Digital Dental
Marketing Guide

These questions will help you craft your message’s story, deliver it in a way that your prospective patients will receive it, and cause your prospective patients to take action. Be as detailed as you can while still limiting the scope of your message. Do not try to target all people with teeth. That’s not a target audience. That’s the internet and you can’t target the entire internet.

If you said ‘Both’ to all three of these, you can still narrow it by eliminating prospective patients that you absolutely do NOT want to attract more of. Unless you have a dental marketing team that understands the goal-setting part of a dental digital marketing plan, you may unwittingly waste money on clicks and leads that you have no hope or interest in converting into patients.

All of these scenarios probably seem like obvious nonstarters to you. Why would anyone who knows anything about dental marketing target these people? Actually, it takes a lot of effort to AVOID targeting these searchers because the ad platforms available to marketers are programmed to try to build the largest audience possible. They want to get you LOTS of eyeballs. After more than 20 years of experience in marketing and running a dental marketing agency for more than 10 years, we understand that not every person on the internet who is searching for dental information is a prospective patient for your office.

Once you know who you want to target, you can also identify how much opportunity there is according to some of Google’s tools. You can also set goals for how many new patient leads you want in the form of emails and phone calls. Nowadays, you can factor in requests for telemedicine consults as well.

If your dental marketing expert has experience running similar campaigns in your city, you may be able to get some target numbers. Or you can just throw out some desired outcomes as a starting point and do your best to reach them, knowing that your goals may be way above or well below what’s actually possible and that you’ll need to adjust as you go.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that these are your goals in a hypothetical digital marketing plan:

Those are fine goals. How will you know if you achieve them? By measuring metrics with reporting systems.

It’s important to ask questions. Don’t settle for a bunch of jargon that makes no sense to you.

For example, if you are looking at the number of impressions your campaign achieves, you’re looking at how many people saw an ad, post, or some other kind of listing for your practice. Are these impressions being generated by the right piece of content? Does the content look right? What if you have 1,000 people see a listing of your practice and half saw a beautiful ad for your practice and the other half saw your privacy practices form. Which half would be more likely to turn into a phone call to your office? The ad is designed for a great experience, so of 1,000 impressions in this example, only 500 are helpful.

We usually recommend looking at data over a period of at least 3 months. You usually want to compare year over year data, in addition, to look for a trend across 3 or 4 months. You may see that certain peaks and valleys recur, pointing to seasonal trends rather than a problem with your campaign. Never make decisions based on weekly developments in numbers. They will almost always be poor decisions.

When you look at the data over long stretches of time, you’ll see that the numbers will naturally rise and fall. Ideally, you will see an overall upward trend in the data. If you do, it means that you’re on the right track. If not, you may have a problem. In either case, before you do anything to modify the campaign, look for ways to cross-reference the data. You may find that the perceived trend is easily explained by looking at data that reveals an outside influence such as a shift in spending on the campaign’s ad budget or changes in economic conditions.

For example, you may see your website traffic go down over a period of three months and think, “What’s going on?” You then look at your click numbers from your Google Ads and see that those are down too. “Uh oh!” you think, “I may have a problem here.” Then you look at your spend and it’s down too and look at the calendar and see that it’s late December and realize that people are probably not searching for dental care as much during November and early December. You’d still want to talk with your account manager who oversees your ad campaign, but if people are online less, you’ll naturally see a reduction in clicks and spending from a paid search campaign.

Is there something that you can do more or less to affect the trend in front of you? Is spending more money on the campaign likely to fix the issue or just give you more of a result that you’re not happy with? Sometimes the campaign is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, but the design is faulty, not the management. In those cases, you probably need to go back to Step 1 and clarify the goal of the campaign with your account manager. If your account manager disagrees with the goal, you may want to get a second opinion on your dental digital marketing plan.

Measuring and interpreting analytical data from a complicated digital marketing campaign is not a simple task. It’s an ongoing process of learning, making changes, and learning again. It’s complicated by design and trying to oversimplify it is a mistake. A digital marketing plan should be multifaceted in the same way that a spider’s web is usually more than a couple of threads. A fly may be caught by just a few threads, but without the other threads that form the larger web, the web would fail to catch anything. We have to learn how the components of marketing work together. That just requires time, expertise, and the right tools. We’ll talk about tools in Step 3 of this dental digital marketing guide.

Even if you build your website on WordPress, your website still has to run on a server and it’s highly unlikely that it will be hosted all alone. That would be great. Not having to share the server’s memory, storage, or processing power with any other website, but it’s just not practical. Running a server is complicated and expensive work. Your website design company should have a server where they house websites that they create. Just be sure that your website is on one of their own servers and not a Shared Hosting platform like GoDaddy, HostGator, or BlueHost.

There are many other server companies out there that offer Shared Hosting. All of these companies host hundreds of websites on the same server, allowing each one first-come-first-served access to the server’s resources. This can mean that your website frequently loads very slowly because other websites are using the server. It can also mean that if a server is brought down because another website on the server is hacked, your website goes down too. This is true of any server that doesn’t have a redundant back-up, but in a shared hosting environment, it’s more common.

You need a professional you can trust to run your ad campaigns on Google Ads and potentially other websites. But once those campaigns are up and running, you still need to know what is happening with the ads. How do you know if your ads are showing up; if they are being clicked on? There are several options.

Most companies that offer Google Ads pay-per-click management for dentists also offer you some sort of reporting to see what’s happening with the campaign. Unfortunately, many of these reports are grossly limited. You need access to data that tells you how your ads are helping you achieve your measurables and goals. That usually includes the number of times your ads have been shown to you (impressions) and how many times people use your ads to get to your website (clicks). But impressions and clicks are just the beginning of tracking the performance of your campaign. You need to be able to see how much you’re spending by ad bundle, which keywords people are typing in to get to your ads, and much more.

Google Ads has its own dashboard for managing the campaigns run on its ad platform. We would advise you not to waste time trying to get to know that platform. In essence, you have to become a pay-per-click advertising expert to truly understand the data that you’re looking at in Google Ads, not to mention how to make changes in order to address concerns in the information. You need a tool that can connect with Google Ads directly and distill the information down so that it’s more concise.

Again, there are many tools that can help you do this. You may alternatively decide to run your own ads via Google Ads Express but this puts more control in the hands of Google- not your control. You can think of it as electing to hail a taxi in an area that you don’t know and feeling like what you thought was a short ride is ending up to be a longer, more expensive trip than is strictly necessary. The right advertising performance tool can be the equivalent of using Uber or Lyft in the taxi analogy, where you know better the route that you will take and how much it will cost you.

Tools like Hubspot and Adstream attempt to solve this problem, and you may find that you like them quite well, but they are expensive and can be just as overwhelming as managing your own Google Ads. They may also conflict with your ad specialist’s way of running your ad campaigns.

We offer our clients ad tracking because it distills down the metrics without stripping away important details. You can view performance over a period of time and by ad bundle. It also helps you track your cost per conversion (how much you spend to generate a phone call or email. Finally, as part of a larger system, your ad performance information can be easily located in a larger report that gives you a complete picture of your online visibility.

Dental offices rely on their dentists to generate revenue. The more the dentist devotes their time and attention to other matters, the less money the practice will bring in. Maximize your revenue and capitalize on your investment in a dental digital marketing plan by empowering your team to help you run the campaign.

We often see dentists make the mistake of trying to leverage a technologically-savvy employee for their marketing effort while not actually empowering them to manage the campaign. The lack of empowerment usually comes from not carving out time in the employee’s schedule for them to actually connect with the marketing team and analyze the results.

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If you started this journey of designing a dental digital marketing plan and have read through all four steps, hopefully, you understand that your campaigns will not succeed with a ‘set it and forget it’ philosophy. Your marketing plan should be active, evolving, and growing based on your goals and data. Don’t give up. Get expert help when you need it. Pro Impressions Marketing dentists enjoy being in the know while also partnering with the best in the business. We love taking the lead with the marketing, and the dentists partner with us so that we understand how the dental office is growing and changing, too.