Teenagers and children with braces are among the largest categories of dental patients. From orthodonture specialists to family dentists helping to maintain the gear, dentists are constantly dealing with young patients going through a painful and often traumatizing experience.
If anyone could benefit from a little preparation for what lies ahead and how not to be afraid, it's children who will need to have braces or are currently going through the experience.
In the past, the only way to get this kind of information to kids was through television PSAs or sending people to host assemblies at the schools, but times have changed.
Here in the age of smart homes and mobile phones, children and teenagers are on the internet. They do Google searches just like everyone else for school projects, idle entertainment, and to answer questions they're afraid to ask an adult about.
This means that, oddly enough, inbound marketing techniques are the perfect way to get incredibly helpful information to your future patients and those looking for answers about the braces they already have.
Building Your Brand on Compassion and Transparency
As a dentistry practice, your brand is almost set automatically for you. The vast majority of dentists work very hard to be friendly and welcoming to reduce the irrational fear responses that people already have.
This means that you want to build your brand to be relaxed and always ready to explain a dental procedure so that it's no longer unknown and terrifying.
Explanation is, in fact, one of your best marketing tools because so many people fear what they don't know about dentistry. The tools look scary, the chair light looks scary and, let's face it, no one likes their mouths to be messed with.
Explaining what will happen and what you're doing in the process calms people down, assures them that nothing nightmarish will happen, and helps them to visualize the process outside of their own experience.
With this in mind, the vast majority of your inbound marketing can and should be focused on explaining dental processes, office tools, and neat industry inside tips with your present and future patients.
Kids Need to Know About Braces
That anyone needs braces is a reminder that perfection isn't automatic. Kids can't help if they need braces because their teeth didn't grow in correctly but they will have to put up with the years of tightening metal wires, rubber bands, and diet restrictions that come with it.
While they will be much better off for putting up with braces as children, it doesn't make the situation any less challenging or upsetting.
Unfortunately, pre-education about braces isn't something that's required in schools and some families simply don't talk about it.
In many cases, the right conversations don't happen because the parents didn't experience braces and don't know what to say or their own experiences of past orthodonture was so bad that they don't have any good advice.
Teenagers and children can glean some information during their appointments but generally, they're too busy to have a long question and answer session and there will always be those moments when something goes wrong outside the dentist's office.
Having several sources of orthodonture from more than just their friends online is incredibly useful to your younger patients.
Writing the Right Blogs
This is both the perfect opportunity to help out and to do a little inbound marketing. Blogs are one of the primary aspects of any inbound marketing campaign and are also one of the best ways for an independent source to share a lot of helpful information.
Bloggers, businesses, and non-profit organizations all use blog articles as a way to create big helpful pages of text and pictures full of completely organic SEO by the quality of the content.
By writing about the dental hygiene and orthodonture care tips that many teens will need, you can simultaneously create easy to find educational resources and increase traffic to your website on very frequently searched keywords.
The key is to know your audience, not their parents. While you shouldn't make the mistake of trying to be overly hip, remember that you're speaking to a younger audience and that they're going through something difficult or may have to in the near future.
Keep your tone friendly and reassuring and start from the beginning. You may even want to structure your blogs like lessons, as modern young people are used to the eLearning infrastructure from school and online class elements.
Allow the kids to skim around content and consider highlighting particularly important information visibly in the text to call attention to it.
Communicating Through Social Media
Your second powerful tool when sending a message of orthodonture care to online teens with braces is social media. Most modern businesses have some form of social media presence and many hire community managers to continuously engage the audience online.
While a dental practice doesn't necessarily need an enormous online following, simply posting interesting dental facts to platforms like Twitter and Facebook can catch the attention of, entertain, and educate young people all at the same time.
Strange (and useful) facts about orthodonture, for instance, with a cool picture and a link to more information is a quick and easy gateway to educating kids about braces and because people know so little about dentistry, almost everything is a cool unknown fact you can spool out over months of modest social media activity.
The Marketing Perks
Goodwill and educating the young is a wonderful way to do business and build your brand and is therefore also a great marketing approach.
Teens who seek information online about dentistry and find your social media facts or an educational blog post arranged like an eLearning course will take your information back to their parents when discussing their thoughts on dentistry.
Your website will be opened often and your brand will become an authority on making the right dental choices for young people.
The only hilarious downside to the plan is that you're likely to wind up helping and becoming known in more households than live in your area and could visit your offices. But you never know, people travel.
For more interesting advice on inbound marketing for dental practices, please contact us today.
