Photo by Cameron Cassan. CC BY 2.0.

Many dentists regard marketing as a necessity and therefore not always something they need to ‘embrace’. For dental marketing to work effectively, it needs to be a ‘state of mind’, it requires a strong, consistent, long term communication of your Unique Selling Points (USPs).

To do this, one of the first things is to develop a dental website. With all the dental websites out there now, you need to stand out by communicating USPs with patients in mind. The website content should be interesting, exciting and worth knowing about.

A dental logo is not a brand. It is only a brand element. To transform your brand is not just about redesigning your logo or the ‘look’ of your website. A dental brand is about who you are and how you do things – your USPs. A patient may think that they can transform their smile, but we all know that afterwards, behind that smile is essentially the same person.

We help you develop your USPs by emphasizing your strengths i.e. the dentistry expertise, the practice, the people, the treatments and the value you are offering people. The market has become crowded with “me-too” competitors. Unless you just want to sell on ‘low price’, this is no way forward. We believe in dental marketing that enables patients to see your particular ‘point of difference’ as valid and valuable.

Always beware, of finding yourself saying the same things in the same way as other dentists. It pays dividends to talk not only about your own dental services but also about your own particular dental expertise. In other words – what makes you different? In fact, we feature on many of our dental websites a page called “Why Choose Us”. The most important USPs are about the patient experience – how will the treatment, people, environment and communication be different at your dental practice?

Remember, a website is only a reflection of you, your brand, your USPs!

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – the Internet Marketing Secrets of “WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.

In order to measure the length of anybody’s attention span in doing any activity, the type of activity undertaken will affect the result. Someone is obviously capable of a longer attention span when they are doing something that is enjoyable and/or intrinsically motivating.

Therefore if a dental website was dull and uninteresting, someone’s visit to that site is going to be a lot shorter than it would be with a well designed website. Furthermore their attention span will be further decreased if the website is found to be difficult to navigate and it is slow to download sections. Frustration certainly shortens a person’s attention span.

The web has allowed people to develop incredibly short attention spans. This is because everyone knows that there are always other sites that they can look at, with similar information. In fact, there are many different ways to find these different websites: Search Engines, Directory sites, Price Comparison sites, Social Networking sites etc – they all offer a huge amount of data on services available.

Consequently it’s now a bit like a small boy being let loose for hours in a sweet shop. With the internet too, you are spoilt for choice. Therefore if you see a site with a long, long introduction on the home page set out in a tiny type size, are you going to take the time to read it, or go somewhere else? Initially, most people are not particularly loyal and faithful when it comes to websites. But once someone finds a site that gives them the information they want, in an easy to understand way, that person will keep coming back.

A dental website design strives to achieve the main dental marketing objective: ‘conversions’. A ‘conversion’ is where people (as a result of visiting a website) actually pick up the phone to make an enquiry (or they pay a personal visit to find out more). To increase ‘conversions’ we ensure a site is as highly ranked as possible on Search Engines and then the site design itself works to ‘convert’ each site visitor into an enquiry. This is mainly achieved by lengthening the site visitor’s attention span.

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – the Internet Marketing Secrets of “WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.

Positive psychology is a more recent branch of psychology that “studies the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive”.

We seek to adapt and utilize this for the visual communication of ‘positive values’ in our web designs for dentists, as this forms the basis of an effective dental marketing strategy. Positive psychologists seek “to find and nurture genius and talent”, in other words, to find the positive and “to maximize this, making normal life more fulfilling”.

Therefore we set out to find positive, aspirational images of places, people and situations that are relevant to Dental Care. A good web designer is taught: “Always show the benefits and the positives”.

The theories of human flourishing developed by humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Eric Fromm, have found much support from positive psychologists. How do we humanize every situation to make it accessible and achievable? This is the challenge facing the web designers at Dental Focus on a daily basis, as we communicate Dental Marketing values. I taught design once to ‘disaffected’ youths and I found Positive Psychology to be the way forward. To identify in each individual learner his strengths, the things he enjoyed and excelled at, rather than the negatives that had got him in to trouble. Design is about expression, so we express visually the ‘positives’. It worked for me with troublesome teenagers, and it certainly works with professional Dental Practices (who I find a lot less troublesome!). In fact with dental website design, we achieve some quite startling results!

Positive emotions, engagement, and higher hopes are all central to good web design and to Positive Psychology.

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – the Internet Marketing Secrets of “WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.

“My mate has offered to do my website”. We hear this a lot, and we are very pleased that the level of ‘online literacy & knowledge’ is forever increasing. This, in turn, will also mean that so is the level of the online sophistication of the ‘audience’.

Dental Marketing and web design are both highly specialized areas. That is why a proven track record is so important. To know what works and what doesn’t work. Would you have a serious medical operation done by a friend who was an inexperienced doctor ‘dabbling’ in surgery? Okay, you could rightly argue that an ineffective website is not as serious as a limb dropping off. It may not be life threatening, but are you happy to hemorrhage money from your dental practice and spurn commercial business opportunities?

It’s true that few websites are absolute disasters. But there are so many which are losing traffic, losing potential business and not attracting enough visitors. This loss of revenue just steadily mounts up.

Your core brand proposition is crucial, and has to be expressed effectively through your web design. So web design is not just about pretty pictures and technical knowledge, it’s also about marketing savvy. We first need to judge how and why your Dental Marketing objectives can be met. The brand, the content, the proposition and the design all have crucial roles to play in meeting the visitor’s expectations and requirements.

Every visitor to your website is looking for something specific and you have about 10 seconds to engage them before they might leave. So the first page that they see on your Website must work visually and functionally to draw them in.

As well as attracting attention, a website builds your credibility. This can be done through a combination of Testimonials, Smile galleries, Before and After photos, biographies etc.

At the end of the day, your website has a specific job to do: Dental Marketing. You wouldn’t ever knowingly use anything sub-standard to do any important job, would you? That would be like you borrowing a bucket with holes in it, to carry water? Please make sure your dental website is not letting you down.

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – the Internet Marketing Secrets of “WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.

There are a number of elements that make up a great dental website design, but one of the most misunderstood and misused is space, whether white or not. The objective of a web site must be to communicate information, with clarity and confidence in an interesting way.

Although, most designs have space, often not enough, or not in the right place. This could be because demanding clients often see space as being ‘empty’, therefore being a waste. In fact space might be one of their most valuable assets. ‘Less is more’ when communicating a message, indeed my lecturer at Art & Design College, once told me (when talking about visual design) “Be brief, however long it takes”.

Space is simply the empty space between and around the elements of a design or page layout, around graphics and images, margins and gutters, space between columns, and even the space between lines of type. By increasing the space between elements in a layout, a design can gain clarity and elegance. Text that is cramped and with minimal line spacing can be very difficult to read.

Web site visitors generally have quite short attention spans. So the information needs to be concise and easy to read, avoid too much ‘scrolling’ on a page. Bullet points are effective, because each one has some space around it.

Paper is seen as a valuable resource and clients will often want to use every inch of it. The same seems apply to a computer screen, which is why being generous with space will speak volumes about your message. It is a way of saying that the content is far more valuable than the area it sits on.

Space gives the reader a chance to breathe and helps to focus on what is being said. It works rather like good punctuation and good use of language, it influences the meaning of text and can give a website greater impact and clarity.

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – the Internet Marketing Secrets of “WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.

Its always been assumed that ‘thinking outside the box’ is wild and the most truly creative. Well no it isn’t really, when compared with solving problems by employing well used imagery and existing information, but in original ways. This is far more tricky. Take great art for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’, did he start with a ‘blank canvas’ (metaphorically)? Did he invent all the characters and the actual event? No, he portrayed what was thought to have happened to a ‘brief’ from his patron (the church).  He did however do it in an original way, by using facial expressions and gestures, more effectively then ever before (but he was definitely thinking ‘inside the box’). Even when he ‘invented’ the helicopter by making drawings of one, he based them on a well known medieval toy that kids threw about at the time and he modified it. He was again thinking from inside the box.

Being creative, especially in the field of design, is thinking ‘inside the box’. Otherwise you are wasting people’s time. The answer (or design solution) is nearly always sitting somewhere within the original question. If a dentist wants a new website for dental marketing purposes that is unique, we’ll investigate and read through all the information provided. Inevitably we find that each practice is individual in numerous ways. These ‘points of difference’ provide the basis for a unique dental website design.

As a Creative Director, I used to mentor young designers and I found it was a question of letting them learn through experience and honest feedback. Consumer research, gives you great feedback from the ‘man or woman in the street’, not from other supposedly ‘brilliant’, ‘creative’ thinkers. This way you just hear what people honestly think of your design. After all, it is these people that you designed it for in the first place. A website has to appeal to it’s audience, not try and win a Turner prize. It has a job to do and the term ‘design’ these days means: getting something to work functionally and visually. Our dental websites both function and catch the eye. The E-Type Jag is a beautiful classic car, but would it have been so admired if it only went at 10 miles an hour? Our websites perform well, they rank high for Search Engine Optimization, as well as look good. We achieve this by thinking firmly from ‘inside the box’.

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – the Internet Marketing Secrets of “WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.

What is the primary purpose of a dental website? Rather like the packaging for a product tells us what’s inside the tin (or pack), a dental website tells us what’s inside the practice.

The designers’ objective (whether of packaging or a website) is always to ‘add value’ to the contents, whether to an effective cleaning product or to an excellent dental practice. But how, you may ask? By emphasizing the positive ‘points of difference’ or the ‘Unique Selling Points’ (USP’s). These can work for brands on both ‘functional’ and ‘emotional’ levels. We all try to make the ‘great upward leap’, a psychological term first coined by Adler, a close friend of Freud (but no relation of mine). Basically we all aspire to better things than we currently have, a nicer car, a new yummier chocolate, a better dentist. The purpose of a dental website is not only to tell the site visitor what a dental practice has to offer, but also to add value to it by drawing the visitor’s attention to it’s benefits. These could be the treatments, a special offer, the beautiful location etc. Each dental website is unique, featuring each individual dentist’s logo, practice photos, staff details and treatments, creating an effective, unique ‘brand presence’.

It is the primary, most cost effective form of marketing available to most dentists. Whereas a product in a tin may be a big brand (i.e. Heinz). This can rely on advertising, packaging, PR, website, sponsorship etc. Whereas the ‘visible face’ of a dental practice, is often the website and, maybe also, the actual practice with the sign outside it. But with the World Wide Web, you don’t have to worry about distribution channels or national TV campaigns. A huge audience will see your dental practice, including somebody in Australia (if they wanted to). It is our job, to narrow this down, to target the right audience i.e. those living nearby who are interested in dental services.

It’s our job therefore to make each dentist’s website relevant to it’s audience, by stressing it’s benefits, location etc. No two practices are the same, ‘one size does not fit all’. Marketing, psychology and design principals apply to the web, as with all forms of media, we strive to say exactly what the dental practice does ‘on the website’, but not ‘on the tin’.

Adrian Adler is “the Wizard” at Dental Focus Web Design.

We’d love to hear from you and have a discussion – please leave a comment and rate us!

And remember to subscribe to our blog by e-mail so you can get all our dental marketing ideas immediately – Internet Marketing Secrets of “the WOW websites that find you and convert you!”

If you would like some free advice, Email Us or call 020 7183 8388.