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Your web site has to capture the attention of those who buzz by.
Around 2007 I invested time with Krishan Joshi and the team at Dental Focus in listing the essential ingredients of an effective web site.
The Dental Focus home page still contains that material and a new, updated version is in the pipeline over at DF as I write this.
To summarise:
Profile
People
Premises
Prices
Promises
Proof
Products
Places
Phones
Publicity
and a visit to the aforementioned site (just scroll down their home page) will explain more on each of those 10 P’s of web design.
Weaving Human Interest Marketing into that design has now become an essential way to positively differentiate yourself in a world of noise.
Here are some simple tips:
Focus on the patients and not on yourself. Take a look at http://tenimplantcentre.com for a perfect example of the point. Nick and Martin at Ten Dental in Clapham have made a superb job of this implant micro-site by bringing their own patient stories to life
Never use stock photos – the public are savvy and can recognise them a mile off. Follow the lead from http://www.thesmilespa.co.uk and ensure that every aspect of your marketing, from web design to internal photographs in the practice utilise real patient images;
Make extensive use of high quality video to tell your story. It still amazes me that Marcos White from The Courtyard Dental in Huddersfield captured this principle years ago with this video and yet the style has hardly re-appeared on any other UK site since.
What these sites have in common is a passion about their patients and not necessarily about themselves.
When I sat down with the Dental Focus team this summer to begin the conversation that led to the new Coach Barrow web site, I was inspired by Ten Dental and instructed Maddy to keep me off my own web site – “make it about the clients” was my request – “make it about the patients” has to be yours.
For your web site to be sticky – tell human interest stories about real people.