Dental Marketing Step 4 – Strategy

How to formulate your strategy

Now that we have all the data we need to make smart and informed decisions, we start making our marketing strategy for the dental clinic/s. There are three main avenues that dentists currently market themselves online, SEO, Social Media and Google Adwords. This is for good reason as well as these are your go-to channels that will yield the highest ROI in our experience working with clinics.

We must now consider each channel on its merits as well as timeline of results. There are a few metrics against which we can judge the success of a campaign.

1. Return on Investment
2. Time to see ROI from campaign launch
3. Time and energy required by clinic management and staff for campaigns
4. Residual value to clinics from running campaign

The following is what BizGrow has seen first had based on our campaigns we have run which has been corroborated by many industry associates.

SEO

1. Highest return on investment – Approx $30 for every dollar invested
2. Varies significantly from campaign to campaign but can take 3-6 months to see first results and can take anywhere from 6-12 months for campaign to hit 100%. But is the go-to for most dentists as it’s the best long term strategy.
3. Minimal energy required internally, possibly contribution to monthly blogs on website.
4. High residual value, should you sell the clinic later on down the line, you are selling a clinic with guaranteed monthly new bookings regardless of marketing. This is of value to principal dentists looking to retire who have a large portion of their customer base that they have built over many years that are loyal to them. When purchasing a clinic the new potential clinic owner will consider loss of revenue due to loyal customers that only came to the clinic due to their loyalty to the previous principal dentist. Being ranked at the top of Google will be worth far more to you in residual value to the clinic than the costs of the campaigns many many times over. See SEO for Dental Clinics

Adwords

1. Lowest return on investment – Approx $17 return for every dollar invested
2. Almost instant, campaign should be at 70% optimal within month 1 and 80-90% optimal by month 2.
3. Minimal energy required internally
4. No residual value as its Cost per Click so after you have paid for a click, that visitor will either become a booking or they won’t be however there is no residual value to the clinic outside of the value of the booking created. See Adwords for Dental Clinics

Social Media

1. Medium return on investment – Approx $24 for every dollar invested
2. Ads can be pushed out and given that you have a good landing page you can begin to convert traffic. Although can take a little bit of time to build Likes and a following for your actual profile page.
3. Slightly more involvement required, ongoing discussions with SM staff around what’s happening in the clinic
4. Medium residual value as you would have built a following for your clinic through social media which will be passed onto incoming management should you decided to sell the clinic. Not as high as SEO but certainly higher than Adwords. See Social Media for Dental Clinics

Email Marketing

1. High return on investment as can often be done internally
2. Can take time to put email together however results are quick
3. High level of internal involvement unless outsourcing to marketing agency
4. Medium-High residual value as you are building a newsletter database that can be sold on to the next business owner that can be leveraged to keep bringing in revenue.

We generally recommend starting with SEO despite the small initial lag time to get the campaign up and running, it delivers maximum ROI as well as residual value to the clinic valuation should it be decided that you sell down the line. However regardless of which digital marketing channel you utilise, we always recommend to our customers that they should have in place an effective form of email marketing in the way of monthly newsletters to your existing patient database. 

Some clinics choose to launch and Adwords campaign together with an SEO campaign depending on budget. The Adwords campaign will generate almost instantaneous results (although more expensive) and can be phased out slowly as SEO results ramp up in the coming months.

When going after Search campaigns such as SEO or Adwords, keyword strategy is extremely important. This is where an experienced digital marketer can help. Different target keywords will have varying degrees of what we refer to as ‘commercial intent’. This refers to how likely they are to go ahead and book. The more commercial intent the online searcher has means they are searching for that term as they have a higher likelihood. So how do you decide what strategy to implement with keywords? Essentially the most important metrics are relevancy to what you do, competition level, search volumes (from data), commercial intent. Once you decide what direction you want to take with your marketing and you have your strategy formulated in terms of the marketing channels you will utilize, you need to then turn your focus before beginning any marketing to your website. This is the platform that all your marketing efforts will be landing visitors on for the next few years, get it wrong at your peril.

Stay tuned for the next installment in our dental marketing blogs, ‘The dental website’. As always if you have any questions or want help with growing your clinics form the experienced experts at BizGrow Digital, you can contact us on 1300 669 618. Also you can subscribe to our newsletter using the form on the right hand side of this page to have the latest dental marketing news sent to you.