Before hiring a dental marketing agency, make sure you ask these questions
Dental marketing services can be one of the best decisions a dentist might take to promote a dental practice.
But if you don’t hire the right dental marketing company or the right freelancer, it can quickly become a nightmare.
If you want your dental patient marketing to bring you a positive return on investment, make sure you ask the following questions before choosing a marketing agency or consultant.
What do their dental marketing services actually include?
When you promote a dental practice, you should have only one objective in mind: more patients.
“Raise brand awareness” or “Get more likes. Get more visibility. Grow your Facebook Page” aren’t real objectives that can help you get more appointments.
Why? Because likes and shares don’t pay bills, right?
Ok, but now comes the question: “What dental marketing services can actually grow a dental practice?”
Dental Google Adwords
This is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic fast and quite cheap.
Plus, it’s super easy to set up a campaign. You can run a few dental ads on Google in a couple of hours. And you don’t even need a designer or so!
But even if this is efficient, most of the times, Google Ads isn’t enough to get the most out of your dental patient marketing strategy.
This is why you need to do the next step which is…
Remarketing Ads
Remarketing is showing an ad or some other piece of content to people who haven’t converted the first time they visited your website.
And since 99% of your traffic won’t buy from the first time, this is a great way to increase your conversion rate and get more patients.
It can be accomplished through both Google And Facebook.
Facebook Ads
The main advantage of this is that you can promote your dental office only in a certain area you choose, like your neighbourhood for example.
And you can also laser target your audience. For example, you can show an ad only to moms in your area, with ages between X and Y age.
The downside of this is that you will also reach people who don’t have dental problems or they aren’t ready to visit a dentist yet, while on Google you pinpoint only those who need a problem solved right now.
Dental email marketing
This is another great way to make sure you don’t lose all those visitors who didn’t buy yet.
This can prove very efficient for more expensive services like dental implants. After you get people’s emails, you can gradually earn their trust by sending them more useful information about the problem they have.
Dental SEO
This isn’t a short-term dental marketing tactic. SEO takes time, sometimes even 6-8 months before seeing any result. The advantage is that once your website shows up in the first places in Google, you’ll basically attract patients for free, 24/7.
Dental copywriting
You should never hire a dental marketing company or someone who doesn’t offer this kind of service.
Why? Because it’s the basis of any dental marketing campaign. No matter how many new visitors you get on your website, if you cannot convince them to take action, you wasted all your money.
Copywriting is the art of persuading (usually in written form) people and you need this service a lot.
What you need to ask a dental marketing agency before hiring them
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What is their number one objective
Dental marketing services should have clear SMART goals. The agency or the freelancer you hire should know 1) what is their goal and 2) when they are going to reach it.
Here’s how a proper outline of a dental marketing strategy would look like:
Objective: 50 new patients per month
Secondary objectives:
- Increase traffic by 250% in the first 3 months
- Setup conversion tracking for each landing page
- Increase conversion rate by 50% in the first 3 months
Main dental marketing channels:
- Google Ads
- SEO
- Facebook Ads
Secondary dental marketing channels:
- Email Marketing
- Messenger Marketing
You see how this is much more effective and actionable than just: “Let’s raise brand awareness”?
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What is their method of tracking results? Do they do it?
They say that half of the money spent in advertising is wasted. The problem is, you don’t know which half.
Well, thanks to online marketing, now you can find out.
And as a dentist or a dental office manager, you want to know where you spend your money and how you can improve your marketing efforts.
And it’s quite easy.
In Google Analytics for instance, you can see how many people visited your website, where did they come from and what is your conversion rate (from all the people who visited the website, how many of them actually ended up completing a form).
And this is just an example. You would be amazed how specific dental online marketing can be!
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Do they have a dental marketing plan or a strategy?
You shouldn’t start a dental marketing campaign without a proper plan.
Otherwise you might end up trying all kinds of dental marketing ideas without actually having an overview of where you are going. Which leads to a lot of wasted money.
Before choosing a dental marketing agency (or even a dental marketing freelancer) make sure they have a proper plan laid out.
What you should do next
The first thing you should do is to take all these ideas with you.
Next, interview several dental marketing companies and compare their answers.
What you should look for is hiring someone who has a clear plan focused on tangible objectives that translate into getting new patients at the end of the month.
And of course, don’t forget, put all the points they promise into a contract!.
