Don’t miss out on this huge marketing asset

You may be fueling business growth through the well-known and effective channels of digital marketing, for example SEO and pay-per-click, but are you missing out on another critical asset which is right under your nose?

Here I’m referring to your employees and using their knowledge and experience to help broadcast positive messages about your business within their own social communities. Numerous studies have indicated that a company’s employees are in fact the most credible brand advocates and reliable sources for a business’s target audience.

This concept is broadly referred to as “employee advocacy” and it works just as well for small businesses as larger ones; albeit the overall “reach” of such strategies will obviously be governed by the number of employees involved. Irrespective, this employee advocacy approach is very powerful and well worth nurturing, particularly considering the socially connected environment we all live in these days.

So how can your staff help with your dental marketing?

In the dental context, there need to be firm ground rules in place and possibly even some training to ensure that when your internal brand advocates are broadcasting to the masses, that they’re not inadvertently breaking any GDC rules, ICO rules or any others which apply. This should go without saying and is very important. Once that confidence is established, you can then encourage your team to begin sharing your content and messages with their own social connections. Many of the younger generation now have hundreds if not thousands of social connections and the potential reach is significant when you get it right.

As well as increasing the social reach of your brand, when your team share your content you will also benefit from:

• increased website traffic
• increase in qualified leads
• better social engagement as new users interact with your business profiles

Some examples of employee advocacy and why it’s so powerful

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What steps do you need to take to get back on track quickly?

If you look through search engine results you won’t need to go too far before finding dental websites which have been hacked. Google in particular, is now quite adept at identifying hacked sites and flagging these with a warning message advising you not to click.

Modern browsers and anti-virus software are also better than ever when it comes to blocking hacked sites and reducing the risk of the malware spreading. However, it’s clearly best not to be in that situation in the first place and not get hacked. But what steps should you take if you are unfortunate enough to be compromised? Before we step in, let’s take a quick look at the type of websites which get hacked and why it happens so you can determine the risk.

Which types of websites are most prone to hacking?

It’s very hard if not impossible to hack a traditional website which is built in flat html and any hacks of this nature tend to come where a server has been compromised i.e. not via the “front end” of the website itself. The huge majority of hacks occur with database driven websites, so information sites which have content management systems or ecommerce systems.

The most hacks occur with the WordPress platform which although popular, needs a significant amount of maintenance to stay secure. However, even well-maintained WordPress websites have fallen victim to new hacks which have happened in a very short space of time. Other content management systems also need maintenance but WordPress is historically more prone to compromise than any other.

So if you have a website which fits into one of those categories, your risk is higher than if you have a website which is built with traditional “flat” html and consequently you need to take extra precautions.

Unfortunately most hacking occurs where a designer delivers a website but then fails to maintain it. This can happen for a couple of main reasons, 1) they can’t be bothered even though you paid them and 2) they delivered a website built with a pre-made template and/or plugins which then became incompatible and couldn’t be supported. Both of these scenarios are much more common than you might imagine and many dentists fall foul of the hackers who check constantly for vulnerabilities which can be exploited.

What do you do if your dental website gets hacked?

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Reduce click-budget and improve conversions in your dental Google Ads campaigns

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is becoming increasingly popular (and necessary) as part of comprehensive dental marketing campaigns. As we’ve discussed earlier, Google is dedicating more space in search results for ads and decreasing the scope for traditional free search results.

For example on mobile ‘phones unless you scroll, all you see on the first results page you are presented with, is ads and local results. Considering that on average 60% of all web traffic is now from mobile devices, it’s not hard to see why the “pay to play” advertising age is now firmly with us.

Given the above, it makes very good business sense to optimise your Google advertising, as click-budgets, i.e. the money you pay directly to Google, do not come cheap if you want to get good traction with your campaigns. This is particularly so in areas of high competition where, for example, a click on an implant or ortho ad could cost £5 or more.

Too regularly we see DIY campaigns which are set up in-house by dentists or dental team members with little or no experience. This includes the use of the Google Ads “Express” format which is designed to make the job much easier for the inexperienced. However, very often the result is a campaign which is poorly optimised and leaks budget through lots of wasted clicks and lack of proactive management. To counter this, it really does make sense to employ a pay-per-click professional or be prepared to spend a fair amount of time learning the Google Ads interface and learning by trial and error.

Basic optimisation

If you are keen on trying the DIY approach, the following parameters must be addressed as a minimum. Remember that you also need to revisit the ads configuration regularly as setting up is not “fire and forget”. Google Ads is a dynamic auction and as such needs intervention to keep the account optimised.

Hierarchy and granularity

It is absolutely essential to segment your campaigns by topic at quite a granular level. So at the campaign level you might choose “dental implants” then use 3 or 4 ad groups within the campaign to represent different aspects of the implant topic. For example your ad groups might cover single implants, denture stabilisation, full arch replacement etc. The more you break it down, the easier it is to control and optimise. Your account quality score will also benefit from this and in turn reduce your click costs. This granular approach is quite time consuming but will work much better than what we usually see in DIY campaigns i.e. a single campaign, perhaps one or two ad groups and hundreds of keywords rammed in without too much thought.

Keyword selection and matching

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The crucial role of the reception team in your dental marketing campaigns.

The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to secure new business; so for dentists the bottom line is acquiring new patients who want the type of treatments you offer.

The role of the dental marketer is relatively easy to define in this, i.e. setting up the tools and techniques needed to bring new enquiries to the practice. The ways to achieve this objective are broad and varied, ranging from the traditional promotional literature campaigns to state-of-art re-marketing via social media, SEO and everything in-between.

As we’ve noted elsewhere in our marketing blog for dentists, a good agency will not only be able to deliver the results you need, but also be able to do it transparently through the provision of regular, clear reporting. However, whilst it’s reasonably straightforward to identify new leads, how these are actually dealt with and followed-up at the practice is much harder for the marketer to determine. Unfortunately there are too many cases where good leads are not handled correctly and in some cases, not followed up at all locally. This nullifies all of the upfront work done by your marketing team and wastes money from your hard-earned budget.

What can go wrong?

There are a few notable points of weakness at the practice level which we’ve encountered over the years. The first and perhaps most important and prevalent is a lack of systems designed to capture and nurture leads. This may be done to the principle “expecting” someone to get on with it rather than ensuring that the correct training, systems and auditing are in place. This is still way too common unfortunately. Another common occurrence is where the reception team has systems in place but is insufficiently proactive to make best use of them. Sadly we see this quite regularly too, and often where the principal dentist is so immersed in clinical work that he/she doesn’t realise what is happening.

We’ve seen technical failures too – for example the dentist who quit his marketing campaign on the back of “limited” results. Our reporting, linked directly to online analytics, showed a substantial number of new enquiries each month, but this was not translating into sufficient new patients and treatments. Only when he quit (to our surprise) did we finally establish that his reception team was not monitoring the email address which had been requested and set up specifically to handle new web enquiries (really!)

In another case where the success of the campaign came under question, it transpired that the receptionist had been recording all new enquiries as “word-of-mouth” simply because it was easiest and on the top of the record sheet. This may sound extreme, but it’s worth taking a look at what’s happening in your own team.

So the front-desk team or whoever is tasked to receive and handle new enquiries, really is critical to your success (or failure).

What needs to be done?

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