Online Marketing with Mark Oborn

With an ever digitised world all around us it’s becoming more and more apparent that in order to survive every business needs to embrace the digital age, this includes dentistry and this includes marketing

So why is online marketing so effective?

Pull versus Push
Push marketing is what we classically do with our leaflets and magazine adverts, we push our information to as many people as possible and pray that they identify with our service or product, some people call this ‘spray and pray’ marketing.

Online marketing on the other hand is pull marketing. So long as our product or service is desirable and is presented in the right way then people will find us when they search at a time that is right for them. Some people call this ‘inbound marketing’.

Inbound marketing is more effective because we know that every person that sees your website has already identified the need within themselves to solve that problem.

Effectiveness
Off-line marketing only lasts whilst you continue to push your information out there, if the magazine adverts or leaflets stop then the marketing stops.

With online marketing it will sit there, 24/7/365 and work tirelessly even whilst you sleep. Off-line marketing simply can’t compete!

So let’s look a little deeper into what is required for an online marketing campaign.

What is required for an online marketing campaign?
Successful online marketing is made up of two specific factors, traffic optimisation (getting more people to your website) and conversion optimisation (getting more people to take action once they are there), you MUST focus on both of these.

A website which has a 100% conversion rate but only 2 visitors per month is equally as ineffective as a website that has 1000 visitors per month and a 0.2% conversion rate.

The 2 types of optimisation
1. Traffic optimisation, this typically includes:

1. search engine optimisation
2. paid advertising (PayPerClick)
3. social media marketing
4. e-mail marketing via permission-based list building on your own website

2. Conversion optimisation to get more of those website visitors converting into patients, this typically includes:

1. calls to action and wording on the website
2. engaging with people at a relevant point in their decision-making process
3. mulitple automated e-mail marketing campaigns
4. social media campaigns

Traffic optimisation

Search engine optimisation
Principally made up of two distinct factors:

1. on-site optimisation
2. off-site optimisation

On-site optimisation
This includes the words and phrases on the website, when the search engines (let’s face it we are talking about Google) visit your webpage, which they will do every day, they’ll read the content and work out what the page is about based upon that content.

If the content isn’t specific to the treatment/service/geography then Google can’t work out what that pages about and consequently can’t send any visitors there!

Off-site optimisation
Every dental practice says the best way to get new patients is by referral from other patients, this is ‘referral marketing’ and Google does exactly the same. Google knows that if people are talking about you around the Internet then you must be a trustworthy and reputable company, the more people that mention you (by using a link to your website) the higher you will rank in the search results.

Paid advertising (PayPerClick)
Paid advertising works extremely well as long as you understand a few basic principles.

Facebook PayPerClick
This is interruption marketing, you are interrupting a person in the middle of them doing something else (chatting to their friends), your message needs to be very strong but comes with the huge advantage
of being able to specifically target very niche areas including age, gender, geographical location, interests, education to name but a few.

Google PayPerClick
Google doesn’t have the ability to target so demographically specific as Facebook, however it comes with the massive advantage that it is not interruption marketing. When someone searches on Google they are actively searching for a solution to the problem and paid advertising allows you to appear in both search results.

What is important is to always use tracking on any advert so that you can track conversions on the website, without tracking you are guessing as to which advertising medium works best.

Social media marketing
This works better if only a small percentage (typically no more than 20%) of messages are directly focused around driving traffic to your website. 80% of messages on social media should be there to engage followers. With an engaged audience they are far more likely to then click on an occasional link driving traffic back to your website.

E-mail marketing
E-mail marketing using e-mail addresses harvested from your website (see following section on engagement) can also be an effective means to drive traffic back to that site. If you are what often happens is that patients during an e-mail marketing list and click on links back to the website several months after the initial visit to the site.

Overview of conversion optimisation

Calls to action
A simple test is to look at your website and ask yourself the question, if I were a visitor what am I supposed to do when I land on this site?

The action required by every visitor should be clear, call us today, email today etc.

It’s so simple to include calls to action, but they so often get missed.

Engagement
To get the best engagement on your website to effect the highest conversion rate we have to understand the person’s motivation when they land on your site, this is typically broken down into the following:

1. People that have identified a problem (crooked teeth, missing teeth, unhealthy mouth, unhappy with their smile etc) and are in the process of searching for information, either looking for various treatment options or looking for different service providers.
2. People that have been through the information searching stage and are ready to book an appointment but are still https://youtu.be/YDcxA-HRZJc and therefore need an incentive
3. People that have been through the information searching stage and are actively https://youtu.be/YDcxA-HRZJc.

Once we understand that not everyone that visit our website is ready to immediately request an appointment we can begin looking to create engagement mechanisms for each of these people.

People searching for information
These people should be provided with a free download in exchange for a name and e-mail address. We can then help them understand how to solve their dental problem in a PDF download and a series of automated follow-up e-mails. Every e-mail that we sent we should gently drive patients towards requesting an appointment.

People wavering about requesting an appointment
There should be some form of incentive or gentle push on the website to encourage patients to take action, free consultations (within limits) or refunds of initial assessment can work extremely well at reducing risk and encouraging patients to take action.

People actively ready to go
There should be a request an appointment facility on the website, this does not necessarily need to feed into your practice management software but it should give the patient the ability to request an appointment at the ideal day and time, you can then get back to them with exact details.

E-mail campaigns
By using the above engagement mechanisms we can drop people into automated e-mail campaign:

1. They download information about specific problem, they are then sent a series of gentle e-mail messages informing them about their particular problem and directing them to request an appointment.
2. They request an appointment, once they come to the practice they are then led into a patient e-mail list.
3. Once they become a patient at the practice and are on the patient e-mail list they are gently asked to leave a review for the practice.

Social media
As well as being excellent at driving traffic to the website (traffic optimisation) social media can also be used for conversion optimisation by lowering risk and increasing trust.

Social media posts should hand out useful, free and relevant dental health advice which demonstrates that you genuinely care about the local people. When this is included among testimonials and reviews by happy patients, the social media stream becomes an excellent mechanism to lower risk and increase trust; key factors in a successful marketing campaign for service industries such as dentistry.

Summary
When all of the mentioned mechanisms are put into place, one ends up with a robust online marketing machine which works without sleeping, continuously attracting traffic to the website, engaging with that traffic and then feeding the traffic back into the website again and on to social media.

Everything works together as one cohesive unit in order to help the local people with their dental health and build your dental practice.

When deciding who should be helping you with your online marketing it’s important to ensure that the service provider works in all of the areas mentioned otherwise you can easily end up with a fragmented and ineffective online marketing campaign.