YouTube for dentists – a valuable marketing channel?

Optimising dental videos for lead generation on YouTube

Broadcasting useful content via social channels is a proven technique for helping to drive traffic to a dental website. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are all key components in the web marketing tool-kit and now in common use.

However, one channel which has huge potential but is still under utilised by the majority of dentists is YouTube. This is possibly because the majority consider video to be a bridge too far – either just too tricky to organise of perhaps prohibitively expensive? In reality, neither of those is true, particularly when a days professional filming can be achieved for little over a thousand pounds. Compare this to designing and printing a new patient pack with a few glossy inserts and you’ll start to see what I mean when it comes to comparing “bang for buck”.

The value of dental video for your practice website

Before I delve into the specifics of YouTube, let’s take a moment to recap on why dental video is a great marketing investment:

• patient video testimonials act as trusted, third- party, word-of-mouth referrals which work for you 24/7 on your website.
• videos are engaging and encourage people to linger on your website. Not only is this good to help potential new patients engage with you but it is also good for search engine optimisation. As we covered in this blog here, increasing user “dwell” time on your website sends high quality signals back to Google which can improve rankings.
• video provides excellent content to add to your social channels; for use in the practice on reception flat screens as well as on your website.
• YouTube is a fertile platform for lead generation and is now a social network in itself with sharing, comments and likes as part of it’s feature set. What’s more, YouTube is now the World’s second largest search engine, second only to it’s big sibling and owner, Google.
• Hosting your dental video on YouTube provides another opportunity for searchers to find you – this is not the case if you host the video yourself.
• professionally shot video helps to portray your business in a professional light.
• because your viewers can see and hear you, a video on YouTube provides a “human touch” for your business that no other social network can match.

Optimising your dental practice video for YouTube

Now that we’ve recapped on the benefits of video, let’s take a closer look at how to optimise it to gain best effect. Careful optimisation will help users to find your content and there are a couple of simple parameters to keep in mind:

Video title

This is similar to a web pages title and can be set up in a similar fashion i.e. a mix of keywords (not too many!), your brand and a catchy “hook” to grab attention.

Description

You should also think of this as being similar to web page text i.e. optimised for SEO. The first couple of sentences are the most important and you can take the opportunity to add a link to your target page here. You can also add links to your other web properties, blog, social media etc at the end of your description. As with all SEO , do not be tempted to over-use keywords – add these once or twice and then support them with other phrases that match contextually.

Tags

YouTube also allows the use of ‘tags’ to describe your video. Don’t skimp on these – use broad, generic phrases as well as more specific ‘long-tail’ versions.

What about optimising the videos themselves?

Like any content, your video clips need to be of decent quality and configured in such a way to grab users attention and then hold them.

Dental video production for YouTube is beyond the scope of this short article but there are a few key factors to keep in mind. Remember the following points and you will be on the right track:

• use short, targeted clips rather than long, drawn out footage.
• use calls-to-action – at the start and then re-iterated at the end.
• switch the viewer on quickly – studies show you have around 10 seconds to grab attention.
• annotate the footage in selected places where you need to make a point.

Summary

Posting carefully crafted dental videos to YouTube is proven to be one of the best ways to encourage new patient sign-ups and is a lot more cost-effective than you might imagine. Your suite of videos should be optimised for YouTube in line with the guidance above to ensure that your content achieves maximum benefit.

If you would like assistance with producing video for your dental practice, please call the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548. Our video director will be pleased to discuss the options we have available.