- LOCATION IS KEY
- RUN FACEBOOK ADS
- CONSIDER VIDEO MARKETING
- INCORPORATE EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS
- TRACK YOUR MARKETING ANALYTICS
If you Google, “Food near me” or “Gas station near me,” you will quickly notice how Google is able to identify your location and suggest a list of places for you within your area. This type of location-based marketing is known as local SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The true magic of this feature is its ability to advertise and rank your business to local customers looking for your services and products in real-time.
According to Google, local SEO search makes up 46% of all Google searches, and 85-95% of consumer engagement happens through these “local” searches. This means, the likelihood of your customers searching for your business location, name, and contact information drives in higher engagement than a search without local SEO. There is no doubt that we are living in a world with an appetite for convenience and quick information. That is why investing in building a local SEO framework is important to increase your business traffic.
So, what does this mean for your dental practice?
It means start investing in building a local SEO! And if done correctly, with accurate information, and trustworthy review ratings, your dental practice will be more appealing for the customer to click through.
There are many ways to promote your dental practice through social media marketing. One of the most popular methods of increasing brand awareness is using Facebook to promote your page and posts and reach your target audience.
As of December 2018, there are over 2 billion active Facebook users worldwide, each averaging around 20 minutes per session. Although you will not be targeting all users, by opting to run ads on Facebook, you are giving your Facebook business profile a “boost” to attract new customers interested in your service or product.
Luckily for you, you run a dental practice! Meaning, everyone needs to visit you regularly during the year for some tender loving dental care. But, before you go ahead and promote any of your posts, you need to strategize how to do it.
First let’s discuss your customers. Who are they? And what do they need? Asking these simple questions allows you to generate customer profiles to target your posts. You need to narrow your target audience demographic to categories such as gender, age, and typical behaviours/interests, to ensure only potential customers click your posts -- not your competitors or even your suppliers. Try to focus on demographics, customer behaviours, and location, to ensure you are targeting a pool of potential clients. Once you figure out your client personalities, and are confident about most of their wants, go ahead and use Facebook ads to generate more traffic to your dental practice.
There is no doubt that posting visuals on various social media platforms or even your website, is something you and your team already do. Besides, posting images about your business, staff, or past events is a great way to build trust and loyalty with your audience. However, over the years, there has been a shift in customer preferences for video content.
Since 2016, there has been an increase in the popularity for video marketed content. In fact, according to HubSpot, 50% of your customers want to see videos more than any other type of content. This is not to say that still images are no longer impactful. It simply means that your business needs to find new ways to grab the attention of potential patients, with the current trends of online consumers in mind.
With video marketing strategies capable of increasing conversion rates up to 80%, your dental practice can benefit from creating educational videos about your services, or even filming a live video of you and your team behind the scenes. This visual information gives your patients a reason to trust you and your business to care for their oral health.
Above all, the biggest advantage of video marketed content is creativity. You have the freedom to film in any style. Either way, your viewers will most appreciate natural, fitting videos that are part informative and part entertaining. If finding the time to make a video is too time-consuming for you, consider creating an animated video with strong visuals to send your message.
If you are really interested in video marketing content, check out our blog on How Dental Practices can Benefit from Online Video Marketing to help you get started.
Email marketing is consistently useful for generating new leads. Moreover, it allows you to segment which patients are active with your practice and which ones need more persuading. If you run your own practice, it is important to ensure patients are always aware of relevant information. This would include things like discounts and offers, how to book appointments, and the importance of routine check-ups. Many brands accomplish this by creating a weekly, monthly, or quarterly email newsletter that communicates important information to their patients.
It starts by making sure your front desk asks patients to update/confirm their email information when they come in for appointments. Your website or social media pages can utilize Calls-To-Action (CTA) to sign up for a newsletter. Online newsletters or e-blasts allow you to track key metrics in patient engagement and introduce them to your products and services that they might not have been aware of. Moreover, it helps keep your office top-of-mind and allows for easier referrals.
Additionally, you can strategically plan to win back the attention of inactive patients by building a personal connection with them, and encouraging opportunities like winning a prize if they leave a review for your practice, or receiving free offers with a routine dental check-up.
For the best results, avoid spamming your patients. Building trust with your patients means showing an intent to maintain a personal connection, and providing educational information without sounding like a sales pitch. It is important that you win their trust first before aggressively selling them your service. Make it easy for patients to opt out of receiving marketing emails - it’s the law!
Now that you are inspired by the previous tips, let’s discuss numbers! By that, we mean analytics.
Beyond being a digital buzzword, analytics tracks the performance of your marketing campaigns, website clicks, and social media likes/shares, which answers some important questions about your visitors: Which posts are doing well? Who are your most engaged visitors? How long do they spend on your website or social media page? Alongside key metrics to track the success of your marketing efforts, keeping these questions in mind saves you money, time, and most importantly, the frustration of pondering why your posts are not performing well for your target audience.
A study by Forbes Insights Report discovered that only 22% of marketers have implemented data-driven initiatives to track their online activity. Outside this pool of marketers, there is still a significant number of marketing strategies that focus on creating content without performance tracking. Not only is this a careless approach to growing a business, but it could lead to the failure of your practice in an increasingly competitive digital marketing space.
So how do you get started? Take small steps. Start with deciding on realistic goals, and then work your way up to using Google, Facebook, or Instagram Analytics. If you are starting from scratch, this is a great approach to get adjusted to the world of analytics. Many of these free tools give you a dashboard to visually see the progress of your marketing campaigns, and view insights and trends to pivot your current strategies. But before you set up your analytics account, you need to know who your users are -- age, location, behaviours, and interests. By identifying these patterns, you will not only understand your audience better, but you will also be able to enhance their experience. Using the free tools mentioned above, you can examine their behaviours, and then make informed, appropriate adjustments to your marketing strategy.
If you already have some experience implementing analytics into your marketing strategies, you have probably noticed that it all comes down to consistency and repetition. The data you have about your users is constantly changing, so regularly tracking your performance on a monthly basis is necessary to stay on top of your goals and your competition.
If you found this blog useful for your dental practice, check out our blog page here to discover other ways to ensure your dental practice gets the attention it deserves online.