO

Posted by DBC Digital on

February 23, 2015

No time for Social Media Business Marketing? Think again.

So you’re a busy business owner or inbound marketing professional?

Are you using that as an excuse to skip social media marketing?

You may have heard that maintaining accounts, creating content and posting on a regular basis is time-consuming and difficult. Well, the fact is—it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.

Use these tips for more efficient marketing with social media, and you’ll see it’s easier than you may think to make social media work for you:

Request user-generated content

Your fans, connections, groups and followers are a great source of content. Since content creation is a major part of the time spent on social media marketing, soliciting content from others makes the job a whole lot easier. Not only that—it offers readers different perspectives and the expertise of a wider range of people.

Ask those connected to you on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn to contribute guest blogs to your site. Are any of them professional writers? Hire them to write posts and tweets. Start discussions. This is all user-generated content that populates your accounts and attracts attention—with very little effort on your part.

Crowdsource

Social media is one of the best crowdsourcing tools out there, so use your accounts to solicit ideas and solutions from your fans and followers. Get discussions going and ask for opinions. Encourage them to send you links to helpful resources. Most people are happy to do the work for you, provided they get to participate—and maybe get the chance to win a promotional offer?

Repurpose Material for Your Social Media Marketing

Inbound marketing pros have heard this one before. Repurposing involves taking content already created once, and then repackaging it into different forms for your audience. It’s a smart way to squeeze more out of your valuable content and spend less time on the content creation process, to boot.

For example, several blog posts could be combined into a “white paper” and linked to your social media accounts. Send your followers to a call-to-action that allows them to opt-in to an email list to access the white paper. Voila! For the time it took to write a few blog posts, you have a white paper downloaded by (perhaps) hundreds of social media fans and followers—and your subscriber list just got a big shot in the arm, as well.

Link Your Social Media accounts

Linking your social media accounts gives you the ability to have all content post automatically to all of them. This saves a lot of time over manually posting separately to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Along these lines, don’t forget that you can cross-pollinate with social media, to get maximum exposure for your content for minimum effort. An example of this would be to take a video you posted to YouTube and re-post it on your Facebook page, and/or link to it on Twitter.

Use images

Don’t forget—images are “content” if labeled properly, and they are powerful. Simply by adding a few compelling images, you can keep text to a minimum and still make a big impact (they don’t say a picture is worth a thousand words for nothing!). So take advantage of this! If you come across images that tell your story and reinforce your point, post them—and frequently. Interesting images always have people coming back for more, and it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to share them.

A note regarding images: Search engines for the most part can’t “read” images, so be sure to make the file name of the image descriptive of the topic you are writing about. If you are familiar with alt-tags, be sure to use them to detail the image’s topic as well. This will ensure you are also receiving credit from Google for your images.

Whether you’re new to inbound and social media marketing or not, try these tips for more efficient social media marketing. You’ll see how easily social media can fit into your schedule. It can be fun, rewarding and profitable—if you follow the tips above.

Categories : Content Creation, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Tags : social media for business, social media marketing, social media tips

Posted by Plumb Marketing on

January 29, 2015

Big Business Marketing on a Small Business Budget

In business marketing, size isn’t the only factor to success. In fact, it doesn’t matter how good your products or services are if nobody knows about them.

Thus, if you own a small business, effective business marketing is essential to your success.

However, when your budget for marketing is small, creating and implementing a solid marketing strategy can be challenging.

Below are some tips to help you develop a big business marketing strategy on a small budget.

1. Use social media for business marketing.

Social media can reach a large audience. The number of people with active social media profiles continues to grow, and many of these prospects use their profiles to interact with their favorite brands.

Fortunately, social media is a relatively inexpensive marketing channel, so even small businesses can afford to participate.

Your business marketing may benefit from a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram and/or Pinterest. However, if you are new to the social media scene, start small and build your presence gradually for the best results. Here’s a previous post from us on how to get started with Social Media Marketing.

2. Build a business website.

The majority of your prospects are going to check out your website before contacting you. Creating a website for your business gives you credibility and allows you to reach out to a larger group of prospects and customers. Depending on your needs and ultimate goals, you can also use your business to increase sales by allowing customers and clients to make purchases online.

To get the most out of your website, stick with simple navigation and a clean, polished appearance so that visitors won’t feel overwhelmed when they try to find the information they need.

3. Incorporate traditional business marketing.

While many businesses are now focusing on building an online presence, traditional marketing methods can still be effective. For instance, explore various traditional marketing techniques such as direct mail campaigns to a targeted list and consider printed ads in strategic publications.

Be sure to continuously monitor the results and returns on these strategies to ensure that they are bringing in a justifiable amount of revenue. If you discover that one or more strategies aren’t pulling their weight, move some of your budget over to those areas that are performing better.

4. Keep Your Marketing Connected.

Regardless of which business marketing strategies you decide to employ, you can save money and increase the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts by incorporating your strategies into a comprehensive marketing plan. All strategies should promote a consistent brand image, and customers who connect with you via one marketing channel should be able to recognize your brand and transition to the other platforms easily.

For example, if you send direct mail to consumers, include your company’s colors, design cues and web address and/or social media information on the mailer. Likewise, your website and each of your social media profiles should include links to your other online marketing channels.

5. Bring in a marketing consultant if you need help

Although it may seem counter-intuitive to hire a third party when you are trying to keep costs down, marketing consultants can often boost revenues and help you be much more efficient. This can end up saving more than enough to pay for themselves in time.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, a marketing consultant can help you decide which marketing strategies will provide the best return on investment.

Creating a strong marketing campaign with a meager amount of money can be challenging, but it is far from impossible. By following these tips, you can help your business grow without going over budget.

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Posted by DBC Digital on

January 15, 2015

Marketing Strategies – Six Simple Tips to Leverage Your Old Blog Posts

Brands and business leaders spend a great deal of time and energy developing and promoting new blog posts. Although this is an essential activity and an important use of resources, creating new posts can also take up a substantial part of your limited time and keep you from posting anything at all.

When leveraged properly, re-promoting some of your previous blog posts can bring in new traffic, engage consumers and help your audience grow. As marketing strategies go, this rates as “easy but effective”. Here are some tips and strategies you can use to pull these posts off the shelf and put them back to work for your brand.

1. Choose your best posts.

Promoting posts that flopped the first time will get you nowhere. Although these posts may continue to draw in a small amount of traffic, focus your attention on those blogs that were most popular with readers in the past.

2. Make sure the content is still relevant.

Your post from last Valentine’s Day may have drawn in record numbers of readers at the time, but promoting it at Christmas may not be the best plan. Before you begin promoting any older post, make sure that its content is still relevant and useful for your audience.

3. Use social media.

One of the easiest ways to direct readers’ attention to your previous posts is to share these posts on various social media websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other channels your brand utilizes. Each time you share a post, be sure to entice readers with a teaser or short explanation of why the post is relevant.

4. Include internal links in new posts.

Another excellent way to direct readers to your older blog posts is to link back to them from within your newer entries. When using this strategy, it’s important to link only to older entries that are relevant to your current post. Likewise, don’t include too many backlinks , as this can overwhelm your readers.

5. Don’t re-date old posts.

Linking back to previous posts is fine, but pretending they are new posts isn’t a good idea. Even if you change the date on the posts, at least some of your readers are sure to recognize that they have seen the content before. This makes your brand appear dishonest, which can drive your readers away.

6. Don’t go overboard.

Although referring readers to old posts can be a useful strategy for your brand, it can be overdone. If you share or link back to older posts too frequently, your readers may think that your brand is out of new ideas or has become lazy. Instead, spread your links to older posts throughout your newer content.

As you put these ideas into practice, pay careful attention to the results. Evaluate the number of views your older entries are receiving before and after you promote them in order to measure the success of your efforts. This will help you determine which promotion methods are most effective, as well as which old posts are most likely to draw new readers.

For more about blogging and other Marketing Strategies – subscribe to our blog today!

Categories : BLOGGING, BRANDING, Content Creation, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY

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