The following is a guest post by Henri Asseily, of Telnic. If you are interested in guest posting for Dental Heroes, please sign up here.

It will come as no surprise to dental professionals that people who have a good experience with a product or service will want to tell their friends and colleagues about it.

Word of Mouth is Critical

Word of mouth is a critical driver in generating new business, and the traditional methods of enabling this in the offline world are much slower than in the online world. The key is how to employ it in a way that can get the biggest bang for the buck.

A blend of social media and search engine optimization using free resources linked to your central online presence can work together to generate buzz, as well as drive curious or interested potential patients back to a central place where they can find out more and take action.

Twitter Works

During the first week of March, the word ‘dentist’ was tweeted on Twitter, the short-form blogging platform where people share everyday experiences and recommendations (or negative comments), nearly 4,000 times, according to Topsy. In the past month, the word ‘dentist’ was mentioned nearly 21,000 times. There’s something about going to the dentist that brings out the emotion in people! Twitter can be an incredible resource to both search for new patients and reach out to them cost-effectively, and also a brilliant platform to get existing clients to tweet about their experience, post pictures and engage with their peers. Ask your patients whether they’re on Twitter, get on there yourself, and don’t forget to research potential customers thinking about whether or not to make a visit in your area.

Other Social Media Tools to Consider…

In addition to Twitter, other social media tools such as Facebook fan pages (which now come with analytics tools), free listings in social recommendation sites such as Yelp and free blogging platforms that can be updated by email or text messaging (such as Posterous) can provide your practice with multiple cost-effective sources to get your messages out and crucially engage with your patients, even if they change home addresses or telephone numbers. Updating this content provides good material for search engines to index, and therefore drive results in search – the number one entry point for Americans on the Web.

Link it up with a .tel page

Optimizing search results can be achieved by simply cross-linking all of these places to one simple-to-manage domain that you own. Previously, this may have been tricky and time-consuming. But with the new .tel domain, you can have a simple presence online that links to all of the above resources, and enable people to quickly access information about your practice on the Web. Perhaps more importantly, the .tel page is optimized for use on smartphones, so new and existing patients can direct dial or email your office to book an appointment wherever they are. There’s no coding or Web site building involved, and it can be managed from an iPhone and costs from around $20 per year all-in.

As busy professionals, investing your teams’ time in the above will help you engage with clients without having to commit to time-consuming and costly ventures. Let your service do the talking through your patients.

Your thoughts?

Which online marketing tools have you seen results with? Do you have a .tel page?

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