Dental Marketing Step 2 – Data

Data, Data, Data for Dental marketing

One word. Data. You can not have a good Dental marketing strategy without good solid data. Data is the single most important aspect of marketing, and since the digital revolution well over a decade ago, is readily available to us once we know where to look for it. Why anyone would possibly comprehend creating a marketing strategy and plan without data to back it up baffles us and yet still occurs in 2017.

Armed with good research and data, you are able to make better decisions as to where to invest your money as well as significantly increasing the likelihood of generating good Return on Investment (ROI) from it. Quite often we encounter clients who will come to us and make a statement regarding the direction and medium of marketing they want to use. For example I want to use Social Media to push Invisalign out into a 30km radius around me or I want to be found as a leading Prosthodontist in my region. Before running off and executing such a campaign we need to know how many people are actually actively search for a Prosthodontist in this region, what are the monthly average figure for such search? Without this data, from our experience, you have a good chance of kissing that marketing budget goodbye.

In order to gather the required data we have numerous tools at our disposal such as Google Analytics, Google keyword research tools, Facebook analytics and third party websites like Semrush, MOZ etc. What are we looking for in data? In depth keyword research. How many people searched for a dentist in your area and in your surrounding suburbs for general dentistry as well as for all the other dental services you provide. From what you found what percentage of searches had strong commercial intent (likely to become a customer) vs what percentage were only researching? From the services I provide, what procedures or services are the best revenue raisers and what social or online mediums are people looking for these types of services? These are all questions which can be answered through in depth keyword research and strategy using the tools we mentioned.

You can find detailed guidelines on how to use the respective tools to dig through the mountains of data or ensure you find a good marketing agency which is data centric (shameless mention for BizGrow Digital here) and understand who to target, where to start, what channels to utilise, how to word your messaging etc.

Once we have accurate and relevant data, we need to calculate the LTV (Life Time Value) a dental patient has to a clinic. This creates the foundation of our marketing strategy as once we understand things figure, we can use it to figure out which products to implement and which not to implement. In the next blog we will talk about how to calculate the lifetime value of a patient and why it is absolutely vital to the future of your clinic to understand this metric.