What I Have Learned About Marketing Through a Data Analyst's Eyes.
I come from a heavy analytical background. I have been a financial
analyst a data analyst and have held many positions that use number
tracking. My most recent position is business manager of Oxford Dental
Care. We are a dental practice that tries very hard to keep costs in line and I
oversee the financials as well as analyzing marketing efforts.
I have learned a lot through monitoring our marketing efforts and I want
to share something that I have learned in hopes that it will be
beneficial to other dentists out there.
Start With Your Online Reputation
As we started the practice we knew that we wanted people in the
community to equate our practice with high quality dentistry. We signed
up with Best Local Reviews immediately and started gathering reviews
about our practice both on Google My Business and Yelp. Yes, I know that
a lot of people don't like yelp, but ignoring it is only hurting your
online presence. Over the last year we have been able to gather quite a
few good reviews and that has been the main thing that people mention
when they call for a new patient appointment. It doesn't matter if the
patient got a mailer or one of their friends told them about us, almost
everyone has seen our Google reviews.I would describe our efforts in
gathering Google reviews as something slightly less than
semi-aggressive. If someone is really aggressive they could build theirs
a lot faster than what we have done.
While building good Google My Business reviews will help your business
rank better locally, that is not the only place where you will see the
benefit of having good reviews.
Now For the Marketing Stats
In a typical month before
starting Google Adwords we would have between 7 and 15 people getting to
our site from our Google My Business listing. We are not in the top
three yet because some of our top competitors have over 100 Google
reviews. I am sure that number getting to our site would be
significantly higher if we were in the top three. Don't lose hope if you
are not in the top three, or even in the top ten. Focus on getting some
high quality five star reviews.
Back to traffic from Google My
Business. I started messing around with a few different pay per click
campaigns. The reason that I say messing around is because we have never
spent more than $300 per month on a campaign. As we started kicking
these campaigns in, the most amazing thing started happening that I was
not expecting. While we were only paying for one to two clicks per day,
we started getting several calls each day that were not calling from our
pay per click campaign.
As I looked at our Google Analytics I
noticed that our referral traffic from Google + which is Google My
business is averaging nearly three per day and those are not clicks form
our Adwords campaign. This is between six and twelve times the traffic
that we were receiving prior to starting Google Adwords.
As I
thought about my own actions when I am looking for a good local
business, I almost never click on the paid advertising because I don't
know anything about those businesses. This was part of the reason that I
was so hesitant to start Google Adwords in the first place. The only
thing that I can figure is happening is that they are seeing our name
and cross checking our Google reviews to see if we are trustworthy. The
best part of this is, if they do this, they click on our Google My
Business listing rather than the ad, so the number of calls that we are
getting is even higher than the clicks that we are paying for on Google
Adwords.
While I can not guarantee the same results for everyone
who tries this, we have been extremely happy with the results since we
always like to minimize our costs. If you have any questions feel free to email Adam at oxforddentalidahofalls@gmail.com