Your digital dentistry
What is a personal brand and how does it differ from a company brand?
Medicine is an industry in which the human factor is very important. The personal brand of a doctor forms a business reputation, creates an image that is attractive to patients. Unlike clinic advertising, one specialist is promoted here. This is primarily necessary for the doctor himself, because he can change the clinic, and patients will continue to come personally to him. The office in which the popular doctor works will also attract a lot of new clients.
1. Assess competencies and choose a niche
It is impossible to develop a personal brand without understanding your niche. “Just a dentist” is not interesting, but a specialist in implantation, periodontology, surgery, working with children’s teeth or VIP-clients, a master of making fillings has every chance of success. The maximum emphasis will be placed on the niche during promotion. also attract a lot of new clients.
The faster you identify your “chip” and determine what you are better than others, the more effective will be the promotion of your personal brand. This will be the main idea around which you can build your advertising strategy.
2. Define your target audience
It is impossible to develop a personal brand without understanding your niche. “Just a dentist” is not interesting, but a specialist in implantation, periodontology, surgery, working with children’s teeth or VIP-clients, a master of making fillings has every chance of success. The maximum emphasis will be placed on the niche during promotion. also attract a lot of new clients.
You won’t be able to please everyone: if you target an audience that is too wide, you will only waste money and time. Analyze your current and past clients: who exactly is being treated with you, what is their income and social status, what unites them? What kind of people will definitely not come to your appointment? It is very important to identify the target audience, because the content will be focused specifically on its interests, pains and needs.
3. Choose a psychological archetype
Building a personal brand is akin to running a business, so there can be no trifles. The psychological portrait of the doctor, his personal qualities, which are read by the audience, are very important. Experts recommend choosing the archetype that best suits your customers’ needs and that you can retain. For example, a dentist may be read in communication and behavior as a discreet professional or a friendly friend. The tone of communication with the audience, behavior and image as a whole are built around the chosen archetype.
The archetype should correspond to the target audience you are working with. For an aesthetic doctor working with veneers, it is important to build communication with young “advanced” people, an orthopedist on duty often works with adults and elderly patients, where the communication style needs a different one.
The children’s doctor can also choose the role of a caring, understanding adult or a cheerful and reckless older friend. Here you need to take into account that the promotion of a personal brand on the Internet should be designed for parents, because they are the ones who make the decision about choosing a doctor. But at the appointment, the doctor contacts the child directly, and the baby’s opinion will most likely be taken into account when planning the next visit. So you need to focus on both the “customer of services” and the direct client.
4. Demonstrate expertise
No matter how cool a specialist you are, you cannot stop developing. New technologies and methods of treatment, new terms regularly appear in dentistry. Attend dental courses, conferences, seminars. By choosing a narrow area of expertise, you can easily bypass other doctors and even invent something new. Share your research, victories and achievements in the blog.
5. Choose promotion tools
Having identified the target audience, you need to determine from which sources people come most often. The main emphasis is placed on them. Promotion tools options:
- social networks, instant messengers, YouTube;
- dental aggregator sites;
- blogs, media articles, book writing.
You need to choose only those tools that you can operate with. For example, it makes no sense to start a video channel in the absence of equipment or the desire to regularly shoot videos. Then paid contextual and targeted advertising is connected to the selected channels. The profiles on the aggregators are filled in as informative as possible.
It is also important to create your own website or landing page, which will be the main business card of the doctor and a source of information about him.
6. Be visible
In addition to creating the main content, try to become as visible as possible, using all the opportunities to be noted, seen and heard. Agree to interviews, webinars and lectures, take pictures with patients, attend professional events, and make useful contacts. The more people talk about you, the better.
7. Offer people something useful
When forming your content plan, think about what will be interesting to your target audience. In dentistry, photo and video content, before-after comparisons, history of dental restoration, description of treatment methods in simple language, removal of fears of procedures, recommendations for maintaining dental health at home are best perceived. Write in such a way that it is easy and interesting to read you: for this you can hire a specialist who will write on your theses. Texts on third-party sites or social networks must contain a link to the main blog.
8. Take care of visual content
You cannot save on visual content. For a start, one professional photo session is enough, then you can dilute the text with your own high-quality photos, examples of work. Photos are especially important if you focus on promoting through Instagram.
9. Build a positive reputation
In medicine, reputation is everything, as in a personal brand. People should perceive you as a decent and responsible professional who can be trusted. To form such an image, it is worth focusing on stability: an individual approach to each client, consistently high quality of work, and so on. If you get bad feedback, try to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
You can remove negative feedback in several cases:
- it was written by a competitor with the intention of undermining your reputation;
- violates the rules for publishing reviews on a specific site;does not contain specifics: in this case, they try to clarify the reason for the dissatisfaction, if it does not work out, the review can be deleted;
- the review has been worked out and its author has consented to its deletion.
The complete absence of negative reviews also looks unnatural. It is important to look open to communication and friendly: conduct a dialogue with patients, react to their complaints, resolving them in correspondence, in a telephone conversation or at a meeting.
10. Collaborate with opinion leaders and other doctors
See who people from your target audience are following. Offer influencers cooperation on favorable terms – paid advertising or barter.
Team up with doctors of other specialties. For example, a therapist, if necessary, refers patients to a specific surgeon, periodontist, and vice versa. In blogs, you can put links to each other, do mutual advertising.
Summary
The creation and development of a professional brand allows the dentist to gain popularity among colleagues and patients, to stand out in a narrow niche and earn much more. In addition, a personal brand works for the future: if in the future you decide to open your own clinic, there will already be a ready-made client base, and advertising will require less investment.
