Hassan Mushaid explores changes to dental practice marketing in the digital era.
With the advent and popularisation of the internet over the course of the 21st century, digital marketing has spawned. It has begun to rapidly evolve, especially for small businesses like dental practices.
Marketing, before the digital era, was leaps and bounds behind the current model in terms of speed and efficiency. In the beginning, marketing was best communed within the frames of a newspapers, leaflet drops, and television ads. It was quite primitive in its purest medium, though the messages and technical aspects have hardly changed.
Using this perspective, the variation between the earliest forms of digital marketing and the mediums of marketing prior to the digital world, is similar to the disparity between the beginning of digital marketing and the current era of digital marketing.
Early on, digital marketing for dental practices and other small business was all about list building. All about search engine optimisation (SEO), gaining organic traffic, all about websites, sales letters and more. In short, all the processes of digital marketing were manual and far more tedious.
In order to thoroughly discuss all the ways in which digital marketing has and continues to develop, let’s discuss first the standard template of digital marketing: the profit cycle.
The profit cycle
Figure 1 essentially describes all of digital marketing in a nutshell. It goes as follows: gather an audience (black square), target the audience with advertisements to send them to a page that hosts your products and other offers. (the pink square) Then retarget them in order to get them to commit to purchasing further. Here’s how the specifics of this system have differed with time.
Building an audience for dental practice marketing
Old: For dental practices that were using the internet to market their practice early on, gathering traffic, as it was with most business, whether digital or brick and mortar, was a matter of gathering prospects that were interested in your business in something called a list.
A list was simple a collection of email addresses for which a business could advertise.
New: As of late, the value of an email list for businesses has become more and more diminished. Open rates and conversion rates have begun and continue to falter with each passing day.
The new adaptation of the email list is social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Social media sites have effectively begun to replace email lists. The audiences within social media sites consume content from businesses in the form of picture posts and video. They can retarget and resell on the basis of that consumption.
Monetising an audience
Old: The second figure within the profit cycle, the pink square, represents a place where dental practices house their offers and can begin to monetise their audiences.
In the early days of digital marketing, the place that houses a business’s offers was their website.
When carrying out their dental practice marketing, practices would host an array of their treatments and special offers on their webpages. They would get their audiences, known as traffic, to come view their offers from their webpages by sending them sales letters via email. Alternatively they would do this by bolstering their sites visibility in the search engine via SEO.
New: The new way businesses monetise their offers is through sales funnels. A sales funnel is a modern adaptation of the website.
A sales funnel is a sales process that is structured like a funnel. Facilitated through a series of landing-pages, hosting offers of varying value, which proceed in a single direction. Sales funnels are better than websites because they cut back on analysis paralysis and maximise a dental practice’s revenue by presenting potential customers one offer at a time.
Dental practice’s today get their audiences into their sales process using the new ad platforms, offered within social media sites such as Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and Google ads.
Retargeting an audience
Old: The older method of retargeting an audience was just re-engaging customers that were a part of a practice’s email list.
If a dental practice sent out an offer in an effort to facilitate a sale and the offer was not well received, they would retarget their audiences simply by sending another offer through email. You can carry this out manually or through a piece of software called an autoresponder – Mail Chimp for example. This type of dental practice marketing is now outdated.
New: The new way to retarget an audience is through Pixels. A Facebook Pixel is a piece of code embedded into a business’s website or landing page. It allows the business to track each customer’s journey. It will then send out advertisements on the basis of their findings.
Pixels can allow a business the power to determine whether or not a visitor clicked on a button. How much time they spent on the page, at which exact points did they decline to submit an inquiry, and more.
Another way a dental practice might interact with and retarget their customers nowadays is through Facebook Messenger. Messenger is Facebook’s built in messaging service that acts in the same fashion as traditional email. Only with better conversion rates due to its integration with the Facebook app.
Messenger allows a target audience to then receive multiple links, sales letters, videos, and more within an instant.
Conclusion
They say that technology advances at such a rate where a fresher’s student of today graduates only retaining outdated information. This is definitely true when it comes to digital marketing.
Though marketing principles will always remain tried and true at the core, digital dental practice marketing requires constant learning and testing. This prevents your dental practice getting left behind.
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