Targeting your digital dental marketing
Optimise your online marketing systems to make the most of your budget.
Many dentists outsource their digital marketing to specialist dental agencies, but there are plenty who still prefer to do it themselves or delegate it to a member of the practice team.
Whilst the desire to do it “in house” and try to save money is admirable, in most of the cases we’ve seen, the DIY approach actually ends up costing more. This is simply because online marketing involves various systems which are quite sophisticated and need skill and experience to set up and then manage ongoing.
Without this level of experience, the adverts you configure for Google or Facebook or the SEO you try to do for the practice website, can be considerably wide-of-the-mark and cost you significantly more than you’d imagine. Let’s start by making a quick overview of why targeting is essential for paid advertising.
Google AdWords
This is perhaps the most obvious area where huge amounts of cash is being wasted by DIY dental advertisers. Typically what we see when we are asked to take on under-performing accounts, is that the parameters which are used to set up the accounts are set using Google defaults, and way too broadly. One key objective of pay-per-click is to only present your adverts to people who are searching for your services and to avoid presenting them to those who are not.
Get this wrong and you will get lots of clicks on your ads which really didn’t have too much chance of “converting” into tangible enquiries. For example, if your keyword targeting isn’t done correctly, a search for “dental implants” could also yield adverts from suppliers of breast implants or indeed any other type of implant, medical or otherwise. Similarly a search for “teeth whitening” could yield results for anything related to “teeth” or indeed “whitening”.
Keyword matching is just one set of parameters which needs attention – there are plenty of others too. You can configure your campaigns to display for searches in specific locations, at specific times and much more. You can even show your ads to people who previously visited your website using “re-marketing” techniques.
Setting up and managing dental pay-per-click campaigns on Google is not a trivial exercise and needs a lot of experience to get results and to avoid paying your hard earned cash to Google unnecessarily on “wasted” clicks. Campaigns must be set up in a “granular” fashion i.e. ad-groups and keywords must be kept tightly focused. These must then be matched to landing pages which are configured specifically to represent the topic and optimised to encourage conversions. Simply placing a loosely targeted ad on Google which links back to your website home page may get you some enquiries, but nowhere near as many as you would expect to receive from a correctly optimised campaign.
Google actually try to make it easy for DIY advertisers using a system called “AdWords Express”. Whilst this will get your adverts up-and-running, it won’t be in an optimised way and you will almost certainly be wasting money compared to a professionally managed campaign.
Facebook Advertising
Getting website traffic from Facebook is actually relatively simple – but it’s also bottom of the league in terms of quality. What I mean by this, is that the number of tangible conversions for this type of social media traffic is generally quite a lot lower than conversions which result from “organic” (free) search traffic and AdWords. This simply because you are presenting adverts to people who aren’t actively searching for products and services when they’re posting to their friends or family about what they did last night.
However, you can improve this considerably by using the targeting systems provided by Facebook. Rather than simply posting adverts which display generically and broadly, you can configure your adverts to show to very specific demographic groups, by age, gender, location etc. Even more powerful is the facility to create “custom audiences” which allow you to show your ads to people who have previously engaged with you, for example visiting your website or blog. By implementing tracking code on your website, the “Facebook pixel”, you can progressively build an audience for your ads – similar to the techniques used for AdWords re-marketing.
By using these techniques, you can improve the quality of traffic generated from Facebook.
Organic SEO – optimising for specific search terms
Up until quite recently, Google used to rely heavily on identifying specific keywords on a web page to determine what that page was about. Consequently you would see lots of web text stuffed with keywords associated with specific subjects. These days, Google still uses keywords, but it is widely considered that the search algorithms are much more adept at understanding the overall context of a web page – so high quality text with sparing use of specific keywords but inclusion of complementary terms, forms a much better platform than old-fashioned “keyword stuffing”.
There are lots of other “off-page” factors which influence how well your web pages rank, but you still need to make sure your website is configured optimally “on-site” to benefit from how Google works – this can also be considered as targeting.
So for example, if you want to rank well for dental implants, you stand a much better chance with 4 or 5 pages of text which discusses the various aspects and techniques of implant dentistry, rather than a single page, sparsely populated with 200 words. To help promote the main headline pages in Google, you can then add treatment specific blogs and back-links from suitably themed third-party websites, all targeted to help improve your chances of being found in the search engines.
A well-structured SEO campaign for dentists will consider these target areas and then be configured and managed accordingly.
Summary
Targeting your online dental marketing campaigns is absolutely essential if you are to make the most of your budget and yield as many useful new patient enquiries as possible. It is not trivial to set up these systems and they are certainly not fire-and-forget. So whilst you can expect to pay a reasonable sum of money to an expert dental marketer to assist you with this, almost certainly you will save more money and get better results than with a DIY campaign.
If you need assistance with any of the topics covered in this blog, please get in touch with the digital marketing team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to help.