Dental Marketing Direct

Digital Marketing for Dental Offices

Online Advertising

5 Online Advertising Ratios Every Dentist Should Know

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Most dentists outsource their online advertising campaigns to a dental marketing firm which then reports to them the results of the campaign. This is where your knowledge of marketing will be tested because these reports are full of technical terms and abbreviations. You must understand the meaning of each of those metrics to evaluate the performance of any marketing campaign. In this post we explain 5 ppc advertising KPI’s that every dentist must understand.

dentist advertising KPIs

Click-through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the ratio of clicks on your advert to the number of impressions it has received. This metric is very important for pay per click advertising specially Google Adwords. Google Adwords uses quality score in its ad ranking methodology and CTR is the main factor in quality score. A higher CTR means that your ad will get a better placement and cost less per click. Thus you will get more traffic in your budget.

Cost per Lead

The cost per conversion or cost per lead is simply the total cost of the campaign divided by the number of leads. This metric is very important to understand the efficiency of your campaign in terms of driving calls, form submits and other actions. A cost per lead that is too high would result in an unprofitable campaign. Therefore you must keep an eye on this number and make sure it meets your agreed targets.

Click to Lead Conversion Rate

As the name suggests this ratio gives the number of leads per click and is often expresses as a percentage. This metric helps gauge the effectiveness of the website or landing page used in the campaign in converting traffic to leads. In order to produce a low cost per lead, a high click to lead conversion rate is crucial specially for competitive dental procedures like cosmetic dentistry.

Lead to Appointment Conversion Rate

Similar to the click to lead ratio, this one gives the number of appointments resulting from each lead. Since this ratio is less than 1, it is usually expressed as a percentage. Your marketing campaign will be unprofitable if you cannot close enough leads and convert them into dental appointments. This KPI will help you gauge the quality of the leads as well as the phone skills of your receptionist.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

This KPI represents the gross profit resulting from a campaign to all the cost associated with running and managing the campaign. It is similar to the ratio return on investment (ROI) used to compare different investments. ROAS helps you evaluate the overall efficiency of your marketing campaign. A negative ROAS means you lost money whereas an ROAS of 100% means you made a gross profit equal to your marketing campaign cost. For any marketing campaign you should aim to hit at least 100% ROAS.

If you are struggling to make sense of your advertising results, or you need to improve your dental marketing campaigns, please request a free consultation.

7 Tips to Get More Dental Patients with Facebook Ads

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Facebook Advertising is a great to way to promote your dental office online and get generate new patients at a reasonable cost. However, the Facebook ad platform can be very confusing for a first time user and you can waste a lot of money testing strategies that do no work. In this post we share some useful tips to help you get a jump-start on your Facebook advertising campaigns.

facebook ads logo

Create a Special Offer

Facebook is a social network where people log in to keep in touch with their friends, play games, join communities, share pictures and comment on them. Buying stuff is the last thing they have in mind. Therefore, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. This means your ad must be powerful enough to distract a user from their usual activity on Facebook. One of the best ways to make your advertising powerful is to create a discount offer. Ideally, your special offer should be unique and available for a limited time/quantity so that people are compelled to take immediate action else risk losing the discount. Special offers are the secret behind the most successful Facebook ad campaigns.

Use News-feed Ads

Facebook offer several different ad formats but the best ad format by far is definitely news-feed ads. The news-feed format is any sponsored content that appears in a user’s Facebook timeline and is therefore hard not to notice. News-feed ads work equally well on all devices and thus should be your main focus.

Refine Your Audience Targeting

In order to get the best ROI from Facebook, you must show your ad to qualified users only i.e. people who may be interested in your dental offer. Facebook allows you to target user using any of their many targeting options.

Custom Audience: Use email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to create and save audiences you’d like to show your ads to. Learn more about Custom Audiences.

Location, Age, Gender and Language: Choose the basic demographics of the audience you want to reach.

Interests: Choose specific interests that are important to your audience. These are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

Behaviors: Select people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. These behaviors are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

More Categories: Select people based on any Facebook or partner categories you’ve requested access to. Keep in mind that some data is only available to advertisers in the U.S.

Connections: Select your audience based on whether or not they’re connected to any of your Pages, apps or events. Anyone who has a friend connected to what you’re advertising will see their friend included in your ad. This can increase the likelihood that they’ll find your ad relevant enough to click on or engage with it.

Using these targeting criteria you have to create 3-4 different audiences that would be most likely to be interested in visiting a dentist. For e.g. a demographic you could target is moms aged 25-45 who like Delta Dental Facebook page and reside in the same zip code as your dental office. Another target audience could be males/females aged 25-55 who have recently moved into your town or zip code.

Use Before and After Images

As mentioned earlier, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. Therefore you must use images that grab the user’s attention as they are their news-feed content. Before and after images are perfect for attracting attention from prospective dental patients who may be suffering from a similar dental problem. For instance a teeth whitening ad could use a before and after treatment photo of your patient’s mile demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment. The image would captivate the attention of users who also have yellow teeth and want to whiten them. They would definitely take your offer more seriously than if there was no before after photo in the ad.

Use Facebook Re-marketing Ads

Facebook Remarketing allows you to re-target visitors who left your website without completing a conversion action (such as appointment for submission or call or brochure download). These users will be tagged with a special cookie and will be shown your ad when they log in to their Facebook account. You can use remarketing to pitch a different offer or different price point to convert visitors who did not convert with the initial offer.

Use CPC Bidding and Conversion Tracking

Facebook offers its users the option to either pay for clicks using CPC bids or pay for impressions using CPM bids. For the most part you should avoid CPM bidding until you have found an incredible offer and matching audience. You must also use Facebook conversion tracking in all your campaigns to compare results of different offers and audiences. You can then pause campaigns that results in a high cost per patient acquisition and reallocate that budget to campaigns that produce a high conversion rate.

Use Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are the missing piece in many under-performing Facebook campaigns. Each offer should have a different landing page that is optimized for conversions (calls or form submits). You should use different landing pages for computers and mobile devices because user behavior on the two devices is quite different. e.g. forms with several fields do not work very well on mobile devices and should be avoided on mobile landing pages.

Try to look at some competitor landing pages to get an idea of what is working and then add some of your own ideas to come up with different designs that can then be A/B tested with the offer to optimize the conversion rate of your Facebook ad campaigns.

How to Create a Killer Discount Offer for Your Dental Office

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Discount offers are a great way to attract new patients to your dental practice but most dentists do not give enough thought when creating a discount offer. The aim for any discount coupon is to get a higher volume of patients visiting your office. This means your special offer must be attractive enough to compel prospective patients to make an appointment. In this post we discuss some ways to make your special offers more effective.

effective dental coupon

Limited Time

An easy way to get people to take action is to limit your discount for a specific time like a certain date or number of days. This means that prospective patients who do not take immediate action risk losing the discount forever and which is exactly why this technique is so effective in getting more people to book an appointment. By not binding the offer to a specific date or time you are saying that the discount is will be available for the foreseeable future leaving no incentive for a potential patient to take immediate action.

Limited Number

Similar to limited time offers, you can limit your discount offer to the first 10/20/30 patients. This again creates a sense of urgency among prospective patients because if they hesitate somebody else could claim the offer in their place. The great thing about this offer is that you do not have to specify any time frame and so the coupon/offer can be reused over and over again.

Packages/Bundles

Packaging or bundling related treatment procedures together with a discount can be very effective in getting patients to make an appointment. The most common of these offers is “$X for Dental Exam, X-ray and Cleaning” which every other dentist is offering nowadays. Similarly, you can combine other procedures together to create more offers e.g. crown + implant or Invisalign + teeth whitening.

Minimum Spend

A percentage discount on minimum spend works on group discount situations like families and group of friends/colleagues. This offer encourages people to spend a minimum amount at your dental office and get a fixed percentage off. This would be a very attractive offer for a family with 3 kids all of whom need some work done before the school reopens or holidays begin etc.

The next time you are creating a discount coupon for your dental office, consider using one of the above techniques to make your special offer more effective.

 

3 Online Marketing Ideas to Get New Dental Patients Fast!

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Are you in a hurry to increase your patient base? Are you fed up of being lied to about dental marketing? If the answer is yes, then this post is jut for you. Online advertising is one of the fastest ways to get more dental patients. Unlike offline advertising like radio, TV or direct mail, online advertising offers a better ROI in a shorter period of time. Another great thing about advertising on the we is that most ad networks will charge per click and therefore it is often called pay per click or ppc advertising. In this post we describe how you can utilize 3 of the biggest online PPC advertising networks to get new dental patients fast.

get new patients fast

Google Adwords

Google Adword logo

Google is by far the most popular search engine and also has the biggest online advertising platform called Google Adwords. It offers both search and display advertising options. If you want new dental patients quickly, you must try search advertising and ignore display advertising – at least in the beginning. Search advertising is one of the most effective ways of generating dental appointments by showing your ad to local residents searching for dentists on Google.

Using the free Google keyword tool you can quickly check how many people searched for dentists and dental procedures during the past 12 months which will give you an idea if there is enough demand for your dental service in your local area. Try searching for a ‘dentist [insert your city/town name]’ and look at the search results. If you see ads from other dentists then it is a clear indication they are getting dental patients from Google Adwords. Therefore you should also start advertising to get your ad up there to start attracting new dental patients.

Bing Ads

bing ads logo

Similar to Google, Bing has its own advertising platform called Bing Ads. It serves ads on both Bing and Yahoo search results helping Bing Ads reach approximately 1/3 rd of all searchers in USA. While this may not sound like a lot, you can still get enough search volume for your dental services specially if your office is located in a densely populated area. You can easily check the estimated monthly search volume (number of searches made in a give period) for the dental procedures and treatments you offer using the bing ads keyword research tool. If you find there is enough search volume then go ahead and launch a search advertising campaign in Bing Ads to show your ad to prospective dental patients.

Facebook Ads

facebook ads logo

Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world and over 70% of online adults use facebook. This offers a huge opportunity to get your message across to users who might be interested in dental work. In Facebook ads you do not have keywords to tell you who is looking for dentist but instead you have to use likes, interests and demographic data to target audiences that may be most interested in getting a dental procedure done. In addition you have to create an offer to grab attention of the users and compel them to take action since most users on Facebook are there to have fun and don’t want ads distracting them. For e.g. you could target single moms who have liked the facebook page for Dental Dental (or another insurance your dental office accepts) with an offer of discounted teeth whitening. By testing different offers with different audiences you can quickly find a few winning combinations before scaling them up to generate new patient appointments consistently.

If you are interested online PPC advertising with any or all of the above platforms and need expert advice and assistance, don’t forget to request a free consultation!

5 Proven Ways to Improve Dental PPC Campaign ROI

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PPC advertising is a great way to generate new dental patients online. However, if done wrong, your ppc campaign can become a nightmare and burn through your marketing budget quickly. Therefore, it is important to achieve a good ROI for your PPC campaign before scaling it further. In this post we have identified 5 proven tactics to improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.

Dental PPC ROI

Add Negative Keywords

Negative keywords help prevent clicks from irrelevant and low quality searches. If your dental office is open from Monday – Friday, you don’t want your ad to appear for searches like “dentists open on Saturday” or “dentists open on Sunday”. In this case adding negative keywords like saturday, sunday and weekend will prevent your ad from showing up on such irrelevant searches.

A/B Split Test Ads to Improve CTR

CTR (click-through rate) is the most important component of quality score. A higher CTR means a higher quality score. Ads with a high quality score will have a lower cost per click and a better ad position than other ads bidding on the same keywords. Therefore, improving CTR will directly reduce the cost of your PPC campaign and thus improve its ROI. The easiest way to improve CTR is to create multiple (2 to 4) ads in the same adgroup and rotate them evenly. Then every week revise ads with the lowest CTR with new verbiage and offers until you can beat the highest CTR ad (called the control).  When that happens, you revise the previous comtrol until you can beat the new control. This procedure of testing one ad against the other is called split-testing. Using split tests, you can  improve the average CTR of your campaign over time.

Use conversion optimizer or CPA bidding

In adwords, if you get more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer. Doing so will help you optimize the campaign for a target or max CPA (cost per acquisition of a new patient lead). For e.g. if you need 50 leads at $70 each to meet your ROI target and your campaign has an average CPA of $80 with more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer with a target CPA of $70. Google Adwords will then automatically adjust your CPC bids on each keyword taking into account the expected conversion rate for a click from each keyword. Thus achieving a maximum number of conversions at your target CPA of $70.

A/B Split Test Landing Pages to Improve Conversion Rate

Landing pages are a vital component of any successful PPC campaign. Once a searcher clicks your ad, all the work you did in optimizing the campaign is over and the conversion now depends on your landing page. A lot of dentists do not use dedicated landing pages for PPC advertising which can kill their campaign ROI and they end up shutting down the campaign. One of the quickest ways to improve the ROI of your PPC campaign is to improve your landing page conversion rate. This can be done through A/B testing of landing pages similar to ad split tests described above. However, with landing page split tests our goal is to improve conversion rate of clicks into leads (form submissions or calls).

Improve Call Handling Performance

The purpose of any PPC campaign is to generate leads in the form of calls and appointment request form submissions. However, you need to convert these leads into confirmed appointments and office visits to earn a profit from the PPC campaign. This is where call handling skills of your front desk come in. Often ignored by most dentists your staff’s call handling performance can make or break your PPC campaign ROI. Therefore you need to ensure that your receptionist is giving due attention each inquiry generated by the PPC campaign. The more leads they can close, the higher will be the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

In order to improve call answering performance, you need to record all inbound and outbound calls so that you or a sales expert can listen to these recordings and identify any shortcomings. These issues can then be addressed with some training sessions so that the a better closing rate can be achieved in the future.

As you can see from the discussion above, you must optimize a PPC marketing campaign through all stages of dental patient sales cycle – from the ad impressions to clicks, from clicks to leads (calls or form submission) and from leads to confirmed appointments. This will give you a high ROI after which you can increase your PPC campaign budget to generate even more dental patients for your dental office.

PPC or SEO: An Effective Dental Marketing Plan Uses Both

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When it comes to marketing your dental practice with search engines, you have two options to choose from – SEO or PPC advertising. Both these search engine marketing strategies have their pros and cons. In an earlier post I have discussed the benefits of PPC advertising with Google Adwords. In this post we will go over the benefits of SEO for dentists and then discuss how both SEO and PPC can complement each other to create a solid dental marketing plan.

SEO vs PPC Advertising

Advantages of SEO

The main benefit of SEO is it’s long term residual value in that the work you perform today will continue to deliver results for several months and years into the future. In that sense, SEO is like investing money into the future search traffic of your website. However, like any investment, SEO has a payout period and in case of most local dental websites it would be around 3-6 months before you start seeing significant search traffic resulting from your SEO campaigns.

When compared to PPC advertising, the main benefit of SEO is that it has no per click/visitor fee unlike PPC where you are charged for every click. A PPC campaign is more like a current expense where the money you spend on clicks is gone forever. The moment you stop spending, all the traffic and patients you were getting form the PPC campaign will also stop. Whereas, with SEO, once you obtain good rankings, you can hold them for some time without any spending anything on SEO during that period. Therefore, in the long run say in 12 months period, SEO will have a better ROI than PPC advertising (and most other forms of advertising).

Dental SEO vs PPC ROI
The cost per patient acquisition from PPC advertising remains constant over time while for SEO it reduces with time.

Another benefit SEO enjoys over PPC is that dental patients trust organic results more than PPC ads. This fact has been confirmed through multiple surveys where consumers rate organic results as more credibile than the search ads. Therefore, if you want your practice to appear more trustworthy than another local dental office who ranks well in organic search results, then you need to invest in SEO to compete with them.

Given the above facts, we can safely conclude that SEO is not an option but almost a necessity if you want to consistently generate dental patients online. But what to do with the first 3-4 months of SEO when there is no search traffic. This is where PPC advertising campaign can help fill the gap.

Combining SEO and PPC

Combining PPC with SEO
Start with a PPC campaign and reduce advertising budget as SEO traffic grows

You plan your search marketing strategy to generate a minimum number of new patients per month – let’s assume this target is 30. In the beginning, SEO will not be generating any traffic. Therefore, you have to run a PPC advertising campaign to generate all 30 patients. As your SEO traffic grows over the subsequent months it will start generating new patients. That is when you can start cutting back on your PPC advertising spend since some of the targeted 30 patients/month is now being born by the SEO work. Eventually off course you want to be in a situation where all 30 patients are being generated by SEO alone and you do not need any PPC advertising to meet your external marketing target for new dental patients.

When you have achieved your initial SEO targets, you have two options

A) You stop the PPC campaign and continue investing in SEO. This is perfectly normal and if you are happy with the number of new patients you generate with SEO then so be it. Just remember that a competitor may take your advertising spot.

B) You revise your new patients per month target upwards and continue with the PPC advertising campaign. If you want to get even more new dental patients and cant wait for your website to gain rankings on additional keywords, then PPC advertising is the way to go.