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The Truth About Social Media Marketing for Dentists

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Dental Patients from Social NetworksSocial media marketing is a the most challenging way to get dental patients online. Many dentists who jump on the social media bandwagon, trying to find new patients learn this fact the hard way. They invest in a great page/profile, post a few updates, run some ads and then wonder why nobody is listening to what they have to sell. Well let me break it down for you –  nobody logs on to twitter, facebook, youtube or any other social network site to buy stuff. Social media is like this big party where everybody is invited to have fun, gossip around, stalk others and maybe relax after a busy workday. I mean you could setup shop on a table in the corner of the ballroom but dont be surprised if everybody ignores you. Social media marketing is all about joining in the fun, making new friends, sharing stories, discussing problems and then maybe giving out a business card to people who need help. However, before you get the opportunity to give away your business card to interested individuals, you need to start a conversation. 

There are many ways of getting people talking to you but some are more effective than others. You just have to ensure that you offer something of value that will distract people enough to take you seriously. Below I discuss 5 ways how your dental office can draw people’s attention on the various social media networks.

Social Proof

Facebook Marketing for DentistsWhether it’s facebook, twitter or youtube, the first thing people notice when visiting any page or profile is the number of likes, followers, subscribers  and comments activity you have. This is second nature to all social media users because we quickly want to assess the social value of the page or profile. You need to get a high number of likes, followers, subscribers and comment activity to grab people’s attention. The greater the followers count and activity level of your page, the easier it will be to attract more patients.
This is why it can be incredibly difficult to get a new page or profile going. Why would anyone like a page that nobody has liked before or commented on? Therefore, you should invite all your friends, family, relatives and patients to like or follow your dental office page when it is first launched. You can even offer a small discount or free whitening in return. You can also advertise your page to generate likes. But the point is that you need social proof to get new dental patients from social media.

Create Useful Engaging Content

Now that you have a decent number of likes and followers, you need to leverage that following to promote your dental office in their friends and social network. This is where you need to produce content that will grab the attention of your fans and followers and compel them to engage with your page and profile. Let’s be honest, nobody on social media will participate in anything that is boring so you have to make extra effort to make your content fun, original and interesting specially since dentistry is such a dry subject. But you can still post some jokes, memes, quizzes, surveys, studies, animations, videos, success stories and social experiments about dental related topics.

When your fans and followers like the content you produce, they will share it with their friends and social circle and thus take your office name further. The content will want people to visit your page and for more cool stuff you have to share.

Discount Offers

Discount offers specially limited lime offers work very well in a social media setting. The main reason for it is limited time – people believe they stand to lose something if they don’t act and this leads then to claim the offer. For e.g. If somebody who has not visited the dentist for over 6 months, sees an offer for a $49 exam + xray, they would be happy to give it a shot.

However, you do not want to overdo this stuff because then people will be turned off by the number of offers you are sending out every month. Your promotions to content ratio should be very low around 1 promotional post for every 20 educational/informational/fun posts.

Reviews and Testimonials

This is again connected to social proof because most people do not want to risk going to a new dental office. Reviews and testimonials help people convince people that your dental office is the real deal and that you have several satisfied patients who recommend your services. This conviction then helps patients make the decision to contact you for professional help or claim one of your discount offers. Without some positive reviews you will have a hard time convincing people on social media to visit your dental office.

Before and After Photos

These photos act as proof that your services work and are powerful in grabbing attention of prospective patients. They help prospective patients see the transformation in black and white. Social media loves these kind of photos since a many the users suffer from the same or similar dental problems. and these before and after photos offer people something they can relate to. Seeing someone else overcome the same dental problem that you are suffering from is a very effective in attracting new patients.

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.

PPC Advertising for Dentists: Maximise Profit NOT ROI

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Before starting any advertising campaign for your dental practice, you need to specify some goals for the campaign. A lot of dentists who are not familiar with PPC advertising would choose a specific ROI like 300% or 400% for their campaigns without knowing that they might be losing money by setting up such a high ROI goal. As a dentist your ultimate goal is to maximize your profit after deducting advertising cost. So instead of giving your ppc manager a budget and asking him to maximize marketing ROI while staying within budget, you need to tell him to maximize your net profit while staying within budget.

why?

because PPC advertising has a diminishing marginal return beyond a maximum ROI, as the advertising spend increases. This means that as your advertising spend increases beyond a threshold, your ROI begins to decrease. Read that last sentence again and look at the graph below of a typical PPC campaign.

marketing-return-on-investment-graph

During the early phase of any PPC campaign you will find that ROI increases as you optimize the campaign. Then you increase your advertising budget and optimize some more. After that you keep increasing budget and optimize the campaign further until you hit a Peak ROI of the campaign. At this stag all the main avenues of optimization have been exhausted and the campaign is optimized for maximum ROI. Further optimization of ads, keywords, bids etc, will not result in improving ROI. However, the profit resulting from the campaign is not at it’s maximum at this stage. This is because in order to achieve maximum ROI, you have sacrificed some low ROI traffic that would earn you more net profit.

If your goal was to maximise your campaign ROI, then you would be right in maintaining the campaign in this state for as long as possible. However, doing so would mean that you are leaving a significant amount of profit on the table, since your PPC campaign is not optimized for maximum profit but for maximum ROI. Therefore, if you want to squeeze out last chunk of profit from your PPC campaign, you need to ignore your ROI goals and focus on increasing spend on less efficient but still profitable keywords/audiences. You have to continue increase spend until, the incremental profit resulting from an increase ad spend is equal to the incremental ad spend. At that stage, the campaign is optimized for maximum profit. Increasing ad spend of the campaign any further would result in a negative profit incremental profit and thus reduce total profit from the campaign.

One final point to note is that maximum revenue doesn’t occur until after maximum profit has been achieved. Therefore, you should revenue interchangeable with profit as it can mislead you into increase your advertising spend more than required.

7 Reasons Why Every Dentist Should Try Google Adwords

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The growing use of internet as a medium for marketing has lead to many innovations in online advertising. One of these great innovations from early 2000’s is Google Adwords. What started as a search advertising program is now a full blow advertising network reaching almost 85% of all web users on most popular websites like Google.com and Youtube.com. With Google Adwords PPC advertising you are charged only when somebody click on your ad rather than CPM model, where you are charged for every 1000 impressions your ad receives irrespective of how many people actually interact with your ad. Below are 7 reasons why all dentists should try Google Adwords PPC Advertising.

Advantages of Google Adwords

Speed-to-market

Google Adwords is very quick to setup and get started. It can deliver results very quickly. This is a huge advantage in situations where you need new patients fast or you have a great service/offer that you want to push out before your competitors. Most other alternatives require development of creatives which can can time consuming.

Location and language targeting

Do you wish to target hispanic dental patients only? With google adwords language targeting you can do that very easily. Google Adwords also has very comprehensive location targeting features. You can target residents of certain zip codes, cities and towns or better yet a 10-mile radius around your dental office. Remember the closer a prospective patient is to your office, the more likelier they are to visit. You can also exclude languages and locations that you want to avoid.

Pay for Qualified Clicks Only

Using the Google Adwords Search network, you can advertise to people who are looking for a dentist in your city. These people are highly interested in professional dental treatment and you can offer your service to them by advertising on google for relevant keywords. What is even more impressive is that you can exclude keywords to avoid showing your ad for irrelevant keywords. For e.g. if you do not treat children you can add keywords like children, kids, paediatric etc. as negatives to ensure that anyone who is searching for paediatric dentists does not see your ad. This way you will attract clicks only from qualified visitors who are interested in your service.

Granular Control Over Advertising Spend

A Google Adwords can be started for as little as $5/day. While that may not get you much clicks, it just goes to show that you can control your advertising cost depending on your marketing budget for the month/week. You can also control how much you want to pay per click for each keyword you want your ad to appear on. This granular control allows you to run the campaign, stop the campaign, adjust bids up or down, adjust budget up or down and activate/pause the campaign whenever you want. e.g. If you have plenty of appointments next week, you can keep the campaign paused. If you want to fill up your schedule for the subsequent week, you can re-activate the campaign again before the preceding week begins.

Visitor Retargeting

Another amazing feature Google Adwords offers is the ability to tag and then re-target people who visited your website. This feature works for both search and display network and is very useful in reaching visitors who abandoned your website. For e.g. You can use re-marketing ads to target visitors who left appointment form or contact form uncompleted with a discount offer to convince them to make an appointment.

Performance Tracking and Reports

Google Adwords has the most comprehensive tracking and reporting features of any popular advertising platform. You can track click to calls, calls from websites, calls from ads, form completions, app installs, downloads and even import your google analytics conversion goals into your adwords account. These conversion actions are then backed by in-depth reports of all aspects of campaign performance that allow you to evaluate the success of each campaign. All these conversion tracking and reporting are free for all advertisers irrespective of their ad spend.

Campaign Optimization Capabilities

Google Adwords comes built in with free campaign optimization tools that allow you to maximize the performance of your campaigns to deliver your desired conversions. For e.g. your goal is to generate a maximum number of online appointments, you can create a conversion in adwords to track the number of appointment form completions. Then once your campaign has had over 15 conversions over the last 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer and define your target maximum or target patient acquisition cost. You can then sit back and let Google Adwords Conversion Optimizer run your campaign on auto pilot. It will adjust your CPC on keywords automatically to generate the highest number of conversions (appointments in this example) possible in your budget.

Custom Dental Websites vs Cookie-Cutter Design Templates

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When reviewing website design options for your dental office, most website design companies will ask you to choose between a custom design and a pre-built template website. While both types or websites can be successful, following are some useful points to consider when deciding between these two options.

dentist-website-template

Cost

Custom dental websites will always cost more than a pre-built design. If you are on a budget or just starting out, then template design may be the way to go. You can always revisit the design after a few years. Then again, if you will get a custom website in future anyway, then why not get it now.

Time

Custom websites will take longer to complete since everything will have to be approved by you and there is going to be a lot of back and forth until everything is exactly how you want. For a template design only the color scheme will be changed to your logo and your website would be ready to go. You just need to add content to make it live. Again, if you are pressed for time, a template design may be the better option.

Customization

A custom website is personalized to your exact preferences and satisfaction. On the other hand a template design will only allow for basic changes. You will rarely find a design template to match your exact needs because templates are designed to cover all/most audiences. If you find yourself wanting too many changes to a template design, you should consider a custom website.

Uniqueness

While a template website does undergo some basic customization, it is possible that two or more dental practices have the same color scheme. In such cases, their websites can look identical or very similar. Obviously, no dentist wants their website to look the same as another local dentist, particularly if they offer the same services. It can damage your brand and cause confusion among patients. Ideally your website should be unique to your dental practice and only a custom website will achieve that.

Marketability

A custom website can be tailored to your target audience and therefore provide better conversion rate than a template design. For e.g. If your dental office is located in a minority dominated area, you will need your website to reflect that. If you want to attract young professionals, your website should be built to do so. In short your website should speak to your patients (whether they are blue collar workers or corporate executives or middle class families) instead of the general population. This is where template designs suck big time and the main reason why we recommend custom websites.

Ultimately, the choice between a custom website and template design comes down to how committed you with online marketing. If you are serious about getting dental patients online, then your website has to be professional and marketable in terms of both design and content. Template websites usually fail to deliver on both counts. If you want to get a custom website for your dental practice please contact us for a free consultation.

12 Questions Every Dentist Should Ask Before Hiring an SEO

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Dental SEO is a long term investment that can bring dozens of new patients every month to your office. SEO is not a regulated industry – there is no license requirement and search engines like Google keep their algorithm secret. Therefore, this field can attract scams and fly by night operations who can ruin your website with outdated and outright shady SEO tactics. Before trusting any individual or company with SEO, you need to make sure they are qualified to do this job. We have prepared the following list of questions you may want to ask before hiring an SEO for your dentist website.

Dental SEO

1. May I have a list of current and past clients?

When you hire any SEO vendor always ask for current and past clients just like you would do when hiring a designer. Any reasonably experienced SEO should be able to provide 2-3 references upon request and if not, you better find another vendor. After you received a list of clients you may want to verify the current rankings of the clients. Another follow-up question would be to ask for their longest running clients. A large list of long running clients indicates that the company has been providing consistent results over a long period of time. If an experienced SEO has all their active clients for less than a year ago then they may not be the best choice for your website.

2. What type of SEO activities will you do?

SEO work can be categorized into 3 broad categories – Technical, On-Page and Off-Page. Make sure you get details about what work will be performed for each type of SEO.

Technical SEO is concerned with fixing website errors and crawl issues and ensuring that google bot and other search engine crawlers can read the website without any problem.

On-Page SEO work includes all activities related to optimization, categorization, internal linking, addition and deletion of the website content.

Off-Page SEO activities include everything done to promote your website to other web-masters and bloggers with an aim to develop citations and back-links to your website. Most of the SEO work done will be Off-Page so you should inquire about citation and back-link building strategies being employed by the SEO firm you wish to hire.

3. What changes if any will you make to our website?

Since any changes made on your website will reflect on your dental practice and brand name, it is important you know exactly what changes will be made to the website. If they wish to add content, make sure it is accurate and written well. If they want to add images, make sure you have the copyrights. If they want to add call tracking make sure it doesn’t mess up with your NAP consistency. Ask them to take backup of your website before making any changes.

4. Can you guarantee my website will achieve a number-one ranking on Google, Bing and Yahoo?

This is actually a trick question. Since nobody actually knows how the search algorithm works (except for Google, Bing and Yahoo for their own respective search engines), it is impossible to guarantee a particular spot i.e. 1st, top 3 etc. However, most experienced SEO’s can spot weak SERPs and should be able to tell you how long it will take your website to break through the first page listings. Nevertheless it is impossible to guarantee such results since nobody knows how the algorithm works.

5. What are your fees and payment terms?

Most SEO companies charge by one of the 3 popular methods – fixed price, monthly retainer and hourly rate. You should work out all applicable fees and inquire about late payments and any interest on them. Ask for a copy of the contract (if there is any) and go through each item to confirm all items and there are no hidden charges.

6. What happens when we part ways?

It is important that you know this beforehand so that there is no surprises when the contract/project ends or you have to fire the vendor. Make sure that you will own and keep all the SEO work performed during the length of the engagement.

7. How do you measure the success of your SEO campaigns?

This is critical question that will ensure both you and your SEO have the same understanding of what you require. As a dentist, your goal is to get more patients and increase production. Make sure that your SEO’s goal is aligned to that fact as well. Accordingly you need your SEO vendor to report on the KPI’s you are most concerned with eg. number of organic site visitors, number of form submissions, number of calls, number of appointments, number of subscribers. Getting a report on your website ranking movement for certain keywords is not enough. You have to know how many appointments these rankings are actually generating.

8. How often will you report on your work, and what will it look like?

You should get at least a fortnightly report on all SEO work performed in the past 14 days along with a ranking report and traffic report. Ask for a sample report and go through it with your SEO vendor to make sure you understand the various metrics. Ask them to include specific KPI’s that you wish to track.

9. How will your team adapt your strategy to dental industry?

As a dentist you are not looking for SEO agencies that does well with eCommerce sites. You want to hire firms that have ranked websites for other dentists before and are aware of the dental industry, its consumers, their fears and their jargon. Hiring a dental SEO expert should be preferred over a generic/all round SEO firm. But if an SEO vendor can prove they can adapt their strategies to your industry then they could be worth a try.

10. Why should we hire you over other SEOs?

This is probably the most difficult question to answer and one that you should always ask. The answer will often make or break the deal. There are thousands of excellent SEO companies in the world and you may be interviewing a handful of them. This question provides the SEO firm an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the other candidates. What extras do they provide which you as a dentist value most. It could be anything from excellent customer support to money-back guarantees. If they respond with anything involving:

  • we’re cheaper than other options
  • we can build you more backlinks (instead of better quality)
  • we don’t know
  • we can get you faster results,

then you need to proceed cautiously. High quality, long term SEO results take time and definitely do not come cheap.

11. Describe 3 updates to Google’s Algorithm in the last 2 years

This question will let you know if an SEO vendor is up to date with the latest industry trends and news. Ask your SEO to describe a 2-3 updates in the last couple of years such as the ones given below.

Google Updates

Then confirm that they know what they’re talking about by reading through those links here.

12. Describe 3 factors that affect local business rankings in Google

Like the previous question, this one is designed to test some basic SEO knowledge to weed out salesmen from real SEO experts. You should get answers like number of back-links, page title, page speed, citations etc. You can see a much large list of local search ranking factors here.