Dental Marketing

Four Components to a Successful Dental Marketing Campaign

One Stop Dental Marketing

When it’s time to make a dentist appointment, we often turn to Google to search for our nearest dental practice. Now more than ever, it’s essential for dental clinics to maximise their online presence through successful dental marketing. A successful marketing campaign can help you attract visitors to your website, gain more patients, and measure the ROI of your campaign.

By combining four key components: website design, PPC, SEO, and social media marketing, you can create a comprehensive and efficient dental marketing campaign that will reach your audience and help generate successful leads. Marketing for your dental practice can be daunting if you don’t know what you’re doing, but hopefully, this post can guide you and provide more insight into what you can do and how to make the most out of your online dental marketing. However, if you still need a little extra help and want expert advice, we are experts in dental marketing in Australia and can help you grow your dental clinic.

1. Website Design

Your website is likely to be the first point of interaction with any potential patients and is a crucial component of your dental online marketing strategy. With only a few seconds to make a first impression on users, your website’s overall look and feel are essential in ensuring that visitors to your site want to stay there. With a visually appealing and easy to use site, you can increase the chances of patients browsing your website and going on to visit your dental clinic in person.

Why exactly is website design?

When designing a website, it can be easy to get caught up in your website’s aesthetic design: tweaking colour schemes, positioning logos and images, changing fonts, etc. Of course, having an eye-catching website will make a difference in attracting visitors to your dental practice; however, website design has many other factors. Besides your website’s overall look, website design also considers your website’s structure and layout and the user experience. Websites shouldn’t just look good; they should be easy to navigate and intuitive to use. If your website is full of confusing links, users are likely to get lost and frustrated. You need to make sure that your website encourages people to stay.

Why is website design important?

Website design is an important aspect of your dental marketing toolbox. It can help you form a good first impression on your patients. 75% of users make judgements on a business’s credibility based on visual design alone (EZMarketing). An outdated or poorly designed website may negatively impact patients or imply poor quality of services. You wouldn’t want your dental clinic to look rundown; a clean and polished dental practice projects an image of a well-run, successful clinic. Why wouldn’t you give your website the same treatment? Design can also significantly impact how easy it is to find specific information on your website. If a patient is looking for contact information to make a booking, you should ensure that contact or booking information is easy to find on your website. If visitors find it difficult to navigate through all the pages of your site, they may end up frustrated and leave your website entirely.

Web Design Quick Tips

Keep your brand clear. Make sure to keep consistency across all aspects of design, not just on your website but in any piece of marketing you create. If you haven’t already, consider making a brand guideline.
Make use of white space. You don’t need to fill every single section of your page with content. Give users space to breathe on your website; it’ll make finding things a lot easier too.
Responsive web design is essential: this refers to optimising a website with a mobile-friendly design to accommodate mobile users. People don’t just use computers to make internet searches. With 77% of mobile searches occurring in a location with a desktop computer or laptop (Google), it’s clear that many people often prefer to search on their phones even when a computer is nearby.
Incorporate visuals and media into your website. GIFs, videos or other visual media are often more eye-catching than text and give more dimension to your website. They can make your website more engaging to visitors, but be careful not to overcrowd your website.
Consider hiring a web designer. Web design is not always easy. With a wide range of skills and expertise needed, it may be overwhelming to tackle web design yourself. A professional web designer can provide expert design and programming knowledge. Contact One Stop Dental Marketing today if you think you can benefit from our web design services.

2. PPC

If you’ve ever done a Google search and noticed advertisements for businesses or products alongside the search results, you’re likely already familiar with PPC. PPC is a common tactic that companies use to drive traffic from search engines and onto their websites. If you’re looking for a way to increase traffic to your site, consider looking into PPC.

What exactly is PPC?

PPC, or pay-per-click, is an advertising model that lets businesses place ads on a platform. Every time someone clicks on the advertisement, the company pays a fee to the platform host, hence the name ‘pay-per-click’. The goal of PPC is to lead clients to your website, where they will hopefully make a booking to visit your dental clinic in person. One of the most popular host platforms is search engines such as Google, as you can place advertisements onto relevant search terms. PPC lets you customise your advertisements based on keyword search and demographic. Do you want an ad for your Melbourne dental clinic to appear when someone searches Google for ‘dentist in Melbourne’? PPC may be a tool for you. To appear more prominently on search engine results, you cannot just pay more. All advertisers who want to show their ads to the same keywords or audience are entered into an ad auction. This auction is what determines the order that the ads are shown. The auction results are based on a few factors determined by the search engine, including your advertisement’s quality and the maximum amount per click that you’ve set for your ad.

Why is PPC important?

One of the advantages of PPC is that you can start receiving clicks very quickly after first setting up your advertisement. This is compared to other methods such as SEO, which may take up to a few months for you to start seeing results after implementing changes. PPC also allows for an extremely detailed level of targeting. If you know exactly who you want to show your advertisements to, PPC is a useful tool. This can include demographic details, location, buying interests, etc. PPC’s advantage over other forms of traditional advertising is that it is very easily measured and tracked. All major platforms, such as Google Ads, will let you track conversions. You will be able to see the ROI on your advertisements, even down to granular levels of specific ad groups and keywords. All this data is valuable for evaluating your PPC campaign and empowering you to refine your ads over time.

PPC Quick tips

Keep an eye on your keyword performance. Focus most of your effort on top-performing keywords: the ones that bring you the most business while also getting rid of the low performers that may not be worth your time.
Don’t disregard your ad content. Remember, having your ad appear in a search is only the first step. You still want people to click through to get to your website. Compelling ad copy is essential in online dental marketing to help attract more potential patients: make sure to describe your dental practice as attractively as you can.
Make use of PPC’s ability to precisely target your patients. If you have a deep understanding of your target audience, you can use that to your advantage with PPC. You can use PPC to display ads based on time of day and location, along with your audience’s specific demographic characteristics.
Use negative keywords. Just as you can decide what keywords you want your ad to run on, you can also omit keywords that are irrelevant to your practice. If you are a practice that doesn’t offer a specific dental service, opt-out of appearing in searches for that service. You will prevent wasting your advertisements on patients who are unlikely to visit.

3. SEO

When’s the last time you went looking past the second page on a Google search result? On the first page of a Google search, the top five results make up 67.6% of all clicks (Zero Limit Web). It’s no surprise that every business wants to do their best to rank higher than their competitors on a search. SEO, or search engine optimisation, is how you can get your dental clinic shown as a top result, thereby encouraging more clicks onto your clinic website. Although SEO can apply to many search engines, we will focus on Google for this post, as it is the most commonly used search engine. SEO can get quite complex, and this post will only go over the topic quite broadly: it may be beneficial for you to contact an SEO expert. If you’re searching dental marketing companies for expert advice on SEO techniques, contact One Stop Dental Marketing for more information on SEO and how we can use it to benefit your online dental marketing.

What exactly is SEO?

While PPC is a paid form of appearing in a search, SEO is used to rank higher among the non-paid, ‘organic’ Google results. SEO is an umbrella term for any technique used to boost your search position and covers a wide range of techniques. Over 64% of marketers use SEO as a form of marketing (HubSpot). Often, the first step in SEO is to determine what terms people are searching for (these search terms are called keywords) that you want to lead them to your site. Make sure you understand your customer base and their interests. If you are a dental clinic located in South Yarra that specialises in Invisalign, keywords that may be useful to you could be ‘dentist South Yarra’ or ‘Invisalign’. Once you have your list of keywords, you want to utilise those words on your website. There are different areas on your website where keywords are valuable. You can try to use keywords in title tags and meta descriptions of your pages alongside your website’s actual content. Aside from keywords, the structure of your website is an essential aspect of SEO. The way you organise your website and link the various pages can impact your search list’s rank. There are many aspects of website architecture in SEO that can get quite complex. As an example, it’s essential to keep your website well organised and make sure your website’s structure is relatively ‘flat’, meaning that you should try to have the pages you want to rank highly for only a few clicks away from your home page. Aside from being more attractive to search engines, good SEO practices in web design will also improve your website’s functionality for your users.

Why is SEO important?

While paid advertisements can no doubt help drive traffic to your website, most online traffic is directed through organic search traffic. This is why dental practices need to use SEO to rank higher on google searches to drive more traffic to their pages. SEO isn’t just about looking good to search engines. Proper SEO utilisation will also encourage content creation that is relevant and useful to your patients and improve your website’s user experience. SEO is also unique because, when set up correctly, it can encourage traffic to your site over an extended period, well beyond when you first initially set it up. You likely won’t have to keep coming back to re-adjust your SEO content for it to continue working for you.

SEO Quick Tips

Don’t forget about user experience when undertaking SEO. Even though you’re optimising for search engines, you are still trying to attract human users. Google can track whether people immediately leave your site after clicking through or if they stay and click onto other pages. If you’re consistently having people quickly bounce from your site because your content isn’t engaging enough, Google will likely bump you down in the rankings.
Target local searches. Almost half of all searches on Google are searching for local information (SEO Expert). Many people prefer to go to a dentist nearby, so don’t forget to optimise for local SEO.
Track your progress using web analytics. Keep an eye on how your website is performing so that you can adjust and make changes as necessary. Ideally, it would be best to have this in place before you even start directing traffic to your website.
Keep in mind you won’t get immediate results. Unlike PPC, a proper SEO strategy can take months to implement and see results. Don’t be discouraged if you start your SEO campaign and don’t see results in the first few weeks.

4. Social Media Marketing

We don’t need to explain to you how social media is booming. If you’re anything like the majority of the world, you’re on social media every day. It seems like a missed opportunity for businesses not to be utilising social media as an aspect of their dental marketing campaign.

What exactly is social media marketing?

Social media marketing uses social media platforms to gain user engagement by creating targeted content suitable for each platform. It’s essential to keep in mind that each social media platform is unique: what may work on Facebook is not guaranteed to be as effective on Tik Tok. An essential aspect of social media marketing is understanding your target audience and getting a grasp on how they use each social media platform. You want to tailor your content and strategy for each platform.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social media marketing is a great way to directly reach your target audience on the platform they use to interact with other people and businesses. You can use it to increase brand awareness and to get more people talking about your business. Social media marketing can also allow you a unique opportunity to interact with your patients directly. Building rapport with your audience can foster a deeper connection to your patients and encourage repeat customers who want to come back to your clinic again and again.

Social media marketing quick tips

Keep an eye on what’s trending, but don’t go overboard. It can be beneficial to stay up to date with trends but be wary of jumping onto every single online trend you see.
Try video content: don’t feel the need to stick to text or picture based content. Try experimenting with video, or make use of Live Video content offered by platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Be personal: use social media to connect on a more personal level with your patients. Ask questions and respond to comments to engage with your audience.
Share informative/valuable content. As a dental clinic, you may want to use your platform to inform your audience. Give tips on dental hygiene, and your audience may share the content around their circles.

Contact One Stop Dental Marketing

Are you still unsure of how to market a dental practice? Do you think you can benefit from expert advice? Contact the One Stop Dental Marketing team on 1300 867 699, and we can help you make the most of your online marketing campaign. We have experience working in dental marketing in Australia and can help you achieve the marketing outcomes you want.