So, you’ve decided you want to grow your business using digital marketing, so what are the fundamentals? What are some of the primary strategies and techniques you might decide to use?

Over the past 12 years I’ve worked as a digital marketing agency exclusively helping dentists attract more of the right type of new patient into their practice… In this blog post I go through some of those digital marketing fundamentals and answer some of the most common questions.

What should a digital marketing strategy consist of?

Fundamentally a digital marketing strategy consists of two primary elements:

• Traffic optimisation. This is to do with visibility and getting your business, brand and services seen by the maximum number of people.
• Conversion optimisation. This is to do  with ensuring that when you are seen, those people take action.

Traffic without conversions is vanity.

Conversions without traffic is insanity.

We absolutely must have a good amount of visibility and traffic to  your website and  then have the maximum number of people take action and become customers/patients in your business.

What ever the individual tactics of your strategy are, always ask the question, “Is this tactic attempting to get more traffic or conversions?” – This ensures that your strategy is balanced between these two key elements.  A fundamentally, a good digital marketing strategy will be balanced between these two primary elements.

What specific tactics are included in traffic optimisation?

Traffic optimisation includes:

• Google search optimisation for Google #1
• Paid advertising on search engines such as Google  or Microsoft
• Paid advertising on social media such as Facebook or Instagram
• E-mail marketing where we are using an e-mail list to drive traffic back to your website
• Social media where you are using your social media channels to drive traffic to your website
• Blogging, this is an excellent way to attract thousands of visitors to the website, whilst most of these won’t convert that’s not the point… The point of blogging is that your website gets recognised for a wide range of phrases, these then get shared around the Internet (because they are such good information), this then serves to optimise your entire website for your primary pages such as dental implants or teeth whitening.

What specific tactics are included in conversion optimisation?

Conversion optimisation includes:

• Chat Enquiry Bots – to engage with website visitors and gently lead them towards requesting an appointment.
• E-mail marketing – to collect names and e-mail addresses of people that may be interested in resolving specific dental problems, these people may not be ready to go ahead with treatment right now but we can use e-mail to nurture, educate and inform so that when the time is right to them you are front of mind.
• Website design – making sure that visitors to your website know exactly what they are supposed to do when they land on your page.
• Calls to action – making sure that you are very specific with what you want visitors to the website to do and include calls to action as ‘interruption marketing’ whilst they are reading the content of your website

How can I use search optimisation as part of my digital marketing strategy?

Google (let’s face it, Google pretty much runs the world now) Optimisation is essentially understanding the algorithm and what Google sees as important. If we understand what Google views as an important and worthy website then we can ensure that we fulfil as many of these requirements as possible. The more of Google’s requirements refill, the higher we will rank.

The easiest way to understand this is to just think about Google as a human. If you were going to recommend a website, what specific criteria would you want a website to have?
Typically we want a website to be:

• Fast. It’s so annoying when we visit a website, particularly on a mobile phone and it just won’t load.
• Stable. We’ve all visited websites where, as they load, everything keeps jumping around (again, particularly bad on mobiles), you go to on a button or link and  it keeps moving around.
• Easy to navigate. If you can’t find what you want quickly then you will leave the website quite fast.
• Easy to read. If the text on the website is a very similar colour to the background then it’s difficult to read.
• Direct and to the point. You want each page of the website to talk specifically and directly about the chosen topic you want to find out more about. E.g. if you want to find out about mountain bike wheels, if that page then goes on to talk about racing bike wheels, or mountain bike saddles then it will get frustrating for you.
• Easy to understand. Some people relate to the world visually unlike lots of images and videos, some people like to have lots of explanation and text. A website which uses all of these mediums is easier to understand.
• Secure. We want to know that if we visit a website and enter our details that this data is secure. Websites that use nonsecure addresses or nonsecure images could compromise our data and we don’t want that.
• Unique. It’s really frustrating when we visit one page of a website, then navigate somewhere else to find more content about the topic we are interested in, only to find another page which has exactly the same content but a different title.
• Accessible. Who wants a website on a mobile phone where the buttons are so close together that we can’t touch them with our great clumsy fingers!
• Answering our questions. We usually visit Google to search for something when we have a question we want answered, with the advent of voice recognition we often talk to Google and ask the question. So having pages that answer questions specifically is really useful.

So that’s putting things in easy to understand human terms and that’s exactly what Google looks at on your website, Google is reading the content of your site, looking at the code and working out if you have a nice website to send people to. If you don’t, then Google won’t send people to visit because Google once happy customers… And if Google’s customers are not going to be happy when they search, Google won’t send them to your website.

Where does social media fit in to digital marketing?

Social media is about building relationships, it’s about relationship marketing not transactional marketing. Social media shouldn’t be about selling your treatments or services, it should be about informing, educating and nurturing people interested in solving dental problems so that when they are ready to go ahead, you front of mind.

I recommend you break your social media down into three categories of post:

1. LIKE – We do business with people we like and we like people that we are like. So help people to like you. Help people to see you are human. Share what you like, films you watch, places you like to go and hobbies you enjoy. This allows people to connect with you as a human being and as the first stage in building any relationship.
2. ENGAGE – After people feel they like you and have made small connection with you they are more likely to engage. This is about helping them solve their dental problems without you trying to sell them anything. This is demonstrating you care more about a person than you do about making money. Share links from around the Internet with useful information about various dental problems. This engagement type post builds trust which is one of the primary aspects of dental marketing.
3. ACT – This is the final category of social media post, this is the ‘sales’ – it’s the “Come to me because we are brilliant and can solve your dental problem” type post. This is where you talk about booking appointments of phoning you.

I recommend only  20% of your social media posts should be in the final category, ACT – 40% should be like and 40% should be engage.

What is a content marketing?

This is where your blog really comes into its own. Your blog is there to inform and educate patients about their dental health and how they can solve their dental problems. A blog is NOT there for you to sell your treatments and services.

We want patients to visit your blog and to share it, when they share Google sees this share and acknowledges that your website must be good because someone has shared it. Each time Google notices a share it gives your whole website a little boost, we call this Domain Authority. The higher your domain authority the higher your entire website will rank.

So your primary website pages should be about <treatment><location>, but your blog will expand this considerably. Let’s take dental implants for a dental practice in Dorchester as an example. Your primary web page will be all about Dental implants in your dental practice in Dorchester. It will talk about how you use dental implants and how you help the local Dorchester people solve their missing teeth problems. Your primary dental implant page should include strong call to action.

However, your blog will then expand in the dental implant theme:

• How much are dental implants?
• Why do dental implants cost so much?
• How many dental implants do I need?
• What are the alternatives to dental implants?
• Should I have a dental implant or a dental briidge?
• Does a dental implant hurt?
• What is a dental implant procedure?
• Can I have dental implants if I have gum disease?
• My gums are red after dental implants what is the cause?

So here you have 9 blog posts. Each piece of content focuses very specifically around one hyper focused area on a treatment. If you start to roll this out across all of the treatment you offer you can easily create one blog post per month for many years!

I have clients attracting 20,000 visitors per month to a single blog post, and this particular client or 300% increase in new patient appointment booking requests as a result… Not necessarily as a result of people taking action on that blog post, but by people sharing the post and the whole website ranking higher… There was a direct correlation between the blog post ranking higher and new patient appointment booking requests.

Which is the best digital marketing course?

There are many courses around the Internet focusing on digital marketing courses helping you understand the various strategies with traffic and conversion optimisation. I’ve created this dental marketing course package , it includes multiple courses on multiple topics. Courses are available 24 hours a day enabling you to schedule your learning at a time that is convenient for you. Courses are typically three hours long and include a CPD certificate. As part of my marketing membership package you also gain access to ask me questions directly via the community forums.
In a world where more and more patients are dealing online digitally and virtually, there’s never been a better time to get the fundamentals of your digital marketing strategy right!