Marketing Online vs. Offline

With newspaper and magazine subscription rates dwindling, many dental practitioners are wondering whether online or offline advertising will pay off for their practices. The truth is, both types of advertising offer potential benefits, and may depend on your location, as well as your patient base.

Studies show (not surprisingly) that younger consumers are more likely to turn to the Internet – including online advertisers – when selecting their service providers, including dentists.

Many dentists wrongly consider that having a website is sufficient online advertising. But in fact, there are a wide variety of methods to make sure your practice gets its fair share of web exposure. Your dental practice needs to employ a comprehensive search engine optimazations  strategy to ensure that your website shows up during searches on the major search engines. Pay-per-click advertising and local search engines, like Yelp or Insiderpages, can help you target your audience.

Still, while Internet advertising soon may become the backbone of most dental practices’ advertising efforts, there’s no substitute for the community exposure and goodwill that can be gained by participating in local health fairs and advertising in community newspapers, school yearbooks, and other small-press publications. Charity events and volunteer activities are great ways to give back to the community while increasing your practice’s exposure.

For the time being, it seems that most dental practices will benefit from a combination of both online and offline advertising. The best way to learn which works best for you involves a method that’s tried-and-true, regardless of whether you advertise online or offline: test, test, and re-test your marketing efforts, and measure the results, to determine which activities deserve more of your advertising dollars.