Emma Rodgers is director of communications at 

. She is passionate about the intersection of health care and technology. NexHealth is a suite of telehealth tools that helps hospitals, private doctors, and dentists operate their practices.

Emma Rodgers 

 showed that the average cost of a private dental school program was $67,087—not to mention another 4 years of schooling after you complete your undergraduate degree.

You want to do right by your patients and do your best to serve them. And of course, you want to justify your substantial investment of time and money by turning your dental practice into a thriving business.

How do you do that? Before someone can become your dental patient, they have to trust you. The best way to establish that trust is by demonstrating your expertise.

is a good way to show your knowledge as a dentist, offer useful information to your patients, and position yourself as an expert in your field. Here are some blogging tips unique to dental practices to help get you started.

People joke that blogs are a waste of time; that blogging is a “joke job.” The truth is that successful bloggers put in a lot of time and effort to produce effective content.

That being said, having a blog just for the sake of having one is not a good use of your time and energy. It’s better to have specific goals in mind. What do you want to achieve with your blog?

Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Find new patients? Have more content to share on your social media platforms?

When you set about creating your blog strategy, it’s important to have goals that are S.M.A.R.T: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Once you have some goals for your blog and have some content ideas in mind, the next step is to start posting. Get into a rhythm and flow of posting consistently just a couple of times a month.

This will help you get into the habit of consistent content creation. Start slow—try out different types of content and just see what works. Include actionable self-care tips and answers to your patients’ most common questions. Share new industry insight or trends which show that you’re at the top of your field. Find your voice and personal blogging style.

Try posting twice a month for the first 6 months. See how people react, and what content brings you the most inbound web traffic.

Google likes to see websites that are updated frequently with fresh content. After you’ve successfully posted content twice a month for 6 months, try posting once a week.

A good practice is to have at least a month’s worth of content in your backlog repository. That way, you can publish consistently while writing more to replace it.

A blog is essentially a product of your dental practice. If you want it to work for you, you need to treat it with the same time and attention as you would any other product.

As of 2019, there are 200,419 dentists in the entire 

. That’s roughly 60 for every 100,000 people. How are you going to stand out in that crowd?

You do that by positioning yourself as an expert: demonstrate your knowledge in a way that shows your patients how you measure up to other dentists in your community.

Educate your patients with your own original findings and research. You can also post case studies that showcase the successful procedures you’ve done.

Of course, you could also interview industry experts and ask them questions. Pick their brains, draw out their knowledge, and share it with your patients.

One of the best ways you can use your blog is by answering your patients’ questions about their dental health and oral hygiene.

Browse your social media and your email CRM, and identify what questions pop up most frequently. You could also survey your patients and find out what questions are at the top of their mind when they come to visit you.

Turn that information into content. Create a FAQ post on your blog that answers all the most commonly-occurring questions.

An example could be tutorials such as “How to floss properly” or “Five ways to make sure your teeth stay white.”

As we learned earlier, blogging is an ambitious venture. If it grows the way you hope, it will eventually be too big for you to manage on your own.

That’s when you’re going to need to bring other people in to help manage your blog for you. Hire freelance content writers to help produce content on your behalf, so you can focus on the business of running your clinic.

Alternatively, you can invite guest bloggers to make content for you in return for an 

If hiring people or inviting guest bloggers isn’t an option for you, you can circulate your editorial calendar and ask your staff to write posts from time to time.

Once you’ve produced the content, you have to promote it on social media to keep your patients updated on new posts.

For this, you can use social media automation tools such as Later, Hootsuite, and Juicier.io to automate and streamline the process of sharing your posts on your social media or website.

Ever hear the phrase “I’d rather get a root canal”?

People have negative associations with going to the dentist. A 2018 study showed that more than 

 have fear or anxiety at the thought of going to the dentist.

Your blog can be a great place to help your patients overcome the fear and anxiety they feel when they come to visit you.

Try explaining your procedures in practical, matter-of-fact ways, such as “Here’s what happens when your teeth get fitted for braces.” People are less afraid of procedures they understand. Show them what to expect and assure them they’re in good hands.

Your blog is where your patients are going to find information about what you do. Educate them, and give them useful, easily understood advice.

Tips on good oral hygiene practices can be very educational. Try topics like “The best brushing techniques to keep your teeth as clean as they can be.”

You can also review products that you give out after your patients’ teeth cleanings—for example, “Which toothpaste is the best for fighting cavities?”

Dental jargon is often confusing for patients. Try defining different health conditions such as gingivitis, periodontal disease, plaque and more. You could incorporate these into a roundup post like “Ten Dental Health Problems You Want to Avoid.”

Incorporating common dental problems into your content could give you an SEO boost; as people search for these definitions on Google, they can come across your blog post and discover your practice.

Moreover, educating your patients with your blog content helps you build a relationship with them. It demonstrates that you care about their oral hygiene before they even come to visit you, thereby establishing trust. Trust is how you get your patients to keep coming back.

This tip ties back into how most people are afraid of going to the dentist. Your patients will be less afraid to visit you if they know more about you as a person.

Your blog is a great place for your patients to get to know more about you and your practice. Feature profiles on you and everyone on your staff, or try a “Day in the Life of a Dentist” series of blog posts.

Humanizing your practice in this way will help make you and your dental clinic more approachable, which will make your patients feel comfortable with you and want to return.

At the end of the day, you are writing for an audience—a group of people (in this case, prospective patients) with a set of predetermined wants, feelings, and needs.

So, as you go about planning your blog, you need to be constantly asking yourself what your patients want to read.

What questions do you hear most in the office? Are there topics you wish you had more time to explain when patients are in your chair?

Above all else, strive to help your patient with your blog, just as you would when they come in for a visit.

As a dentist, you are uniquely positioned to help people maintain their health with your blog. You can provide them with practical advice, give them easy-to-follow tips on brushing or flossing, share industry insights that inform them of the latest trends in dentistry, or just show them who you are behind the face mask.

To sum up, here are some tips you can follow to help your blog grow with your dentist practice:

Articles

Dentists are uniquely positioned to help people maintain their health by providing practical advice, tips and industry insights with useful blog posts.

10 Blogging Tips Unique For Dentistry

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been difficult for everyone.

This global public health crisis has forced us to fundamentally reevaluate how our society works. Industries have had to innovate to stay in business as the economy ground to a halt, while doing their part to flatten the curve.

Health care workers were hardest hit. They are the soldiers fighting on the front lines of a war against an unseen enemy.

, nurses, and physicians are at the highest risk of exposure, and are most in need of protection. Personal protective equipment has been in short supply since the beginning of the pandemic. Health care practices, dental clinics and hospitals have had to balance the needs of their patients with the safety of their frontline staff.

How do we accomplish that? The answer is to create a contactless patient experience that removes exposure, keeping risk of COVID-19 transmission to a minimum.

Benefits of a Contactless Patient Experience

Patients often delay visiting the dentist because it is seen as an unpleasant experience. A 2019 consumer health care trends report showed 80% of patients select providers based solely on convenience.

Contactless patient experiences are more convenient than in-person visits. Patients can join their appointments with a couple of clicks on their laptops or smartphones. They can book appointments, ask questions, fill out paperwork, and pay for their visits, using the same online portal.

Creating a contactless patient experience is a good way to endear yourself to patients and gain an advantage over other local dental clinics. Why would someone spend an hour at an in-person visit when they can consult with you from home?

Keeping patients satisfied with their relatively painless virtual appointments will help ensure patient retention.

The administrative functions of running a dental clinic are formidable, before the actual work of caring for patients.

Using online forms to upload patients’ insurance, medical history, and billing information provides a more streamlined user experience.

You can use teledentistry software to automate time-consuming tasks, including follow-ups, booking, and appointment reminders. Using emails and SMS texting reminders will help patients keep their appointments.

This lets you spend more time, energy and resources on patient care. You no longer need front desk staff to manage invoices or coordinate your schedule.

Patients are more likely to pay bills in a timely fashion if they can easily do so online rather than having to mail a check. Moving toward cashless, online payment will not only get money to your clinic faster, but will increase your return on investment (ROI) by eliminating processing fees.

Moving your billing, appointments, and scheduling to a virtual workspace will improve tracking and reporting. You will be able to see what aspects of your dental practice are operating at maximum efficiency, and to remove any bottlenecks.

Patients no longer feel safe or comfortable visiting their local dental clinic unless necessary. They do not want to risk exposure to a potentially fatal disease.

Hospitals, doctors’ offices, and dental clinics are seen as possibilities for exposure to COVID-19. Emergency department patient volume dropped to between 30% and 60% in 2020 for non–COVID-related cases.

With telehealth software and digital forms, you will be able to give patients a mobile experience. They will be able to manage most of their dental care from their devices.

Your staff can assess the needs of patients during a video consultation, and limit
in-person visits to necessary cases. This reduces the physical and emotional burden on your staff that comes from remaining open during the pandemic.

This allows time to more thoroughly screen each patient for COVID-19 symptoms and disinfect patients before an in-person visit. This process ties into patient satisfaction. If your clinic is not providing a safe experience, your patients will find another that does.

Creating a Contactless Patient Experience

We are fortunate to live in a time when many tasks that would have required a physical presence just 10 years ago can now be done remotely, thanks to teledentistry software.

Teledentistry refers to software that allows you to conduct appointments virtually. The goal is to minimize physical contact with patients as much as possible, making visits more convenient for patients and less risky for you.

Your best bet is a teledentistry solution that creates a mobile-first experience, allowing patients to check in, schedule visits, communicate with you, and pay bills from their smartphones.

Implementing mobile-first teledentistry will also enable patients to book on demand. This reduces the need for front desk staff, which saves on administrative costs and improves your ROI. Teledentistry can also make in-person visits more efficient. If patients make a prior appointment online to discuss their needs, you can be more informed about their concerns when they do visit the office.

Paperwork, or even electronic sign-in forms on a tablet passed among patients, creates a risk of infection for you, your patients, and your staff.

The solution? Use online forms to collect insurance information, identification, and billing information.

 to patients electronically prior to their appointment, and collect their information before their prescreening calls.

Automate your workflows by sending email and SMS text reminders ahead of appointments, and ask patients to complete all intake and medical history forms online before their visit.

Patients now expect to be billed on the same platform they use for appointments. Why would they send a check in the mail when they could pay for dental visits online with a few taps on a screen?

Giving your patients the option of cashless, contactless payment, 

helps patients to feel in control of their health and their spending.

Online payments reduce the average days until payment by half, because patients don’t have to wait for their bills in the mail. When they receive their bills digitally, they are more likely to pay on time, and you receive payment faster.

Cashless payments also eliminate the physical touchpoints that carry the risk of possible COVID-19 transmission. That reduces the risk for everyone involved.

Configure your invoices so that they are sent automatically by text or email when the visit concludes. This will make it easy for patients to pay for their appointments, so that the money reaches your account faster.

COVID-19 has brought about a strange time. A common joke involves comparing life during COVID-19 to a disaster movie, and people unironically refer to the prepandemic world as “The Before Times.”

People are scared and worn out from the uncertainty. They are turning to you to maintain their oral health throughout the pandemic. If you give them a fast, easy and convenient patient experience, they will reward you.

Transitioning to a contactless patient experience provides increased patient satisfaction, improved efficiency for your practice, and reduced risk of COVID-19 exposure.

Ways you can implement a contactless patient experience include the following:

Choose a teledentistry solution that lets patients manage their care on their mobile devices and book on demand.

Use online forms to automate the process of collecting medical history and insurance information.

Use cashless payment systems to reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure, expedite the payment process and improve your ROI.

Transitioning to a contactless patient experience provides increased patient satisfaction, improved efficiency for your dental practice, and reduced risk of COVID-19 exposure.