4 Common Mistakes in Digital Marketing that Dentists Make

What are the four 4 most common mistakes that dentists make when it comes to their online marketing?

We often see clients make several digital marketing mistakes thinking “this is the best way to get more results”!
These small but common mistakes can be costly for a dental clinic and can prevent you from making the most out of your online presence.

Your goal should be to differentiate your clinic, make sure your clinic stands out and achieving good results through digital marketing, which is why you should watch this video to make sure you aren’t making any of these common 4 mistakes.

Want to remove the guesswork of using digital marketing strategies to grow your dental practice? Download our FREE guide to social media for dentists:

4-step guide to social media for dental practices

Setting Up a Google My Business Account

What’s the number one thing you MUST DO to get your presence started online even before your create a website?

The answer is… setup your Google My Business account. You might be asking, what is Google My Business? And why is having a properly set up Google My Business account so important in today’s digital era? The answer is: this is the first point of contact that patients and prospective patients will have with your clinic. They will gather all basic information needed from your practice within the first 10 seconds of searching your clinic’s name on Google. And that’s why you have to make sure you have all pertinent information on your Google My Business account!

One thing Google My Business is known for is online reviews. Having a Google My Business account allows patients to find your physical location, gain insight, and leave reviews, which you can then respond to by logging into your Google My Business account. However, there’s more power in Google My Business, such as appearing on Google Maps, creating posts that will help with SEO and utilizing the latest feature of Google My Business: products!

Click here to watch the video now!

In this video you will learn:

  1. What is the importance of Google My Business
  2. How to set up and activate your account
  3. How to optimize it for best results!

How to answer to online patient reviews & why

How to deal with online patient reviews? Should you answer? How to answer? And should you be deleting negative comments?

These are all common questions we often get asked by our clients, and with reason! Online reviews seem to be a bit of a grey zone for Dentists, and we want to clarify how to best manage this area of your online marketing.

Online reviews are critical to the success of certain businesses as patients and customers often look into these reviews before making a decision to move forward. This is why responding to these reviews and building a positive online presence is important.

So how should you respond to these reviews? What tone to use? Should you be responding to positive reviews as well? And how to deal with negative reviews? All these are questions we answer in this week’s video.

Click here to watch the video now!

In this video you will learn:

  1. Why responding to online patient reviews is important
  2. [2:52] Setting up some ‘rules’ on online reputation management
  3. [4:59]How to answer to negative reviews (we actually walk you through a negative dental review)
  4. How to answer to positive reviews

Patients oftentimes first scout Google for Doctor reviews before even visiting the Doctor or clinic’s website, which is why managing reviews properly is so absolutely key to attracting patients! – Nathalia Porras

5 SEO myths in dental marketing and our answers to them!

We often get asked by our clients about SEO (search engine optimization) for their dental website, how does it work and what exactly helps the most. To answer these questions we asked SEO expert Tia Hain to join us in this week’s video.

We will be reviewing 5 common myths in SEO and have Tia answer them with the truth as well as some recommendations to follow.

The 5 common SEO Myths are:

1- Ranking is what’s most important when it comes to SEO
2- Specific local SEO is not important
3- Social activity counts for nothing or it counts for everything
4- Being mobile-friendly does not affect SEO
5- Google can figure it out alone, you don’t need to do any extra work

Watch the video to learn more.


Our goal is to help you get moving in the right direction so that your dental practice can be successful in its digital marketing efforts.
-Nathalia Porras, MBA
Founder of NP Marketing

6 Tips to get the most out of your new dental website

Have you started redesigning your new website and want to know what the best practices are?

Last week we discussed the reasons to revamp or redesign your website, but before moving forward, you should know what the best practices are so you can follow them and get the most out of your new website.

In this video, we go over 6 tips to follow to make sure you are getting the most out of your website. Our tips are based on differentiating your practice through your website. All these best-practices tips can be easily applied to your own new dental website.

Here are three out of the six tips I go over in today’s video:

  • [1:09] Using stock photography vs. using your own photos: learn what’s the optimal usage ratio of each on your website, and how to best combine these.
  • [2:23] Make use of a ‘Book an Appointment’ button: learn what are the places where you should be ideally placing a book an appointment button on your website, to maximize clicks, and of course, get more patients to request appointments with you.
  • [2:53]: Make your website mobile optimized: in today’s digital era, this is an absolute must. If your current website is not mobile optimized yet, that’s a clear red flag that you need to redesign a new website. Learn why ensuring your website is mobile optimized is important.

Make sure to view the entire video to learn all 6 best practices. Click here to view now!

Our goal is to help you get moving in the right direction so that your dental practice can be successful in its digital marketing efforts.

-Nathalia Porras, MBA
Founder of NP Marketing

Other related videos:

How to create a full month worth of content on social media?

As a healthcare professional, do you ever wonder “what kind of content should I be posting on social media?”

You are probably very busy and think you do not have the time to think of content for your social media platforms. The key is to plan the month ahead!

In this video, I will be giving you a few tips on how to save time so that you can post content on your social media platforms every month, while focusing your time on treating patients and running your practice. 

At the end of the video, we will also be giving away a FREE social media captions & photo list that will make things easier for you and help you grow your business.

Facebook Pixels: a step-by-step tutorial !

Not sure what a Facebook Pixel is, why you should even be using it or how to install it?

If you’ve started to make use of Facebook ads for your practice (or are even considering it), you must absolutely use Facebook Pixels to understand what’s working and what’s not working on Facebook. By the end of this video, you’ll have a step-by-step formula on how to create and install your pixel on any wordpress site.

In this video you will learn:

  1. What is a Facebook Pixel
  2. How to install it onto your WordPress site
  3. How to use the Facebook Pixel for conversions and targeting

3 Social Media Post Ideas for Dentists

As a healthcare professional, do you often wonder what you should or should not be posting on social media?

You are probably very busy and think you do not have the time to think of content for your social media platforms. This video will give you three easy post ideas to use on your social media accounts to help you grow your business.

The key thing to remember is to keep a consistency in posting.

After watching this video you will learn about:

  1. A great online tool that will give you plenty of ideas to write not only social media posts, but also blog topics for your website
  2. Tried and tested post ideas for your social media channels that you can easily create every month from within your clinic!
  3. A bonus 4-step guide to get your social media started the right way!

Online Dental Marketing: Three Solid Tips!

Dental marketing tips

NP Marketing is a digital marketing agency that specializes in dental marketing. We’ve been working with dentists, general dentists and specialists, for the past few of years, helping them attract new patients and retain current patients using online marketing.

As usual in our blog, we talk about relevant dental marketing topics. In today’s blog, we will be giving you three solid recommendations on how to brand your practice using social media.

First Tip: Post Frequency

The first thing to note is the frequency of posting. Before you start using social media to brand your dental practice, you need to think about the frequency of posting. You need to commit to a frequency of posting that is realistic for your dental practice and you need to be consistent. The key to success here is consistency all along. Like anything else in life, you need to be consistent with social media to be able to see results.

So, the one recommendation that we have for dental practices is that you keep a frequency of about two to three posts a week. Now, for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to be mainly talking about Facebook and Instagram as your mainstream social media channels.

Now, some dental practices might be using Snapchat, even Pinterest or LinkedIn. But as I said, today we’re going to be discussing Facebook and Instagram.

In terms of Facebook, you have to remember that on Facebook, unlike on Instagram, you can share links. So you could go ahead and share any kind of articles, blog posts, or even YouTube videos on your Facebook page. Whereas on Instagram, you’re a bit more limited. You cannot share any kind of link on Instagram (except for the one link that is on your bio).

An example of an article you could share on Facebook is an article from the American Dental Association or the American Association of oral and maxillofacial surgeons- just make sure your articles are coming from high-quality sources.

As a side note, if you’re doing any kind of blogging on your website as a dental practice, good for you! That’s a bonus, and it’s going to really help with your SEO. You also need to make sure that you’re publishing your blog posts using your Facebook account so that you’re reaching many more people through Facebook. This way you are driving traffic back to your website using Facebook.

In terms of Instagram, we want to keep that frequency of about two to three times a week for images on Instagram. However, on Instagram, what I would really like to emphasize are Instastories. Instastories are a big thing right now. You are going to get a lot of engagement if you use Instastories. What an Instastory is, is basically a vertical post normally that you could take with your mobile phone. Anyone on your team could take a photo, and it will live on Instagram for 24 hours. For this reason, you could actually increase your frequency. If you want to post daily, you could go ahead and do daily Instastories posts, and you want to keep to the two to three posts on your regular organic Instagram posts. But as I said, you could increase your frequency on Instastories, and in fact, I’d recommend it. There’s a lot of engagement going on in Instastories, and you see them on the top of your feed. So, go ahead and get some behind the scene images, get some team photos whenever you have a birthday, that’s where those kinds of posts should live on, your Instastories.

 

Second Tip: Dental Content 

Our second tip is all about visual imagery and content. Now, I want you to go ahead and check out our Dentists Get Social Platform that we have created just for you. It’s a turnkey social media solution for dental practices where on a monthly basis you receive both images, dental styled images, and captions that you can use on your social media channels and not have to worry about content.   https://npdigitalmarketing.com/get-social/

dental marketing, social media dental

However, my recommendation with Dentists Gets Social is that you sprinkle in some photos of your own clinic during the month. What I would recommend is that once you get your images on the first of them month, that you schedule them using a social media planning software to schedule social media images. There’s many out there. Some of the ones that are mostly known are HootSuite, Buffer, Iconosquare, etc. There’s so many software programs, but you could decide on one particular software where you’re going to go on, and you’re going to schedule your images that you will get from Dentists Get Social. In between each image, you’re going to be using your own in-clinic photos of the team, of your patients, of reviews, of many other things, but we want to make sure that you have a complete calendar, and that you’re keeping the consistency.

 

Third Tip: Be Interactive!

Third and last tip that we have for you is that we want you to be interactive with your patients or prospective patients out there using social media. A great way to do this is by using Facebook Live video sessions. And for dental practices, in particular, you could do a Q and A session on a treatment. What I would recommend is that you select the top questions that you get from your patients about any treatment. It could be anything from dental implants to Invisalign to hygiene or anything else that you really want to talk about. You take those top questions and go ahead and host a Facebook Live video where you answer these questions.

dental marketing
 

It will be even better if it becomes a recurring video session! So, maybe once a month or once every two weeks, you could host a Facebook Live video. You’re going to go ahead and you can cover some basic facts about the treatment and then go into some of those FAQs. Once you’re done with your Facebook Live video, a couple of recommendations that I would give is that you share it on your Facebook page, and then you’re going to boost that video so that you can really increase the reach of that Facebook Live video to many more patients. And in a future blog, we’re going to be talking about targeting, Facebook ads targeting, and how to use custom audiences. But for now, you’re going to be boosting that Facebook Live right after you’re done. You are going to get many more views after that live video is done

The second thing that I recommend you do is that you download the video, and you could do two things with that video that you now have: you could upload it on your YouTube channel or you can also upload it to a blog post, and you could embed it within a blog post to go in depth in terms of those FAQs that you just covered on that Facebook live video.

So there you have it! Three recommendations on how to brand your practice using social media. Just to recap, number one is that you want to select a frequency for your posting. You want to make sure that you’re consistent, and you want to make sure that it is realistic and that you could stick to that frequency throughout every week.

Second, you want to make sure that you’ve thought about your content and the visual imagery, and we have a tool for you to use called Dentists Get Social.

Finally, the third recommendation is that we want you to be interactive with your patients and prospective patients, and we want you to use Facebook Live video to host Q and A’s sessions on different treatments.

A Sit-Down with Nathalia Porras

nathalia porras

Nathalia Porras

I am someone who says, ‘you gotta dream, you gotta go after it and you gotta get it done’.

 

                                                  Hello everyone!

Social media coordinator

My name is Lea El Houssami and I am the most recent addition to the NP Digital Marketing team as the Social media coordinator.

A few months ago, I had the immense displeasure of going through the job hunting process – the stress of finding a career, a company to support you, and a position from which you can grow; the pressure was on.

As you can see, I have decided to join NP Digital Marketing, a four-year-old Digital Marketing startup, under the leadership of Nathalia Porras. Throughout my entire job selection process, I was very struck by Nathalia, her accomplishments, and the potential I could see in learning from her – can you sense abit of a girl-crush?

I recently sat down with Nathalia, decided to turn the tables, and to interview her about NP Digital Marketing’s journey, female entrepreneurship, family, and more.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

Can you please start by telling us more about how NP Digital Marketing came to be?

In a nutshell, I leaped into entrepreneurship after doing my MBA.

About 13 years ago, after completing my Bachelors of Commerce, I pursued a job opportunity in Dubai. Back then, Facebook was only 2 years old, there was the talk of eBay just starting, I think we were still on our first iPhones, and the digital stratosphere was nowhere close to where we are today.

My first job was in advertising, and while we were working on such big campaigns, there was no talk of digital marketing at all – it was unbelievable!

I knew I wanted to be in Marketing and I felt like I needed creativity to be a part of me or surround me even if I wasn’t a creative person myself. Marketing had a way of enriching my life, so once I had that exposure in Dubai, I knew I wanted it to be my long term.

I decided to return to Montreal, began working in Communication and Fundraising for the McGill Faculty of Dentistry. I kept looking for that one thing that was gonna make me happy in the long term. I had a sense that it was digital marketing because I could tell that the marketing industry was going to continue evolving, and I wanted to be a part of that.

However, I came to the realization that I did not have the experience or the knowledge needed to make that leap.

That is when I took matters into my own hands. I decided to quit my job, take the GMAT, and start my MBA. It was scary – especially considering that I had two young boys at home and I wanted to stay married! [laughs]

That year was pivotal. I took the time to study and to understand what I wanted to do next. In my quest of conviction, I researched the market, the industry trends, and I traveled to Australia to meet founders of numerous digital marketing startups that have made it big – I wanted to cover all my bases.

When I graduated, that’s when I took the leap into entrepreneurship. That was the moment I decided that I wanted to start my own business.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

So who is Nathalia Porras exactly?

Nathalia PorrasI am a very very driven person. Every time I am handed a project, I am always thinking about how we can complete this, not only successfully, but in a manner that exceeds expectations.  I do not believe in being mediocre, nor in saying ‘I cannot do this’. There is always a way to accomplish your goals, that is what always keeps me going.

In the beginning, I had no clue how to do Google AdWords, anything website related, or even social media! Everything I would see, I would go home and learn. I am someone who says, ‘you gotta dream, you gotta go after it and you gotta get it done’.  

Make a plan and go ahead and do it.

 

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

When did you decide that NP Digital Marketing will become an agency?

It actually just became an agency on its own. At the start, it was just me, myself, and I. I was focused on consulting and strategy, nothing more. However, by the time I got my third client, people started asking me if I could do more. Yes, they wanted my strategies, but they also wanted someone to implement and execute them.

Since I did not have any resources, I knew that I had reached the point of capacity and that I now needed to bring someone to help me. I think that was the point when it turned into an agency – and I began thinking of it as one – it was no longer just me.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

What do you consider the strength of NP Marketing, or yourself more specifically?

NP Marketing’s biggest strength is our ability to create strategies that tie things back to the client’s main business goals and objectives. That it is our competitive advantage; from my experience so far, I have not seen any other agency asking a client about their goals and creating a strategy that is designed to accomplish these goals.

We clearly reflect the goals in the strategy and bring it into execution. Our strategies are more than simply having a beautiful image, but knowing how is this going to get our clients more patients, and how is that going to be changed into a monetary value.

Another strength I have is my network and my ability to foster it. I have a strong background in Dentistry because of my previous work with McGill and the faculty of Dentistry. Therefore, I knew every dentist that graduated from McGill, as well as how they worked, they thought and what their needs were.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

And if you could pick one thing to improve as you grow?

 

At the moment, I believe that we must be constantly be pushing the creative boundaries. My vision is for NP Marketing to be the combination of a consulting company and a creative agency so that they are not in silo but cohesive and married to one another.

At the moment, I know we have strategy under our belts but I want the creative to be on par with that and even surpassed it, if possible.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

What would you describe as your philosophy of running a business?

npmarketing

Trust everyone you work with and let them be independent. I cannot stress how important it is for me to be able to empower those that I work with. I do not want them to feel like they cannot bring new ideas to the table, and I am certainly not a know-it-all. My goal is to bring the best team together and to bring the best out of each person.

My philosophy is to find each team member’s strength and aid them in channeling it while finding their weakness and helping turn it into a strength.

There are a lot of opposing mentalities on this, but I believe that you must always aim to surround yourself with the best people possible. You cannot avoid hiring certain individuals because you want to be the best person on the team –  you need to bring on the leading candidates because the better people you hire the better the company.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

In that case, what do you need to see in a candidate to know if they are best?

To start, you need to look at the candidate that has all the qualities of the position you are looking to hire for. ‘Best’ might not be the ideal word to describe their characteristics – I prefer to use ‘Potential’. You need to be able to find someone with that potential to grow, to be strong, and to learn.

No one is perfect, which is why a ‘wanting to learn’ and an ‘I’m going to figure this out’ attitudes are key to look for when building your team.  It is all about thinking three steps ahead and knowing you have the ability to tackle any challenge that may come your way.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

What is one word that you would use to describe your ideal team?

Resourceful.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

When you are not running NP Digital Marketing, what do you do?

Can I say nothing? [laughs]

Let’s see… At the moment, I’m watching a Spanish TV show called Velvet. I also love podcasting, I am actually a massive podcasting fanatic, and I love spending time with the family. What primarily takes up the majority of my time, however, is planning the next family trip.

I start planning trips for the family the moment we step off the plane from the previous one! I love spending as much time as possible with my husband and our children, and our little trips have become so important to me.

Oh, and I keep telling myself that I need to go to the gym.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

Can you give me an example of a typical day at work, as well as a typical day at home?

 

At work, I kick off my day by checking HootSuite to see what kind of content is going out that day and if I notice anything that’s not okay or needs to be changed. Then I head over to Wrike, to see my to-do list of things for the day, who has me booked for the day, and which tasks or deadlines need to be worked on.

Then the time just flies!

Between monitoring and responding to questions –  thankfully, we have a lot of proposal writing nowadays so a lot of back-and-forth on proposals – or going out to meet clients,  I barely have room to breathe and the day just slips by.

At home, our Saturdays are usually dedicated to various activities that the kids have, whether it be ski school, piano lessons, basketball, or anything in between.

Once these activities are done – and my kids are absolutely exhausted! – we head back home to cook and have a relaxing afternoon where we watch a movie or going to our friend’s house for some wine or paella.

Sunday afternoons are usually reserved for the larger family, my sister and my parents, where we all get together for some family time with lots of wine and lots of good food!

If I can describe who I am, I would say I’m a foodie. I absolutely love food. My husband and I have been exploring a lot of new restaurants here in Montreal, but not the bigger known snobby restaurants. I like to explore the underground new restaurants, they are so many hidden gems around the city that not much people know about!

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

Does having children who are old enough to understand ‘what daddy does’ or ‘what mommy does’ affect the way you set goals or values?

To be honest, my sons are like my little motors. There are no better motivators in the world. They definitely affect the way I am as an entrepreneur and as a manager. Although they are boys, it is very important to me that they have a strong female role model in the house.

They understand the concept of working hard – funny enough, they actually cannot fathom the idea of someone not working .. ‘What do they do then?’. I want them to see that you are never more than an arm’s reach away from your dream, but that you need to dedicate your efforts to achieve it.

In my house, nothing gets half-assed, whether it be studying for the kids or working for us adults!

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

Going back to NP Digital Marketing, can you elaborate more on why you have focused specifically on dentistry and the dental world?

Dentists in my point of view, are still in an infant stage in terms of their marketing. They have just begun to evolve and see the business opportunity that is social media marketing, or any other type of digital marketing.

Apart from the fact that I had a very strong network of dentists, I saw that there is a potential in the market where NP Marketing can help these dentists grow while growing alongside them ourselves.

Another other reason from my side was the strength of the healthcare industry as a whole. As one of the only solid industries, that actually constantly grow regardless of other market trends, healthcare is definitely a market that I want NP Marketing to expand into.

Nathalia Porras Digital Marketing

Which brings me to my next question, do you see yourself staying in Dentistry or do you want to change focus as you grow?

 

dentistry-NPMarketingBoth. I do not think that they need to be exclusive of one another. Right now we are experts in dental marketing in Canada – but I want that to become ‘the experts in North America’ or ‘the experts worldwide’, eventually.  

However, I also would look to expanding into Healthcare marketing, and the most natural next step for us would be private healthcare, so Surgery, Optometry, or even Veterinarians and Dermatology. Any Healthcare sector that requires a push of marketing to get new clients for the services is a potential on our radar.

It’s also important to remember that, while we are the experts in dental marketing, we have also had film and animation clients – TeleFilm and Toon Boom Animation, from the get-go, so that is definitely another route we can go down.