The new era of digital marketing in dentistry

Hassan Mushaid explores changes to dental practice marketing in the digital era.

With the advent and popularisation of the internet over the course of the 21st century, digital marketing has spawned. It has begun to rapidly evolve, especially for small businesses like dental practices.

Marketing, before the digital era, was leaps and bounds behind the current model in terms of speed and efficiency. In the beginning, marketing was best communed within the frames of a newspapers, leaflet drops, and television ads. It was quite primitive in its purest medium, though the messages and technical aspects have hardly changed.

Using this perspective, the variation between the earliest forms of digital marketing and the mediums of marketing prior to the digital world, is similar to the disparity between the beginning of digital marketing and the current era of digital marketing.

Early on, digital marketing for dental practices and other small business was all about list building. All about search engine optimisation (SEO), gaining organic traffic, all about websites, sales letters and more. In short, all the processes of digital marketing were manual and far more tedious.

In order to thoroughly discuss all the ways in which digital marketing has and continues to develop, let’s discuss first the standard template of digital marketing: the profit cycle.

The profit cycle

Figure 1 essentially describes all of digital marketing in a nutshell. It goes as follows: gather an audience (black square), target the audience with advertisements to send them to a page that hosts your products and other offers. (the pink square) Then retarget them in order to get…