by AdminPosted on Posted in Paid Ads

What’s involved in managing Facebook and Instagram paid ad campaigns for dentists?

Over the last couple of months we’ve noticed that the amount of time required to maintain successful social media campaigns for dentists has increased. The input required was never trivial but the management input now has stepped up quite considerably due to two main issues:

  • Increasing competition – more and more dentists are leveraging social media to promote treatments such as implants and Invisalign
  • The economic climate has worsened – this means that even more effort is required to target the decreasing number of people who can still afford “high end” treatments

The upshot of this is that we are now typically spending two or three hours more per campaign per week than we were say 18 months ago. In turn this has resulted in an increase in pricing to cover the associated costs.

The response from clients has been mixed which is understandable as they battle a large range of increasing costs. However, when explained carefully along with a demonstration of the ongoing return-on-investment, the vast majority of clients have continued with their campaigns.

With the above in mind, I thought it would be useful to detail what typically goes into setting up and managing a successful social media ads campaign for a dentist. This will hopefully serve as a handy reference for anyone wanting more detail about how their money is being spent and also useful for those who fancy trying some DIY ad management.

The initial set up of the campaign

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram is not trivial and not just a case of creating a couple of ads, launching them and then hoping for lots of enquiries. At the Facebook side, the advertising account has to be set up carefully including some technical issues e.g. domain verification to ensure that ads are actually working across a variety of the most useful platforms. Often a new client will present an ad account with historical violations where we have to step in to resolve the problem(s) before advertising can commence – this can be time consuming.

Structuring the ads is also quite time-consuming, from the selection of the correct text and images through to ensuring that the ad text is well-written and compelling. A large part of this involves competitor analysis to make sure that the client’s service offer is competitive and presents a solid reason for a potential new patient to get in touch.

The landing page

Discrete landing pages work much better than website pages when it comes to converting traffic from paid ads. So a landing page has to be designed and built reflecting the practice’s branding and offer. It will also include key element to encourage the enquiry e.g. use of patient testimonials, Google reviews, past cases, FAQs and more. This is similar to designing a mini website and a lot of work goes in to ensure the landing page is effective. A bespoke page designed like this will also tend to work better than some of the DIY landing page builders you can subscribe to on-line.

Maintenance of the ads

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Techniques

Short, mid and long term strategies for new patient acquisition

One of the key questions dentists ask when considering dental marketing initiatives is, unsurprisingly, “when should I expect a return?”

Whilst there is no definite answer to this, simply because it depends on several factors, we can give some useful indicators to help inform key operational decisions such as budgeting etc.

Before we move on to the main marketing techniques you can use and how long it typically takes for them to become effective, let’s take a quick look at the factors which will affect their performance and which need to be considered carefully before you begin:

  • Your objectives
  • The competitive environment
  • The economic climate
  • Your budget
  • How capable is your local team to assist?
  • Google
  • Facebook (Meta)

Let’s break those elements down a little more.

Your objectives – are you simply looking to get “bums on seats” for general treatments or something more specific such as high-spec implant and ortho treatments? Often it will be all of those things but they are not all quick wins unfortunately and you should be prepared for variable results. For example, it’s relatively straightforward to acquire new patients for general treatments using paid ads, however getting a regular stream of Invisalign cases is not quite as straightforward. This leads nicely into a consideration of the competition.

The competitive environment – some treatments e.g. Invisalign and to some extent implants, are very popular in terms of an increasing number of dentists wishing to advertise those services. With Invisalign training courses now lasting just a few days, it seems that most practices are jumping on this particular ortho bandwagon. With that comes a huge increase in the number of practices advertising and overall competition ramping up considerably. The effect of that doesn’t need to be explained but suffice to say you have to try much harder than just 2 or 3 years ago.

The economic climate – this has a clear effect on any dentistry marketing initiatives and irrespective of what your Invisalign rep, marketing company or dental coach might tell you, if the general public is more focused on how they’re going to pay their fuel bills, they will be much less willing to stretch to having their teeth straightened.

This doesn’t mean that all of the treatment cases will go away, but some of them will certainly be put on ice – so you will need to work harder to attract the folk out there who can still afford it. For the sceptics out there, we have rafts of analytical data which clearly demonstrates the effects of what I’ve just mentioned.  I’d rather be factual and transparent than try to convince you “all is well” and that your marketing pound will fall on fertile ground – at the moment that’s not always the case and you’ll need to work harder.

Your budget – it’s still quite scary how many dentists enquire about digital advertising and during the discussion inform you that their budget is a couple of hundred pounds per month. Unfortunately long gone are the days when you could spend £5 a day on click costs on Facebook and do very nicely. These days you’re looking at several fold that, and more for Google Ads. This varies by region of course and busy city locations will cost you significantly more. It will also vary significantly by the type of treatment(s) you are targeting.

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Content

Here are the key content platforms dentists need to nurture and their use in dental marketing

In times gone by, before the advent of the internet, dental practice promotion was a fairly simplistic affair. Some personal networking, an entry in the local Yellow Pages and some prominent practice signage was pretty much all it took to get noticed in the local neighbourhood.

However, in today’s online world and with the whole of the internet shrunk into our pockets via our mobile ‘phones, marketing a dental practice is a much more complex affair with multiple facets and features. Add to this the increased competition and a plethora of digital marketing agencies all claiming to be the next “best thing”, and then it’s understandable why a dentist might be confused as to where to begin.

In today’s blog we’ll attempt to alleviate some of that confusion by illustrating where you need to have an active online presence and what material (content) you need to generate to make that presence prominent and attractive to potential new patients. In some ways, successful modern dental practices need to be “content generators” or “mini media production companies” in order to engage patients with attractive new material as they scroll their social media feeds or search on Google.

Why web content is so important

Bottom line is that a large majority of people now use the web to research businesses and services – dentistry included. Even those who are recommended via word-of-mouth still tend to reference the practice website and social media channels to validate the recommendation before making an enquiry.

It used to be that the practice website was sufficient and whilst that is still extremely important, other channels and features now also play a key role. Let’s take a look then at the main web channels and features dentists need to maintain to grow their patient list in the modern online world.

The practice website

It shouldn’t really need saying that the dental practice website is the cornerstone of all promotional activity. A high-quality, Google optimised website is essential for dentists in the same way as any business looking to exploit the huge potential of the web.

Dental website design is very competitive and the standard has increased markedly in the last five years. Dentists who appreciate the potential of the web are refreshing their sites every 3 – 4 years (full re-design) so a sensible budget is needed to facilitate this. Making sure that the site is kept up-to-date with new content is also best practice and helpful for Google rankings too.

In terms of pay-back there is little better than a good quality, high performing website and you can easily make a full return on your investment in as little as 4 or 5 months.

Google Business Profile and Reviews

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

A review of total cost of ownership for websites in 2022

One key operating cost which sometimes confuses dental practice managers is the overall cost of their website. This is an important factor which, if you get wrong, will unexpectedly drain your budget way more than perhaps you may have imagined.

What often happens is that practice managers and dentists look at the initial cost to develop a website but then don’t dig into the contractual small print which subsequently ties them into additional unexpected costs and/or onerous constraints. Indeed we’ve had a few clients over the years who have been lured away from us by “headline” promises only to come back a couple of years later when the reality became clear.

When developing and running a website for a dental practice you need to be fully aware of the following costs:

  • Initial set-up costs
  • Ongoing maintenance and updating costs

Only when those cost elements are fully transparent can you understand what your website “total costs of ownership” will be over the average four year life of a website.

To help clarify, here is a quick illustration of the type of mistake that is often made when choosing a website agency.

Total cost of ownership for a new dental website

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

And why it’s increasingly important for your website ranking

Not too many years ago it used to be the case that website designers and SEO practitioners didn’t have to worry too much about the underlying technical performance of a website. As long as the website was reasonable engaging and easy enough for users to navigate, this and some decent back-links was all that was needed to get great Google rankings.

However, the picture has changed quite considerably in the last few years and now “technical SEO” is a much bigger consideration when getting dental websites to rank well in Google.

Back in 2018 we covered website performance and touched on technical SEO in this blog, but what’s changed since and why would a dentist need a reasonable working knowledge of the subject when choosing their designer and SEO provider?

Understanding technical SEO

Over the last few years Google has placed a lot more emphasis on the technical performance of a website and progressively started to give ranking advantages to those websites which perform better than others. It started with relatively simple factors such as how fast a web page loaded, but now encompasses a lot more elements including how certain features of a website display and how quickly.

So why is Google so focused on website performance in this way? It all stems from their wish to provide the best experience for a website user, whether it’s the content which answers a user’s search query best to the time a user has to wait until meaningful information is displayed in their browser.

They also penalise certain features which they consider may hamper the user experience, for example the use of intrusive interstitials (pop-ups) that obscure the useful information on a page.

So why would a dentist need to worry about this? Surely any self-respecting web design and SEO company would take all of this into account when carrying out their work? Unfortunately this is not the case; on the contrary.

What we are actually seeing is popular dental web designers completely ignoring these recent Google guidelines and getting stuck in what we call the “form over function” conundrum i.e. sacrificing technical performance for glitzy appearance. This is no longer satisfactory and you need both aesthetic and technical excellence. Without the latter websites can languish in the Google rankings and we see this more and more, indeed more often than not it’s the “glitzy” websites built on un-optimised WordPress platforms which tend to fare the worst.

How do you avoid a technically poor website development?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

How much is prominence in Google rankings really worth?

Whilst most dentists have a good idea that good search positions are beneficial, you might be surprised to know that it is relatively few who really know the true worth. This probably explains why less than 15% of all dentists’ websites have active SEO in place. Less than a third of these have what I would rate as effective SEO, but more of that later.

In today’s blog we’ll take a closer look at one of the most popular questions I’m asked as an SEO specialist “does my website need SEO?” – the answer is “very probably yes” as you’ll see when you read on. Let’s start with some basics….

What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is a process whereby the position of a web page is improved progressively in search engines. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll refer to Google as this is the engine where over 80% of all search queries are directed in the UK. So it makes sense that our activities to boost dental website rankings are primarily focused on Google.

Some people get confused and think it is a website that is actually ranked by Google, but it’s actually a page within that website. So you can have a situation where, for example, the implants page ranks very well but the Invisalign page not so well. In this case the dentist may request a specific SEO campaign to improve searches around the word Invisalign to promote that particular page or pages. More generally though, a good SEO campaign will target a wide range of search terms to promote a range of website pages.

How is SEO carried out?

This is a huge topic in itself but as an overview, optimisation is in two main parts as follows:

  • On-site optimisation – this is all about making sure that the website is structured to be as receptive as possible for the algorithms that make up Google’s search engine. This ranges from excellent technical configuration to the inclusion of great content which answers users’ queries better than competitor websites. On-site SEO is becoming increasingly important and poor technical configuration can no longer be easily overcome with good off-site SEO.
  • Off-site optimisation – these are the activities which create signals around a website which Google picks up on and uses as votes of confidence when deciding where a website should rank. When it comes to off-site SEO, good back-links, reviews and citations all make a big difference to where a website ranks.

An optimisation team will employ all of the techniques mentioned above to progressively improve the prominence of a website in the free listings Google. Although we don’t tend to refer to other engines much in the UK, if a website does well in Google, it will often do well in other engines such as Bing too.

Why is dental website SEO so important?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Why you need to plan carefully and budget for success

Over the last few weeks the team at Dental Media has collated data from numerous accounts to investigate which dentists are actually winning the marketing wars – so who is doing what and at what cost, to secure new patient enquiries.

The analysis is ongoing and the results will be the subject of future blogs; however there are three general conclusions which are already apparent – 1) In general UK dentists don’t spend enough on marketing, many nothing at all, 2) those who start early and budget appropriately win the marketing wars and 3) those who do it right, quickly extend their lead over their competitors. That probably seems quite predictable, but given the general reluctance to budget and plan marketing appropriately within the UK dental sector, it’s well worth reiterating.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements and how the information can be used to inform the business strategy for your own dental practice.

UK dentists are generally significantly under-budgeted when it comes to marketing

This is particularly the case when you compare to other countries such as the US or indeed general businesses in the UK. Very often we see that dentists have a website and then do little else, perhaps some ad hoc social media marketing or some DIY Google Ads. There may also be some website SEO happening, but even this is far from the norm.

This is somewhat peculiar given that it’s very easy to show that websites which are prominent on Google are excellent for attracting new dental patients and payback on SEO is fast. It’s also easy to demonstrate that social media, done well and consistently, can deliver excellent return on investment.

Despite the data and evidence to show just how well professional marketing contributes to a dental business, there still seems to be a disconnect for many dentists in the UK. There is often a focus on the sum of money needed to introduce and maintain marketing, rather than the payback which it can deliver. This failure to invest leads to business growth stagnating unnecessarily.

Start marketing early to build momentum

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Tackling the effects of current economic constraints

With inflation currently at 9% and predicted to hit 11% soon, it’s unsurprising that the effects are starting to bite in the dental industry. Put bluntly, folk who would have stretched to afford Invisalign for straighter teeth or perhaps an implant to fix a gappy smile not so long ago, are now more concerned about how to pay their power bills and feed their family.

Coupled with this, we are seeing dentists increasing prices to compensate for increasing costs, not just to cover increases in things like utilities, but also to offer the types of salaries needed to attract and maintain suitable staff. To be honest, some of the price increases we’ve applied for clients are significantly ahead of inflation and it does make you wonder how sustainable that actually is.

Undoubtedly, the dental cycle has moved again and harder times are ahead. We are seeing this in the marketing data we produce for clients and even where website and landing page visits from interested patients remain buoyant, the general level of actual enquiries is down. So folk are still looking for services but fewer are choosing not to make the final step, particularly for treatments where a significant investment is required.

To help put it into context, we analysed several Facebook and Instagram paid ads accounts and compared the number of landing page views and enquiries from the second half of last year (following the removal of all Covid restrictions) with the same campaigns for the first half of this year. Landing page views were down 26% and actual enquiries from those views were down 47%. There was no change in the way that the campaigns were being managed and it’s reasonable to conclude that the reduction is solely due to external factors.

What are your options when new patient acquisition gets tougher?

This is a tricky question and one where the answer will depend on your financial situation and what you’ve budgeted. There will be some things that all dental teams can do to up their game to face the challenge, whereas other initiatives will depend on how much cash can be reallocated to areas such as enhanced marketing and advertising to ensure that your business is number one choice in a smaller pond of patients who still have the means to proceed.

Let’s take a look at some of the initiatives you can introduce; some of them free, some of them requiring additional investment.

Internal Marketing

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Facebook

What is account quality and how does it affect how your ad campaigns perform?

It seems that most dentists use Facebook and their sister platform, Instagram for advertising these days; albeit with variable success. Indeed Facebook has made it easier for people with little or no experience to build ads and launch them across both of those platforms.

It’s fair to say that the ‘halcyon’ days of easy Facebook advertising for dentists are over and it tends to be those folk who don’t have a solid grip of the fundamentals who end up wasting a lot of money and disappointed. Quite often this is where we get asked to pick-up the pieces and launch some carefully crafted campaigns after the dentist’s DIY endeavours fell short.

Account Quality Definition

What we often find when we take over the set-up and management of ads for a dentist is that their account has fallen into disrepair and the intrinsic “quality” of the account as Facebook refers to it, has fallen through the floor. This is a serious issue and the implications vary, from under-performing ads through to the whole account being banned.

So what is Facebook account quality and how can you ensure that your own account meets requirements?

Facebook says this in the opening paragraph of their own information about account quality:

“Account Quality provides a centralised place to monitor and improve compliance with our Advertising Policies, Commerce Policies and other Facebook policies and terms. You can also use it to monitor your feedback.”

You can see more in the link to their details here:

About Account Quality

They go on to explain how they use a rigorous set of parameters to ensure that advertisements do not contravene standards and policies and to ensure that people are protected from harmful experiences when they are using their platforms.

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Why you don’t need to pay monthly fees for an agency to manage your Google business page

Over the last few months we’ve had a couple of clients approach us to say that they’ve signed up with a third-party agency that approached them and offered to manage their Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) for £149 + vat per month. Sadly they signed up to 12 month contracts for this on the back of being promised “wonderful” things in terms of Google rankings and new patient enquiries.

I was instantly suspicious and asked one of the clients to send references describing the service that they signed up to and ‘benefits’ that it offered. Here’s what came back in terms of the supposed benefits:

  • Management and otpimisation of the business’s Google Business Profile page
  • Advice on Google reviews

That was it – no assistance with helping the business to rank better in Google local search, no citation building, no actual assistance with the reviews process. So in reality they’d signed up to a 12 month contract at £149 + vat per where they were receiving effectively nothing on an ongoing basis.

What the agency was actually doing was checking over the existing business profile to make sure simple things like addresses were set up correctly, a few photos added, opening times checked etc and that was it. At best this would represent just an hour or two of work. After this, pretty much nothing else was happening!

Is this a scam?

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