A steady stream of dentist leads will guarantee that your business and practice go smoothly. However, this is easier said than done considering competitors, strategies to evaluate, and investment. You need to make yourself some space despite the money and time you might not have for this. Lead generation requires attention, or there won’t be new patients coming your way.
For your niche, both offline and online lead generation strategies are welcome. You can use them by integrating each in the same plan and getting the best out of your efforts.
Offline efforts or strategies focus on common networking and traditional advertising. Meanwhile, online lead generation is all about search engines, social media, and any resource that ends up being useful.
To ensure you are able to go over everything without failing over and over again, you can have a look at the top strategies we will be sharing.
With them, dentist leads should start coming your way. In addition, you can learn a thing or two about factors that influence your dentist’s practice.
What is lead generation?
To keep it simple, it is basically bringing people who might be interested in your services or products by using “touching” points that lead them to your website or conversion page.
Many ways of generating leads are available, but the simplest form of lead generation is to collect visitor information. These prospects or leads are then “nurtured” until they’re ready for purchase.
For example, a lead for a dental office might be someone looking for a new dentist, and you can get their attention with the right marketing strategy and work around the sales funnels of your lead gen.
Now, capturing users’ information usually means that you have managed to capture a visitor’s email and name.
The information you need might vary depending on your sales team’s requirements, such as a phone number or website.
The lead generation process works when businesses offer something valuable, known as a lead magnet, in return for visitors’ details.
For example, you could give away toothbrushes at a neighborhood event and ask for a name and number.
Although online, it may look a bit different; the concept is the same.
For example, a B2B marketing agency might offer an e-book on email copywriting techniques in return for leads.
The Hated but Also Loved SEO
These days, almost everything is available online, and we won’t get tired of mentioning this.
Right now, Google is the most popular search engine for finding a dentist. There has been a 150% increase in “near me” searches over the last few years. If you want to reach your target audience and get new leads, it is important to show up at the top of searches for the right terms.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to achieve organic results, just like the one above.
SEO refers to the improvement of website traffic quality and quantity. Google and other search engines have certain ranking factors that they use to determine where you rank in search results.
You must have a useful and well-performing website if you want to appear on the first page of search results for Google or go for this option in your lead generation strategy, which is crucial.
That being said, your SEO can be improved by:
- Do a keyword audit to determine the terms that are most relevant to your audience. Examples of keywords are “dentist near me,” “dentist [city],” etc.
- Include your top keywords in your website and content, such as a blog.
- Make sure that your website and blog are useful to your audience. If someone searches for dental implants, then the page they land upon should explain exactly what these are, what the procedure looks like, and confirm that you offer them.
- It is important to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible. 40% will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds for the site to load.
- Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, as approximately 63% of all searches now take place on mobile devices.
- Link building can be integrated by linking to authoritative sites and looking for ways that authoritative sites could link back to your site.
SEO is a complex process that requires a lot of effort and takes time to achieve results.
However, once you reach the top, it becomes easier to keep it up.
Content Marketing Works
You should optimize the pages on your site and regularly add new pages with useful, informative content. This strategy is called Content Marketing, and it helps to bring qualified traffic to your website.
You are likely to be asked the same questions by your patients as a dentist. How often should they floss? Do bi-annual exams really need to be done? The answers might seem obvious to you, but it is very helpful for people who are interested in learning more about dental health.
This information can be provided via blog posts, infographics, or videos on your website.
You can then make a good first impression by being a trustworthy and helpful source of information when people visit those pages.
As a dentist, content marketing is one of your best ways to bring qualified traffic to the website. This involves publishing and posting pages regularly with information about dental health.
You should be a dentist and make it a priority to post content that educates people about their health or maybe details related to dental practices and answers questions from site visitors about dental issues.
You can make your posts interactive by allowing the audience to comment on every post. Make sure you respond to questions or comments with explanations.
This will show your professional expertise to the audience and increase their confidence and trust in you.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Converting visitors to your website into patients is essential if you want them to be happy and asking for email addresses is the best way to go about this.
This can be done through contact forms or by signing up for an email newsletter.
To improve your site and increase conversions, you can use conversion rates optimization.
CRO is the process of testing different versions of elements on your website (such as buttons, forms, and calls to action) to determine which version converts visitors best. You can then implement the best version and test another element.
Low-Cost Programs for Referrals
To get new patients, you don’t need to be a marketing expert. Many low-cost referral programs can help you keep your schedule busy by providing you with regular, qualified patient referrals.
You’ll be receiving referrals month after month that is carefully matched with your practice by dental needs, location, appointment availability, and more details and factors of your convenience.
Referring patients saves you time, money, and staffing.
They can reduce advertising costs and streamline the work of front desk staff. At least one offers a 100% production guarantee to protect your investment.
There is no better, safer, or smarter way to grow your practice.
This works because people trust the recommendations of those they know better than advertisements in newspapers or radio.
They most likely won’t do it on their own. Thus, it is important to ask them verbally to refer their loved ones. This method is also more effective for dentists who ask long-term patients than those who have only seen them once or twice.
Tell your patient that you will be taking any new patients when they leave. Also, you can give your patient a couple of business cards with your contact information.
Ask them to pass it on to anyone who might be interested in dental services.
When asking for referrals, make sure you are organized. To avoid being overbooked, make sure to plan your time. This will help you avoid turning down potential patients.
Even if your schedule is tight, it is important not to turn down a new lead in dental care. Even if your schedule is jammed, find a way to accommodate them.
If you turn someone away, it will make them feel that you don’t want to take on new patients.
Rely on Email Marketing
After collecting your visitors’ email addresses using contact forms or email newsletter sign-ups, you are now able to use email marketing to nurture them until they are ready to convert.
For this, you must send them an email newsletter on a regular basis.
This will allow you to effectively communicate information about any new equipment or services you have added to your practice.
Include any dental tips your patients might find helpful in the emails that you send to them so they won’t just close them immediately but rather catch their attention.
This strategy will allow you to directly reach your leads with relevant and interesting information and build more trust while working on getting more patients.
You Can Use Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are another way to reach your target audience and connect to people who may be interested in your services.
But it can be hard for a beginner to work around the strategy and know-how to create the Facebook ads campaigns required.
Thus, this is what we can share with you in order to achieve the best results and get your ads running as soon as possible:
- Use happy customer photographs to create trust.
Your ads should feature your customer’s smile after a teeth-whitening procedure or anything that was done and is appealing to the eye once completed.
When you share your own photos, people will trust your services compared to when you might use the general online pictures.
Also, your brand will be more attractive if you have a smiling patient who shows how white and bright their teeth look after treatment.
- Make your ad copy attractive.
Your FB Advertisement should be attractive, and for it, you need to include compelling offers and a call to action.
When doing this, consider your target audience and make sure it is designed to meet their needs.
- Ad Targeting.
Make sure you are objective when choosing your ad campaign. Your target audience should be identified, and the campaign should be designed to focus on them.
If your target audience includes people who will purchase your product or rely on your services, then it is wise to concentrate on conversion.
It should be targeted at people living near your dental clinic so they can pay a visit or know you can actually be there when they need it.
Make sure to include people of the correct age in your ad and if the range is too wide, go for the most common patients based on statistics.
Know-How to Manage your Lead Generation
Your dental lead generation strategy should not be stopped at email sign-ups and contact form submissions or the usual contacting points where people tend to leave their interests.
As you start seeing results in the process of attracting dental leads, you need a system to organize and respond to them so they continue to be nurtured, and you get the desired results.
Lead management software is the best tool to achieve this goal, and if you find one that provides the tools you need to generate leads and manage them efficiently, you can boost your dentist service greatly.
The tool should allow you to keep track of your quality leads, respond to their queries with helpful answers, and provide all the information requested.
Pay attention to how your leads came across your practice. You can check if it was through a search engine or pay-per-click campaign, social media ads, or any other channel that you have created and used for your dental lead generation strategy.
This information will help you to identify the best channel from which your leads are coming and bring more success to the other lead generation strategies with this management.
Work on Your Landing Pages
Landing pages are one of many tools that online marketers use to increase conversions, as those are where most of the leads reach and end up falling when clicking on ads or other links connecting to your site.
A landing page is a webpage that has one conversion goal as you usually place a specific action that must be directly related to turning visitors into leads and maybe, in the same process, to clients.
Online marketers use landing pages most often in conjunction with paid advertising because they have been shown to have higher conversion rates than a normal webpage.
Now, how can you make this landing page work?
- Add visual cues.
First, you need to understand that online reading is not like reading a book. It doesn’t go from top to bottom but rather left to right.
Studies show that online readers prefer an F-shaped reading style instead of what we know as the traditional one in our culture and language.
The majority of readers will quickly scan the content and then stop to examine areas that are interesting.
Visual cues can be used to direct attention to important areas and focus on this shaped format that generates more leads and converts them.
- Include arrows.
A big, bright arrow is the best way to get a reader’s attention. After all, people will always be attracted visually to this indicator of something being there.
- Consider contrast.
If you don’t get it, we need to mention this isn’t about the illumination in specific but rather how something looks next to the other on your landing page.
Because the human brain is wired to notice differences, contrast is essential for landing page design.
Contrasting is all about what makes someone direct their attention to an element or maybe reduce the relevance of the other.
For example, if you place a big message next to the contact form, most people will ignore the latter.
- Choose your colors wisely.
Although it may seem obvious, color can significantly impact how we perceive the world around us. This is even more real for brand colors as well as the way they communicate your message to the audience.
It can make all the difference between a successful conversion and a lost opportunity if you use colors that aren’t in line with your message.
- Format and typography.
Format and typography may not seem as important to the untrained eye as the other elements.
But, a slight modification to the layout or appearance of your landing pages can make a big difference.
For a clear example, just take a low-budget website and compare it to one that has received professional development. You will notice that reading the latter tends to be easier and more comfortable.
Popups & Their Utility
Websites are those squares or windows that you probably hate when entering a site, but they are quite useful when people are truly interested in the content and what the business can offer in this case.
With this in mind, you might have noticed not all of them are the same.
Some popups appear when you enter, while others might take longer. Well, this has a reason, and to understand it, you need to know about each possible popup:
- Enter: Popups for entry are great for collecting email addresses, promoting discounts, navigating into areas of interest, or getting your visitors’ attention ins something specific.
- Exit: Exit popups can be used to capture information from visitors who are about to leave your website and encourage them to hire your services.
- Click: This one shows when a visitor clicks on a button or an area. To avoid redirecting visitors to another page, click popups are best.
- Timed: Displays within a certain time period after visitors arrive. Popups that are timed are the best for visitors to explore before you make your pitch.
- Scroll: These popups can be used to ensure that a certain amount of the page has been read before you make your pitch.
But with all this information, how can you make these popups actually work for your dental business?
Several factors influence how well they perform and if people actually care about them to provide the information that will always be requested.
Thus, if you want to implement them, you will need to follow these aspects:
- Speed. Performance is the number one priority for website popups. Slow loading times can instantly disorient a visitor.
- Relevance. It is crucial to use the right message at the right moment and on the correct page.
- Exit options. Having a website popup, you can’t close will only make your visitors mad.
- Design your call to action properly. Avoid using generic language in your call-to-action buttons such as “submit” and “claim.” Use action-oriented language instead.
Finally, for what would you use these popups? Are they really that useful?
A website popup can be used for any purpose and can help you achieve your digital marketing goals, depending on which one you have. Some of the most common ones include:
- Building an email list.
You need people to send your newsletter to, and for it, you must focus on getting their information and email addresses.
- Navigation.
Do you have a website that needs special attention? To alert new visitors and direct them to your website, use an entry popup.
An entry popup is a way to promote your newly designed services page to anyone who arrives and make their navigation easier.
- Promotions.
Popups are a great way to promote discounts, promotions, or limited-time deals.
- Shopping cart abandonment.
An exit popup will stop your visitors from leaving when they are just about to sign for a service or request anything related to products and what you offer.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Dental Practice
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Dentist Practice Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Dentist Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.