It always astounds me how basic most online marketing is within the dental sector, given the sophistication of the medium. Traditional advertising such as placing an ad in the local newspaper is pretty one dimensional. Sure you should track the performance of the ad by having a unique offer exclusive to the advert, but beyond that there is little you can do to track the performance of the ad or to make the ad work in multiple ways.
The Internet however is only limited by your imagination, offering numerous ways to make your search marketing work.
Many practices these days accept the importance of a good Internet presence, in particular how you are found on the world’s number one search engine – Google. The frequency and the way we use Google is extraordinary and because of our addition to the Google suite of products, they have become by far the most powerful marketing mediums on the planet. It goes far beyond just being found first when a potential patient searches for ‘Your Suburb Dentist’. These days the mum at the school gates who has just been referred to you will check you out from her mobile phone, an existing patient will want to use Google Maps to navigate to your location and when the all important potential new patient does find your website, they expect to find pertinent and compelling information about your practice in a format that renders perfectly on the device they are using.
Basically, getting found on the Google search engine starts in one of two ways. Either the link to your website appears in the first few organic results on a given search term such as ‘emergency dentist suburb’ or you pay to be found at the top of the Google page via the Google Ad Words Pay Per Click (PPC) facility on specific search terms that you have chosen.
Unless you are the only dentist in a small regional town, the chances of the link to your website appearing first organically in Google are slim. A domain name that matches a search term exactly can help, but beyond this, your site will need to be ‘optimised’ to be found. This process is called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO) and is a very relevant part of your overall marketing strategy. SEO is constantly evolving, however now it’s more about having great content than some of the IT trickery of the past.
Being found via Google Ad Words is a lot simpler than SEO – you just need to pay the bill! However, herein lies the problem. Some dental practices used to spend an absurd amount of money in Yellow Pages and I am seeing a lot of this money being transferred to Google Ads. Google Ads is an infinitely better advertising medium than Yellow Pages, but it can be expensive and not cost effective if it is not used correctly. For instance, at the time of writing the amount the Google Ad Words tool suggested, I pay $21.96 for the search term ‘Melbourne Dentist’. If you have an excellent website that is mobile responsive, you can broadly expect to convert about 5% of the traffic to your website into patient enquires. So IF your site converts at 5%, it will cost about $440 to attract just one patient enquiry and of course not every enquiry will become a paying patient. In conclusion of this approach, it is far too expensive. The problem gets worse over time as the more dentists spend money on a specific search term, the more it drives up the cost of the ‘click’.
But don’t switch off and dump the concept of PPC because if it is implemented correctly, it can be the best advertising money you will ever spend – but it takes an investment in time, great content, constant monitoring and a solid strategy.
First of all you need to get the cost per click right down. This is done with the use of ‘long tail key words’. As Google has become more sophisticated over the years, people have started to search using a sentence format. For instance, instead of searching for ‘Melbourne Dentist’, someone might search for ‘I’m on Collins St and have a toothache’. This search term might cost you $1 per click. However, the cost maybe low, but not many people will search on this particular term – which is why you need to develop hundreds of these long tail key words. Not only are they low cost, they can be highly specific, which improves conversion rates and best of all, most of your competition will be employing PPC companies too lazy to take this approach.
That’s step one – Step two is to use the information you glean from the person searching to deliver highly relevant content. So, we know our example patient is on Collins St with a Toothache – you could do what 99.9% of search marketers do (sorry, you are a search marketer now as well as a dentist) which is send this person to the homepage of your website and let them work it out from there. OR, you could send them directly to the emergency dentistry page of your website and show them a short video explaining YOU always prioritise emergency patients. Do you think this potential patient will book in to see you or contact someone with a home page full of glossy people who do not look real?
If the user is on the mobile phone and they are searching within your open hours, the “Call” Ad extension should be used so the person can call your practice in one click, directly from that Ad.
If all of this seems somewhat convoluted, then you may want to consider the fact that what I have described in this article delivers relevant information about the services you provide to people who are searching for them. No special offers, no gimmicks – this is a highly intelligent approach that presents you in an intelligent and positive light. Surely that’s what dentistry should be all about, right? This is Smart Marketing.
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