Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of digital marketing for dental offices. It allows potential patients to find the office easily when they search online, leading to more appointments and a larger patient base. Getting new patients to your website is the first step, the next step is having them call and schedule an appointment. Your front office staff should be asking the right questions to determine where this new patient came from so you can use that information for future marketing efforts. This means that the front desk staff at dental offices need to ask the right questions when patients call for appointments in order to get this valuable data.
Instead of asking “How did you hear about our office?” you should be asking:
“Who can we thank for your referral?”
Most people will hear about an office and then Google the practice to find out more about it. This means that some people may answer the question of how they heard about the office with “I heard about you through the internet.”
Clicks and views of your website are absolutely trackable by the marketing company, but the best data for your new patients is from your front office. This means you could be spending endless marketing dollars, but not seizing the opportunity to see if it's working for you. Once you know how the new patients have found you, the next step is to filter out patients that may not be a good fit for the office. This is dependent on each dental office, but proper training of your front office staff is vital to any of your digital marketing efforts.
Asking the right questions will help you optimize your digital marketing for dental offices, driving more new patients to your practice and ensuring that each one is a good fit for your office. Knowing who referred them helps track how successful your online marketing has been, as well as if word-of-mouth referrals are driving business your way.