by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

What is it and why should dentists prioritise it?

Regular readers of this blog will know that we are extremely keen that dentists understand exactly how their marketing campaigns are working so that their return on investment is clear and that any maintenance can be done quickly to maximise effectiveness.

A key part of this is an understanding of where new patient enquiries came from, i.e. which channels actually delivered them. By ‘channels’ I mean the routes or paths the patient travelled along before they actually made contact with you. For example did they find you via a Google search, a paid advert on Facebook, an ad in the local paper or perhaps word-of-mouth?

Drilling down further (no pun intended!) we can also measure what we call ‘channel attribution’ which is where we work out just how much credit can be assigned to each touch-point within the conversion path. In basic terms, this means working out which bits of your marketing efforts worked best!

There are lots of studies on this type of work, some quite detailed and mathematical; however that is beyond the scope of this article. Today I’m simply trying to illustrate how important this type of channel analysis is and how you can get the basics in place without breaking the bank or studying for a degree.

Let’s take a look at the basic monitoring which allows this and which should be in place for any dentist using the web to promote dental services.

Google Analytics

This is a free tool which allows the comprehensive monitoring of website performance. It is hugely detailed if you want it to be, but on a more basic level it will allow you to easily see where your website traffic came from, when it came and how much there was. If you set up goals (conversions) it will also tell you how much of this traffic resulted in tangible enquiries.

Installing a small piece of tracking code on your website will allow the collection of huge amounts of valuable data which can be analysed and used to inform your marketing campaigns. You can also integrate your analytics with paid ad platforms so you can see how much traffic those campaigns are generating, and indeed if they are resulting in enquiries.

Oh, and very importantly, Google Analytics is free to use, so there really is no excuse for not using it.

Facebook Analytics (Page and Audience Insights)

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Techniques

Key cornerstones of implant and ortho marketing

During Covid-19 restrictions, some dental practices have struggled to survive whilst others continued to thrive. Of course there was a significant lull during full lock-down but what became clear was that those practices who were on-the-ball pre-covid, were similarly mobilised and active during the crisis.

Now as we start accelerating back to some form of normality, it is clear that those practices who “get it” are continuing to do well; indeed they are prospering even more as other practices fall by the wayside.

So what are the key marketing characteristics which those successful practices exhibit? Let’s take a closer look.

An effective, ethical sales process

Leading practices understand the need for a finely-tuned sales process which turns leads into treatments. All too often, marketers deliver great leads to dentists but half-hearted response from the practice team means that those leads don’t convert. Effective tools and procedures must exist to capture those leads and allow follow-up in a prompt and well-defined manner. Do this too late and/or half-heartedly means that the lead will evaporate. Potentially worse is that your local competitor will likely benefit. The patient journey, right from the start through to treatment and after-care, needs to be exceptional and with the whole team on board.

Similarly your team needs to be able to filter those enquiries which will likely lead to nothing. Whilst we can target marketing efforts to those most likely to take up treatments, some channels will still deliver a lot of speculative enquiries. Some of these will be “golden nuggets” but others will need to be offloaded as the enquirer may be unsuitable for treatment or perhaps have no way of paying. This needs to be done before the valuable time of a TCO or clinician gets wasted.

Creation of compelling content

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Doubling new patient contacts with web page layout and content optimisation

Have you ever wondered how many people who visit your website actually go on to contact you and enquire about treatment? We call this action a conversion which can be a ‘phone call or completion of an online contact form.

Improving the rate at which website visitors get in touch is known as conversion optimisation and is a fundamental activity when ensuring that your practice website is working as hard as possible on your behalf.

What might surprise you is that most dental websites have sub-optimal levels of conversion optimisation, ranging from dire to barely adequate. So there are usually some good improvement opportunities to be had at relatively low cost.

But why are so many dental websites inadequate when it comes to onsite conversion; even new ones which have only recently been launched? Surely all designers know the requirements and follow a set of core standards to ensure at least a good level of conversion optimisation? Unfortunately this is not the case at all, often far from it. You see, most designers are not well-versed in optimisation techniques and whilst they may have an eye on aesthetics, they miss key layout and content elements which encourage users to get in touch.

So what are the key conversion elements of a dental website – let’s take a quick look.

Clear contact details in the header and footer of the website

It may sound obvious that you need to include the practice contact details in prominent positions on your website, but many still don’t. Clear navigation is critical to ensure that website users can reach all of your information quickly and efficiently, and perhaps at the top of this list should be your contact details. Remembers that users are quite fickle, so you must have your telephone number and links to your contact page easily accessible from all parts of your website, typically in the header and footer sections but also at key points within the body content.

Also make sure that your contact information is mobile-friendly; for example that your ‘phone number is configured to be click-to-call from mobile screens and that when your content rearranges for mobile viewing, that the contact details remain prominent.

Replace stock images with bespoke practice photographs

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Branding

It’s probably time to re-consider your brand investment….

More often than you might imagine, we have new dental website clients get in touch who already have a logo they’d like us to use with their project. Whilst some of these logos are designed by professional graphic designers, many aren’t and are a combination of DIY productions or “cheap and cheerful” creations made by their local copy shop or a generic internet service.

Whilst it’s understandable that people want best value from their investments, skimping on a logo really isn’t a good idea and you may come to regret it if you do. Sadly we see this quite regularly and there are a number of pitfalls you will likely experience if and when you realise that your logo isn’t actually serving its intended purpose. It is worth remembering that your logo is the fundamental foundation of your brand identity and you build everything upon it – so changes down the track can be pretty horrendous if you get it wrong. Here are just a few examples:

  • signage changes – this can be extremely expensive!
  • practice stationery obsolete
  • promotional material obsolete
  • all of your web assets need updating and possibly re-designing

Perhaps worse than all of the above is that the fundamental function for your logo has been undermined i.e. the familiarity is gone and people simply get confused when you launch the new version. None of these issues are insurmountable, but much of it can be avoided if you get it right first time.

Features of a great dental logo

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Mistakes

A recap on recurring dentist marketing pitfalls

2020 has certainly been an unusual year and not really in a good way! With the advent of Covid-19 and what looks like turmoil and uncertainty associated with Brexit and other world events, many businesses have been destabilised, dentists included.

That said, life goes on and whilst dentists have paused some of their marketing activities, particularly during the worst months of lock-down, the basics have, in main part, continued. So we’ve seen search engine optimisation initiatives and PPC campaigns continuing in spite of the current difficulties. Indeed we’ve seen a lot of interesting marketing developments as we’ve helped clients adapt to the “new normal” and implement novel ways of reaching and serving their patients.

Despite some good news amongst the more general global grief, unfortunately we are still seeing many of the same marketing mistakes dentists regularly make with their marketing initiatives, many of them costing substantial amounts of money. So we thought we’d recap on the main errors we’ve seen recently with the intention of helping you avoid similar! Let’s dive in….

Onerous contractual tie-ins

This is still a huge issue in the dental marketing arena with most agencies still pushing dentists to sign-up for long term contracts of at least a year or more. We’ve had several new clients contact us to ask if we can help them escape from these types of arrangements where they couldn’t quit, even where the supplier had demonstrably failed. Typical examples were Invisalign marketing campaigns which were hugely over-priced versus what was being delivered, bad PPC contracts where the dentist realised that the supplier was skimming the click budget, and of course the perennial issue of the monthly website maintenance and SEO contract which was being paid for but no work was being done on the site.

These types of very dodgy contracts are absolutely rife in the digital marketing sector and way too many dentists still fall for them. So as an absolute minimum, if you are tempted to sign up to something like this, please ensure that the contract has some form of performance element which allows you to quit if agreed standards are not met.

Please also remember that there is a much better alternative that all clients here at Dental Media enjoy i.e. absolutely zero contractual tie-ins for our marketing services.

SEO campaigns that don’t work

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by AdminPosted on Posted in blogging

Here’s why your blog is still great for patients and for Google too!

Blogging for dental practices first emerged in earnest 8 or 9 years ago when marketers realised that it was a great tool to help promote search engine rankings, primarily led by the SEO team here at Dental Media. Business coaches also started to promote the technique when they caught on to the fact that publishing great content online was an excellent way to show prospective new patients that you were an authority in your field and so a good choice for treatment. So blogging can be a clear differentiator in a few different ways.

But is blogging for dentists still as useful as it was back then and also how has it evolved of the last few years? The answer is an unequivocal “yes” – blogging is still an excellent tool to help with search engine optimisation and to help you stand out from your competitors when people visit your website. So let’s recap on why blogging still works so well and why you should get started for your own practice.

Blogging for patients

Some would say that this is the most important aspect, not SEO; but looking from a marketer’s perspective, I’d say that both elements are equally important. Those of us who have a long history of search optimisation understand that content which works well for humans, i.e. well written and interesting, will usually also work well for Google. The reason is simple in that Google wants to surface the best content for its users and hence tends to promote it to the top of the search results. So in essence, if you write a really useful blog article for your users, there is a good chance that it will also rank well in search engines. There are some subtleties as we’ll see later, but the above principle is a useful one to keep in mind when you do start on your blogging venture.

When a dental practice writes a blog, this serves as a great balance to the more technical type of articles that agencies write on their behalf. So for example, a team member might write an article to announce a new team member or perhaps the latest charity event, whereas the marketer might write about the benefits of dental implants for patients living in a specific location, still informative but certainly with SEO in mind.

The practice written article would typically have a more “human” feel and potentially be a little more engaging than the one written by the marketer, but both types are still important and a good balance between both is the ideal way to proceed.

Other examples of practice generate blogs might be to discuss a new Invisalign or implants open day, introducing staff members, publishing latest offers, discussing new technology and so on. There’s more opportunity than you may think, particularly when you get stuck in.

Blogging for SEO

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

SEO wins the battle for new dental patient enquiries

As you’ll most likely know, there are numerous ways for a dentist to acquire new patients, from fundamental “word-of-mouth” marketing to comprehensive advertising campaigns using Google, Facebook and more recently, Instagram. But there’s one marketing channel which reliably delivers the best results and lowest acquisition costs and that’s search engine optimisation (SEO).

Outside of “word of mouth” referrals, top ranking positions in Google deliver more dental enquiries per pound spent than any other methodology and it’s more sustainable too. Whilst SEO isn’t fire-and-forget and can take several months to start gaining traction, when your website is prominent in Google search for a wide range of dental queries, you’ll soon reap the benefit of a steady influx of new patient enquiries. You’ll also be less worried about paying for ads as a sole source of promotion, along with the ever escalating costs and maintenance that this entails. Whilst paid advertising does still have an important role to play in certain circumstances, overall, your most sustainable and rewarding mid to long term digital strategy will be SEO.

How do we know this?

The digital marketing teams at Dental Media have been running successful promotional strategies for dentists for nearly 20 years. A key part of our service is analysing and reporting on the various techniques we use so that we see what works best and where maintenance is required. We can also calculate essential measures such as the cost to acquire a new patient and also where the money was spent. So we have a clear picture of how much it typically costs to gain a patient via Google versus paid ads on Facebook etc. Without a doubt, the lowest overall acquisition cost is from “organic” search in Google and even though you may need to invest several hundreds of pounds per month to achieve and maintain search ranking prominence, the cost to achieve that is dwarfed by the value of the new patients and treatments gained. It’s also fair to say that the returns from SEO are also quite substantially better than even the best run paid advertising campaigns.

How to get started with dental SEO?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

How do you know if your website is good, bad or indifferent?

It’s recognised by most people that a company website is a critical cornerstone for gaining new business from the web. For dentists, this means new patient enquiries. Indeed we know from many years of experience and from running all types of promotional campaigns, that web enquiries are typically only second to word-of-mouth when it comes to gaining new patients.

So it’s very clear that a good website is an essential part of the dental promotional tool-kit; but how do you know if your site is good, bad or indifferent?

To help, here are the key bullet-points you can use as a check-list when auditing the performance of your dental practice website:

  • Modern and appealing – dentistry is increasingly competitive and in this fairly fickle world, you need to present a professional and appealing image. Fail to do this and it’s likely that potential new patients will simply look elsewhere. So it’s essential that your website is up-to-date and represents you exactly as you would wish it. But a word of caution here. As well as lots of dental websites which are old and stale, there are also too many which are either way too generic, or try too hard. By this I mean they look far too ‘glitzy’ and simply don’t look anything like the business they purport to represent. This is more off-putting than you might imagine, so unless your practice warrants a super-fancy website in line with your business model and target demographic, don’t be tempted to overdo it.
  • Your Google ranking is poor – even if your website is decent, if you are languishing in the search engine results, then your investment is failing you. Fewer than 2% of people searching for services or products on Google actually bother to look on page two. It’s also worth noting that the difference in traffic between the top and bottom positions on page one is around 20 – 30 fold, so you really need your website to be up in the top three positions and also for multiple search terms.
  • Your website is aesthetically pleasing but its technical performance is dire – this is increasingly common and can easily result in frustrated users and also sub-standard search ranking results. Slow loading web pages and overly complex navigation structures etc on a website will lead to it failing faster than you’d imagine. Websites which are technically sub-standard occur because designers often take the easy route, for example using commercially designed WordPress templates which are full of bloated code and unnecessary functionality. The analogy would be driving a sports car with a Mini engine. It’s now extremely important to ensure that your website is excellent both aesthetically and technically, so please make sure that your designers are working to a suitable specification for both aspects.

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Content Management

Research suggests that fewer than 1 in 7 dental practices update their own website

Your website may have a facility which allows you to make updates in-house and without referring back to your designer, but do you actually use it? Research suggests that most dentists with this type of facility, known as a content management system (CMS), actually struggle to use it properly, with many not even knowing it even exists. Most are simply referring back to their website designer when site updates are due.

But why is this? Surely this type of system is ideal and allows the dental practice to make updates quickly and easily without having to pay for third-party services? On face value you might think this is the case, but in reality, the vast majority of users really struggle to make even the smallest changes using CMS. They then get frustrated and end up asking their preferred web designer for help.

CMS – more complicated than you were told?

Most content management systems are way more complex than you may have been advised when you bought into it; so-much-so that it can be extremely daunting for a user when they first log in to try some editing. This is particularly the case for WordPress where you are confronted with a huge array of menu items and page layouts which would be alien to most users, particularly the uninitiated. Unfortunately many dentists believe they have a suitable system in place and designate the editing task to a team member, only to be disappointed when that team member fails.

It is also worth understanding that designers look to tools such as WordPress to make their initial design job easier, rather than providing an intuitive system which can easily be used by a lay person to make required website updates. So the CMS is sold as a useful tool, but for most it simply doesn’t work out that way.

CMS maintenance – you’re likely paying monthly for it

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Why stale websites lose impact quickly

If you’ve ever searched the web for dental websites you’ll know that it’s a very diverse landscape – from flashy creations which resemble the website’s of Dubai hotels, to others which are maybe 8 or 9 years old and aren’t even mobile friendly or secure. So if you’re considering updating your own practice website, or are new into the field and wondering how to budget for future updates, here’s a guide on what to consider.

Let’s begin by sharing over 20 years of experience in designing websites for dentists. This shows us that the typical re-design frequency is around 3 – 4 years, albeit we have some large clients who redesign every couple of years as standard and others who haven’t redesigned for many a year. But on average, 3 – 4 years is typical.

So what are the main reasons which would prompt a re-design of a dentist’s website? Let’s take a look at the key ones.

Usability issues

This essentially covers how easy it is for a user to navigate the website and interact with you. Periodically, big technical changes come along which dictate significant changes to website infrastructure i.e. a re-design. Perhaps the best example of this was the shift to “responsive” mobile friendly design several years ago which completely superseded the need for a secondary mobile website. Whilst most businesses have changed over to mobile-friendly sites, perhaps surprisingly there are still lots of dentists who are still lumbering on with old-style sites which frankly don’t really work at all on mobile. What really should be appreciated in this specific circumstance is that the large proportion of people who find a site like this on their mobile ‘phone, won’t ever bother attempting to interact with the business. It’s simply too hard for them to do so and so they quickly move elsewhere.

So where technology dictates that you need a major update for your website, then it would be foolhardy to ignore it.

Design style

Like most things, design “fads” come and go in the world of dental web design. What looks really whizzy now can become quite dated just a few years down the track, so please be aware of this and if you go for all the “bells and whistles”, then expect those to tarnish relatively quickly. There is a tendency for the younger generation to want a flashy website, however this isn’t necessarily the best idea. As I mentioned, those types of websites can tend to age prematurely and there are also usability and search engine optimisation issues to consider too. A classic style of site is often received much better by the viewing audience and will typically age better too.

So when it comes to design style, it’s recommended to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing with their websites and also how trends are progressing elsewhere. This should give you a good lead into when you should consider updating your own site. Remember that many users are quite fickle and will be attracted to something which stands out above the competition – whilst practicalities and budgets will prevent you from re-designing very frequently, having a planned renewal schedule will keep you at the head of the field when it comes to presenting your business on the web.

Technical issues and search engines (SEO)

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