Creating a Web site for your dental specialty practice costs time and money. But if prospective patients search for your practice online and instead find the site of a competing practice, your efforts have been wasted. Your Web site has to rank high on the search engine lists, and the best way to boost your ranking is to update the site regularly.

Word-of-mouth recommendations were once literally just that—comments exchanged verbally among acquaintances. Today, those comments are posted on the Internet for the world to see. Positive comments can boost the image of your dental specialty practice, and there’s nothing wrong with asking patients to write a short review about your practice. Whether you’re an endodontist, oral surgeon, orthodontist, pediatric dentist, periodontist or prosthodontist, here are a few tips about how to ask tactfully for online reviews:

A couple of recent marketing surveys bring to mind a crucial missing piece in the marketing plans of many dental specialists. The first survey, conducted by Sagefrog Marketing Group, found that 68% of business-to-business (B2B) companies allocate 5% or less of their revenue to marketing.

As our reliance on computers has increased over the last two decades, many people have talked of an eventual paperless society, where people rely exclusively on digital communication. True, a Web site should be an important part of your dental marketing plan, and you may engage your patients with e-mail or social media. But the power of paper lives, too. Print media is easier to read, more visible and more environmentally friendly than you might think.

Trust is the cornerstone of your dental specialty practice. Patients return to you because they trust your expertise and your treatments. But building trust with patients starts long before they call your practice for an appointment. Here are three ways to build trust among people before they come into your dental office.

Increasing the flow of new patients is critical to the success of your dental practice. Most endodontists, periodontists and other dental specialists agree that referrals from other dentists and physicians represent the single most significant source of new patients.

Endodontists around the country tell us that dentists are making fewer referrals than ever before. Too often, the only cases referred are either very difficult to treat or ones that have “gone wrong.”

Having a complete list of every dentist and physician who could make patient referrals is essential if you want to grow your dental specialty practice.

We are in the process of collecting data for the all-new 2011 Dental Marketing Barometer for Dental Specialists and plan to have full survey results and analysis available by February 1, 2011.

USP, an acronym for “Unique Selling Proposition,” is a concept often used in marketing. Your USP is what sets you apart from all other practitioners in your dental specialty.