How to Attract Patients and Grow Your Dental Practice Using Hyperlocal Marketing

It’s not always easy for dental practices to acquire new patients. In fact – patient acquisition is often the single biggest issue that practices face.

Without new patients come no new growth and without growth – a lack of sustainability. While many dentists prefer to focus on the day-to-day operations and providing superior oral care to those that do book appointments – it’s critical that they also focus on how to attract new patients.

One method of bringing new smiles through the door is with hyperlocal marketing and geotargeting.  Let’s take a look at what these are, how they work, and the steps you need to take to use them.

Understanding the Key Terms: Hyperlocal Marketing & Geotargeting

Hyperlocal marketing

capitalizes on finding patients that live locally – within minutes of your practice. The tool targets prospective customers within a highly specific and geographically restricted area. This can be a few blocks, a neighborhood, or even just a few streets away from your practice. Hyperlocal marketing works by targeting those who have recently searched for services using terms such as “near me.” The tool can then gather information from these searchers, and use custom messaging to grab their attention and convert them to bookers.

Geotargeting,

on the other hand, simply refers to delivering advertisements and relevant content to a targeted audience based on their geographic location. When used with businesses that need to target locally, the geographic location is likely to be the size of a town or city.

Both of these, when used to target audiences, will include a city, zip code, or strict location that relies on a customer’s proximity to your dental practice, the type of procedure they are looking to get, and what your dental practice can offer. Someone who wants a standard procedure is likely to visit one of their “near me” searches through hyperlocal advertising, whereas a specialized procedure will have a larger geographic scope as patients are more likely to travel farther.

3 Steps to Starting with Hyperlocal Marketing Messages

When starting with hyperlocal advertising, you’ll want to limit your distance range.
Once you have a good idea of where your patients are located, you can expand. Here’s how a hyperlocal test works:

Set Up a Google Ads Account.

You will need to go to ads.google.com to set up a Google Ads account. Once logged in, head to your campaign section and find the “locations” option on the left-hand side of the page. To edit the settings of this option, click the pencil icon.

Include All Relevant Locations Around Your Dental Practice.

All relevant areas that are located around your practice should be included in a radius within “x” miles of your practice. To do this, add in the “x” miles radius around your practice, click on “show all areas” (top right), and then target the applicable locations within that target range.

Update Your Settings.

Go to “settings” in your account dashboard and click on the “locations” section. Choose the “locations options” from the drop-down menu to edit these settings.

1. 1. 1.  Under the “target” section, you want to target those who only fit the relevant locations around your dental practice (the locations from step two).
      2. Under the “exclude” section, you want to avoid targeting those who show interest in the excluded locations (outside of the relevant areas around your practice)

Save Your Settings.

Who to Target & How to Direct Them to Your Dental Practice?

When choosing who to target, first determine what you offer.

If you only do specialized services such as dental crowns or veneers, your audience size is going to be much larger and your target radius around your dental practice, also much larger.  Those who need these services are more likely to travel farther for them.

If you only offer standard procedures like cleaning and teeth whitening, your target radius should be smaller, as local prospective patients are more likely to make bookings.

In terms of gender, income, and age for specialized services, you want to target those who will need the treatment and those who can afford the treatment.

While it may seem like a good idea to broaden your demographic in case of an anomaly – the narrower your audience is, the more money you save, and the more likely your target audience will convert.