The Importance Of Photography When Marketing Your Dental Practice

Custom dental photography allows you to connect with your ideal target audience and inspire them to take action. It’s also ideal for creating eye-catching ads that convert. And finally, it can also be repurposed for use on social media. In short, bespoke website imagery will always work harder than stock imagery.

However, getting unique photography is about more than just finding a good photographer. You'll also need to consider the legal side of things, including securing consent from your patients. In this guide, we'll explore why your practice needs unique photography, how you can use the images, and how to make sure you have consent.

Why do dental practices need unique imagery?

Free stock image websites like Unsplash make it easy to add high-quality images to your website and create a polished and professional look. But these images are available to everyone, so there is a good chance that countless other dental practices are doing the same thing.

From a patient’s perspective, this can make it difficult to know exactly what to expect from a practice. Their website could have slick imagery, but when they arrive, they could be greeted with a very different scene.

When you use your own unique imagery, you help patients to build an idea of what to expect. This helps to manage their expectations and enables them to build a connection with their dental practice. Honesty and openness are just some of the reasons you should consider using bespoke dental practice imagery. You can also enjoy the following benefits:

Create better ads and posts

When you have bespoke imagery at your disposal, you can repurpose it as you like. This means using it for adverts, brochures, social media posts and more. When you use bespoke imagery, you’re more likely to capture attention because you are presenting something new.

If you lean on stock images, there is a good chance your ideal target audience has seen them before. This is particularly true if they are researching treatments, as they will be visiting lots of different dental practice websites.

Show your personality

Every dental practice has its own unique personality, and this should be evident from your website and marketing imagery. Your imagery tells a story about your practice, which helps to capture the attention of your ideal target patient.

Patients looking for family dental care are likely to want a very different experience from patients looking for teeth whitening and facial aesthetics. It’s certainly possible for dental practices to offer both, and bespoke website imagery will help them to achieve this.

Build trust

Bespoke website imagery can also include patient images accompanied by testimonials. When testimonials are offered alongside before and after photos, this helps to build trust with website visitors. It demonstrates that you can offer the results that your website advertises, but also shows that you have happy patients willing to sing your praises.

The importance of consent

In order to use photos of patients on your website, you need to secure their written consent. A common problem that dental practices face occurs when their associates secure consent to use patient images, and then the dental practice assumes this consent is transferrable.

This is a mistake and could land you in trouble. Instead, you need to seek specific permission for the dental practice to use the images, not just the associate responsible for the work.

Your practice should have a procedure in place for securing consent from patients before using any of their images. This should include where you plan to use the images (so patients aren’t surprised if they see their face crop up on social media) and how long you plan to use the images.

There are plenty of online courses available to help you get your practice consent procedures on track. They will give you everything you need to create your own practice procedures and often include sample consent forms you can adapt to your needs.