Marketing Tools You Can Use to Your Advantage

As a dental professional, you’re constantly bombarded by marketing and sales folks telling you what your practice needs and why. There are so many tools available to you that it can be hard to figure out which ones your practice should be using and why. Today we’re going to dive in and chat about six great, easy-to-use marketing tools that can be a game changer for your practice.

1. Canva.com – If you do not have an in-house graphic designer, have no fear, Canva can save the day! Canva has all the tools you need to design graphics for projects big and small. The best part, you don’t need any design skills, it’s a lot of dragging and dropping into pre-created templates. You get graphics that look sleek, modern, and are easy for virtually everyone to create. You can do a 30 day free trial and then pay $9.95/month billed yearly, or you can use the completely free version with limited access to some templates. Either way, it’s a great tool to have access to.

2. Wistia.com – The best hosting platform and marketing tools for creative video marketers. You can create customized videos by putting your brand front and center. You can customize the colors and controls to suit your needs, and include your brand’s logo to make the player your own. They include automated video SEO which helps to drive traffic back to pages on your website. They also integrate with about 60 different companies, making it easier to generate, segment and nurture your leads from videos! It’s free for business video beginners and pioneers, with a limit of three videos a month.

3. Emailonacid.com – If you’re sending out marketing emails, email on acid is a life saver! They are your campaign precheck which gives you a chance to do some quality assurance before you send a massive number of emails to your patients. You’re able to test your email so you can see how it looks for 70+ different clients (think Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) and how it renders on a variety of devices (iPhone 5, 6, 10, Android etc.). You’re also able to check deliverability, measure results and test results, AKA check to see if your messages are going to SPAM before you send! You can pay $44/ month or $528/annually (billed once).

4. Bit.ly – Are you ever on Facebook and see really long URLs that look a little like this: UTM_=?CAMPAIGN/sadfkha;sdfhjsaf? This happens a lot when people just copy and paste their one-off links onto their social pages. With Bit.ly, you’re able to customize your link and shorten it, to make it cleaner and easier on the eyes. You can create custom links that carry your brand across multiple devices, you can track link analytics, measure campaign performance, and you can optimize the link for the right user experience. For a basic level account which is most likely all you’d need, this tool is free.

5. Asana.com – Do multiple people work on various marketing projects within your practice? In a small business, it’s common for employees to wear multiple hats. Asana is a work management platform that teams use to stay focused on their goals, projects, and daily tasks so you can stay organized. With Asana, you can set your own priorities and deadlines, assign tasks to others, and keep track of various roadblocks within projects. They offer tiered pricing but there is a basic package for free with the business level being as low as $19.99 per user, per month.

6. Mailchimp.com – Mailchimp was created to help you create unique marketing campaigns, connect your favorite tools, automate your practice content, and optimize your efforts. They do everything from email marketing to landing pages to running Facebook and Instagram ads! It’s free to get up and running, with level up features starting at $10/month and if you’re feeling like being a pro, $199/month.

All of these services are free to use and if you enjoy them you can get them on a service-based model. They are all valuable tools to have in your tool kit so that you make sure you’re putting your best foot forward with your marketing efforts.

—Alexis Mallos, Sr. Marketing Manager, Sesame Communications