The last couple of dental practice owners I’ve spoken to (one became a client) said their marketing was working because they got huge traffic to their websites. When I took a closer look the bounce rate was 87%. That means 87% of visitors felt they had arrived in the wrong place and quickly left, so two bad things were happening: first, whatever was leading them to visit the site was irrelevant, and therefore wasting their time and annoying them; second, whatever the cost was to get the traffic there in the first place was a total waste of money for the dental practice owner. Worse, it was money spent on subtly antagonising people who, one day, might have been potential customers.
This is fairly typical in independent businesses the size of dental practices because they have a reasonable budget for marketing yet usually can’t afford to hire a professional to manage the marketing channels, who understands the contribution of each channel. The key question in the above scenario is: what channels are you using to get this terrible result, why are they not performing for you, and what other channels might work better? People tend to look at the top layer of analytics such as unique visitors, and forget about what the core mission of marketing activity is: to get people in your catchment area to become paying clients. You don’t want people to bounce off your website and similarly you don’t want to be paying for people who live too far away to be reading your content. What’s the point?
There’s no point spending anything on marketing unless you come back to performance and return on investment. One practice I know had an effective content strategy for search optimisation (meaning the website would perform well in Google rankings), it even had blogs on premium sites like Huffington Post. It meant the practice looked like a top brand for emergency dentistry in York, and performed really well in Liverpool for the phrases like “get me out of tooth pain”. Neither of which were helpful to browsers in those locations because the practice was located in London, and so these impressive achievements were worth naught to the business. The marketing strategy wasn’t thought through in any detail.
To go back to the two practices I mentioned above, neither owner was aware of the difference between traffic and useful traffic. A careful use of digital marketing channels makes all the difference here. Before paying for any advertising for your practice, the strategy must make sense and objectives must be set. For it to make sense, channel capability must be understood.
Channel capability
Customers can be broken down into three types:
a) Existing or lapsed patients — They have bought, are considering or are going to buy from you.
b) Competitor’s patients — They’ve bought or are going to buy from your competitors.
c) Potential new patients — They have not yet bought from either you or your competitor. They haven’t heard of you. They now have or will have a need for a service like yours and may or may not know it.
If we consider Invisalign for a moment, it’s a brand that will sell itself, but very competitive and the reality is that you will have to accept a lower margin to get the new patient. This is OK if you are able to sell complementary treatments such as hygiene and the like but typically you’re attracting the sort of customer who’ll continue to look around for something better the next time they’re looking for treatment — and by that I mean cheaper. Your existing patients are a goldmine and you will also need to focus the right channels to remind them about treatments you offer and extract that gold.
Search Marketing (SEO & PPC)
If you can figure out what potential patients with a high propensity to convert might be searching for your brand and get your content more visible to that audience with Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click you will be on to a winner. Get your site in order, write content that answers that need and get quality links and you’ve got a chance of making that first connection with someone who might become a patient. But it’s hard to not fall into the trap of pumping out boring, generic material about national oral health awareness week and so on. Here are five tips on how to write less boring blogs.
PPC allows you to pay to be visible anywhere that SEO doesn’t. It also has an advantage over other forms of advertising in that search engines disguise it so up to 60% of people don’t know they are clicking a sponsored advert so there’s a lot of opportunities there. Typically, dental marketers focus their spending on big money keywords. Experimenting with lower PPC terms that bolster visibility at the top of the funnel can also provide valuable returns.
Content marketing
Content marketing is such a wide and varied channel including video, reviews and articles, it’s hard to give any sort of overview. It is fair to say that when done well it is possible to get highly emotive and useful content in front of potential new patients who have never heard of you before. The key is to measure performance and this is almost never as simple as click conversion.
Social media advertising
Social media advertising has claimed similar legitimacy to paid search in recent years, particularly during lockdown but the reality is that it’s not always the most efficient way of reaching new patients. It is much better at reaching the sort of people who may have already decided to purchase from you or your competitors. Facebook advertising is hugely powerful but performance varies by treatment type as well as by geography. It also increases enquiries through other channels, skewing performance metrics, which underscores how well you need to understand what’s really going on in order to work out what return you’re getting.
Social media publishing
Social media is an interesting channel in that different people often mean completely different things using the term. In some ways it can be an exciting way to get eyeballs on your brand but few practices are creative and brave enough to use it well. Most of the time, social media for dental brands means stale, generic posts with nothing to say. Avoid being just another one of these like the plague. You’re better off posting way less frequently and trying to focus on keeping whatever you do say authentic and relevant to your readers. The bottom line is that for most practices, social media accounts are followed only by existing patients, randoms and bots. They are not able to reach and convert new patients.
If you were to introduce a new tactic here, make a policy of following all your new enquiries, and making all your posts relevant to them (and only them) and see what happens. Good luck, and if you need support or just a no obligation chat you know where we are.
