Before you get started with actively marketing your dental practice, you need to make sure all of your ducks are in a row. But what does that consist of?
First, you need to make sure you have a website ready for your potential clients to land on. This is especially the case when it comes to dental SEO. You can’t really boost your search engine rankings if you don’t have a website, can you?
Once you’ve gotten your website taken care of, you can start thinking about your social media presence. You’ll want to join the major platforms and start adding people—even if it’s just friends and family to start. Customers look for social proof, so it helps to have some people following you. You also need your social media set up so you can start running ads.
Something that a lot of dentists don’t consider is their personal brand. While this may seem like an odd thing to think about for a dental practice, the way you present yourself will affect how people see your practice. For instance, if you practice pediatric dentistry and your office is boring and sterile, you may be sending mixed messages. If your office is fun and vibrant, you are expressing to both the patient and their parents that you specialize in working with kids. On the other hand, if you specialize in working with the elderly, you don’t want a bunch of toys around and kid’s shows on the TV.
This may seem like a very small thing to worry about, but when it comes to marketing the details matter. Present yourself in a way that lines up with your core client base and you’ll attract more of those kinds of clients.
Once you’ve gotten all of your ducks in a row, you can start your marketing campaign. The first step of this is gaining a better understanding of who you are trying to target…
You probably already have a general idea of what your clients look like. With that being said, you may not have really taken the time to consider what demographics they fall under. This is extremely important when it comes to running your ads, as you don’t want to blow a bunch of money advertising to the wrong people.
Depending on the type of practice you are running and your services, you may find that a specific client base visits your dental office. For instance, if you perform pediatric dentistry services, your advertising demographic will include parents. If you specialize in dentures and other replacement options, your clientele may be quite a bit older.
Beyond age, there is also income bracket, sex, location, insurance coverage, and more. You may only service clients that have private dental insurance, or you may have sliding scales for patients that are on a budget. These things matter when you are putting together your advertising campaign.
Make sure you have an excellent understanding of the people you are most likely to provide your services for. From there, you can start creating ads that target those people and make adjustments as you go.
Once you have all of your systems in place and you know who your target demographic is, it’s time to start driving traffic and getting more clients! One of the best things you can do to boost your organic traffic and get more visits to your website is to run a dental SEO campaign.
Dental SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves the use of keywords and other SEO tools to boost you organically to the top of the search engine rankings for the most popular search engines (such as Google and Bing). This is not the same as running ads, as you are not paying the search engine to place you at the top. Instead, you are leveraging the power of the algorithm to push your content higher so your customers will see your site first.
Your dental SEO campaign starts with finding the right keywords and keyword phrases. From there, you can add your location to drive more targeted traffic. As you go, you can make adjustments to your keywords and other SEO tools until you reach the top!
Another cheap and efficient way to get more clients and drive traffic to your website is through social media. The top social media sites are great lead generators. Whether you are posting photos, videos, or text, you can get your message out there essentially for free. The more people you can get to add you on social media, the more you increase the chances of them sharing your content.
While creating a social media account is free, you will likely need to run ads on social media to make sure people see your posts. A lot of social media sites will throttle your posts unless you “pay to play.” This isn’t the worst thing in the world. When you pay for ads, you can adjust your targeting and split-test ads to make sure you are reaching the right people (we’ll discuss split-testing in a moment).
A crucial element of your SEO and social media campaigns is driving your traffic to some sort of a landing page. While your homepage is an option, you’ll also want to create content that potential clients are more likely to click on and view.
For dental SEO, you’ll want to consider what your clientele is looking up and create content around that. For instance, if you perform dental implants, you’ll want to consider creating content around dental implants. This may be articles about the placement process, the costs, different types of implants, etc. From there, you can localize the content by adding your location to keywords. The goal here is for someone to see your content page at the top of the search engine. So, if they look up “dental implants Chicago,” they find your page first.
While SEO is an option to get you to the top of the rankings organically, you can always take the shortcut and pay for ads. You’ve seen these ads before—they sit at the top of the search and are marked “AD.” Running ads will obviously get you higher up on the page, but they will also cost you a lot of money. That said, you’ll get great analytics to look over.
If you want to boost your traffic and run the best marketing campaign possible, you should create a dental marketing plan that involves all of the elements discussed above. You want to make sure you have all of your bases covered for maximum exposure, growth, and sales.
Once you’ve started running your ads and creating your SEO-optimized content, you’ll need to start looking over the results and reviewing the analytics you have available to you. Thankfully, many marketing tools give you a ton of analytics to review. From there, you can pour over the results, test, and see how you can improve your dental marketing campaign to get the best results possible for the lowest cost.
When you are looking over the analytics, you are going to want to look for patterns. This includes patterns with your target demographics and the ads themselves. For instance, if you are running ads and you see that a certain demographic of people is responding better than another, you’ll want to take note of that. The same goes for how successful your ads are. Consider the views and clickthrough rate you are getting on your ads. Also, take a look at the conversions once they get to the site. You may notice an ad is getting a ton of views, but not a lot of clicks. Once you see this pattern, you can take steps to improve your metrics.
After you have launched your campaign and have started running ads, you are going to want to take those analytics that you just looked over and make adjustments. This means split-testing (A/B testing). Split-testing is essentially running multiple versions of ads and comparing the results. You pit different ads against each other, and they duke it out. You then take what you’ve learned and create a new ad, then pit that against the winner of the last battle.
The goal here is to create the most effective ad possible. In order to do this, you’ll want to start a little broader and narrow it down. Pay attention to who is clicking, and then make adjustments. So, if you are getting a lot of clicks in the 24-35 range, see what happens when you run two ads that are exactly the same, except one is focused on that age range. Then look over the results.
Also, consider the ads themselves and split-test those. This may mean swapping out the copy, the photo, the call-to-action, and so on. Run two versions of an ad with slight tweaks but leaving everything else the same. See what comes out on top, then make another small tweak and run the ad again. I know that sounds tedious, but it’s the best way to get real results.
Keep reviewing over and over again. Keep looking at the results and keep making adjustments. Narrow things down, and eventually you’ll find that you are spending a lot less money on ads while still getting great results.
Running ads can be pretty exciting once you get the hang of it. You may actually find the process of pitting two ads against each other kind of fun. With that said, you don’t want to spend too much money on ads and cause yourself financial stress.
With any marketing campaign, you need to create a budget. You then need to stick within that budget. If you notice yourself going over budget, pump the breaks and wait until the budget renews.
There is a lot that goes into running a dental marketing campaign. While you have the option of learning more about everything we discussed, putting it into practice, testing, and making adjustments, it can be time-consuming and tedious.
Instead, you may want to consider hiring a dental marketing team to take care of all of this for you. The right team will get you amazing results, while also sticking to your budget.
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