Traditional marketing strategies versus online marketing plans are two very different ways to bring traffic into your dentist office.
At first the difference may not be obvious. Both are ways to tell potential clients about your practice, where they can find you and what services you offer. Whether that’s done on a computer or in the physical world shouldn’t make that much of a difference, right?
The Strategy Behind Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing for dentists has been services like radio ads and direct mail. The big spenders will go for billboards or even local television commercials. These tactics work in essentially the same way.
You spend a size-able budget on one massive campaign. You launch the large campaign out to everyone in your local area, hoping that by reaching as many people as possible you will find the people your campaign will resonate with and they will come into your office or call you up to schedule an appointment.
Part of this strategy is hoping that by seeing your billboard or hearing your radio ad enough times, they’ll be convinced to make that decision. This is part of the seven touches principle, which suggests that by receiving the message about a company seven times, it then compels a potential client to take action.
For a long time, these were the most effective ways to reach people and bring traffic to your office.
The Strategy Behind Digital Marketing
Digital marketing includes strategies like targeted pay-per-click advertising, social media and search engine optimization (SEO). All these strategies also have some basic tactics in common.
The first thing we do when starting a digital marketing campaign is to figure out the specific clients you want to reach. Of course, everyone could potentially use a dentist, but you want to target your ideal clients for the best results. Do you mostly serve clients of a certain income level? Do you specialize in certain services? For example, would you like to bring in more children? Or more people in need of dentures? You may create one, or a few, customer avatars for who you are aiming to target your advertising to.
Once we know who we want to reach, we look at how to do that.
With digital marketing strategies, your budget is spent gradually. Once you have your customer avatars, we strategize different campaigns for reaching those clients. For example, a dental SEO company will come up with a list of keywords and a content marketing strategy that will reach your ideal client.
We do this by determining the things your ideal client is most likely to search for on a site like Google and then we optimize your website so you are most likely to appear when people search for these things. So, if someone searches for “best dentist for kids in Tucson”, your website appears in the first page of results.
Another example is pay-per-click advertising on a website like Facebook, Bing and Google. With these ads, we can target people in your area that meet a set of demographics, like age range and interests.
With digital marketing, we can see real-time results on what is and isn’t working. So, if one strategy is pulling in great results, more budget can be put into that campaign. If another strategy isn’t doing as well, that campaign can be cut before too much money is spent on it and we can put the budget toward the more successful campaigns.
The Key Differences Between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing
The main differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing are targeting and real-time results.
Instead of paying to show your advertisement to everyone in your local area, we target your campaign to the people most likely to become clients. This is more cost effective and brings in better results.
Because we can target specific clients, we can show them campaigns for specific services. By telling them specifically what service they can count on you to provide, the customer is more compelled to consider your dental office because the message resonates stronger with them.
With traditional marketing, your entire budget is spent and then over time your results are tracked, and we attempt to draw correlations between the large-scale campaign and your results in the following months.
With digital marketing, we can look at the real-time results and can pivot to the strategies that provide the best results. This means we can spend your budget on the best results and also see how effective these efforts are for your business. You don’t have to wonder if your advertising efforts are worth it, you can know. If you are looking for a digital marketing company for your business, give us a call or contact us today.
