Building Great Landing Pages for Dental Paid Ads Marketing

Which components are essential to ensure landing page success?

If you’re using paid ads, either Facebook/Instagram and/or Google in a meaningful way; you’re very likely already familiar with landing pages.

For the uninitiated, let’s quickly recap on what a landing page actually is, its essential role in generating dental patient enquiries and what features need to be incorporated to ensure success.

What is a dental ads landing page and how should it be structured?

Paid media advertising usually consists of the following components:

• A set of targeted ads deployed on Facebook/Instagram and/or Google
• A landing page(s) to receive the visits from people clicking on ads
• A trained reception team to follow-up on enquiries proactively
• Data collection to facilitate re-marketing and follow-up

In today’s blog we’ll look specifically at landing pages.

Quite often we are asked why a landing page is needed where a client already has a good quality website and this is quite understandable. After all, a decent website should be optimised to encourage people to make enquiries when they visit. However, it’s not quite as simple as that.

With a website, there are inherent features which actually detract from what we call the conversion process (the act of enquiring), for example the presence of a navigation menu which allows users to navigate away to different pages on the website. With a paid ads campaign, you are typically targeting a specific treatment type and hence need to keep users absolutely focused on that. So simply using a website page as the target, allows too many opportunities for users to get distracted.

There are several ways we can optimise a landing page to assist the conversion (enquiry) process – let’s take a look those features and how they work.

Landing page layout

The primary thing to keep in mind with any landing page is to ensure that it is optimised for mobile. Virtually all of the ads for a Facebook/Instagram campaign will be seen on mobile devices and so any click-throughs need to go to a landing page which works extremely well on mobile. Too often we see examples where landing pages have been designed on desk-top and insufficient thought has been given to mobile compatibility.

Make key information immediately obvious

This may sound obvious but it is essential to ensure that the key elements of your offer are immediately clear and do not require the user to scroll to see them. So make it clear what the treatment actually is, the offer you are making and any other key information such as dates and times if you are advertising an open day.

We also use an intuitive online booking system placed prominently on the landing page with clear “Book Now” buttons elsewhere on the page which link directly back to the booking form when clicked. So even if the user has scrolled down the page, there is a call-to-action making it easy for them to book.

Make the page engaging

It should go without saying, but it essential to make the page engaging and “sticky”. A bland page simply won’t cut it as users are fickle and expect to see something appealing instantaneously. These are the key elements you need:

• Great images – for example, an Invisalign campaign might use an appealing background image showing a person holding an aligner or similar
• Reasons to choose the treatment – key advantages
• Why to choose you as the provider
• Patient testimonials
• Case studies
• The headline offer
• The booking form

It will not be possible to make all of the information visible without scrolling, particularly on mobile, so some of it will need to be added lower on the page. However please see the recommendation above about which elements need to be visible as soon as the landing page loads.

Test and maintain

Setting up paid ads and landing pages is not “fire-and-forget” and regular analysis of results and maintenance of those assets will be required to ensure that they continue to deliver. This will involve adjustment not just to the ads, but also to the landing page to establish exactly which configuration works best.

For larger campaigns, we will often deploy different landing pages so we can compare which works best. This type of iteration and optimisation is essential to ensure that ad campaigns and landing pages are fine-tuned for optimum performance.

A word on commercial landing page services

Here at Dental Media we always choose to build bespoke landing pages for our clients, simply because we know they look and perform better. However, there are numerous landing page services you can subscribe to where payment of a monthly subscription allows access to a range or generic templates you can use. Many marketing agencies go this route but please be aware that the pages you get will tend to look pretty generic and very probably, not really in keeping with your brand. But it is an option to consider if you don’t have access to a skilled designer.

Summary

Using optimised landing pages is a key part of paid ad campaigns. How they are configured and maintained is also very important to ensure that ad campaigns continue to perform and that the best configuration is always in use.

There is a lot of experience and skill needed to build great dental landing pages and perhaps not something for a DIY job, as getting it wrong will result in lost enquiries. Similar can be said for the configuration of the ads you use in conjunction with the landing pages and which we’ll cover in more detail in a future blog.

If you’d like to get up-and-running with paid ad campaigns for your own practice, please get in touch with the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for some illustrations and a project proposal.