More Stuff About Paid Search (SEM)

The Lifetime Value of a Dental Patient

There are two things every dentist needs to know:

  • How much does it cost you to get one new patient
  • On average, what’s that patient worth over the relationship you have with him/her?



    • The internet revolutionizes both sides of the equation.

    Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites are marvels of the modern advertising world, because the cost to be seen by a large local crowd is virtually zero. When you can nurture a prospect into a patient for nothing, it doesn’t take much to give you a killer ROI, right?

    On the other hand, legions of unsophisticated marketers are getting both sides of the equation wrong.

    They invest a lot in hoopla, spin and hype to get strangers to notice them (once), and then, once they borrow a little attention, they put everything into a one shot transaction, which few people engage in, and those that do create little value, because the permission asset is then discarded.

    Dates, not singles bars. Subscriptions, not vegomatics.

    Posted in Local Search, Mobile Search, Paid Search (SEM), Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Web Marketing | Leave a comment

    Legions of “Dental Marketers” Are Getting It All Wrong

    Many dental marketing companies are leading their dentist clients to invest their marketing dollars in the hype of Facebook and the glory of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, making the cost of a connection very high and leaving them [the "dental marketers"] as the only one with cash in their pocket when the music stops…

    There are ways to reach the prospects YOU want that need treatment in the niches that YOU provide.

    Hint: It’s not Facebook or PPC… and here’s why:

    Facebook is revolutionary, but in order to “Friend” someone, you have to know them first. Even on your Facebook Business Page, for them to “Like” you, they have to know you. Would you “Friend” or “Like” a complete stranger? Of course you wouldn’t. That’s why Facebook is a FOLLOW-UP medium, a way to keep in touch with patients and prospects that you already know.

    Let’s talk about AdWords (Google’s PPC program). AdWords allows you to get your dental practice to the top of the search results by just bidding more than your competitor.

    Sounds great, right?

    The problem here is two fold:

    1) By bidding more, your cost of acquiring a new patient just went through the roof by paying $5, $10, $20 or more just for a single click into your website (do not make the mistake of confusing a “click” with actually getting a “prospect”!!).

    With the average “conversion rate” from clicks to prospects being only 3% to 8% (which was great a few years ago when you only paid $0.50 for a click… read #2 to see why), you could be easily paying (and not realizing) $300-$800 PER PROSPECT just to generate leads.

    2) PPC was, for years, one of the best kept secrets for lead generation. 5 years.. even 1 to 2 years ago the number of dentists advertising in Google AdWords was, in many local markets, a fraction of what it is now. Since AdWords is a bidding war, more bidders = higher bids = diluted results because more people want “a piece of the pie.”

    There are ways to attract qualified patients in the niches that you want to specialize in.

    Do you want to know more about successful web marketing? Contact us, we’re here to help.

    Posted in Local Search, Mobile Search, Offline Marketing, Paid Search (SEM), Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Video on the Web, Video Productions, Web Marketing, Web Site Design | Leave a comment

    Local Search Evolved [infographic]

    Posted in Local Search, Paid Search (SEM), Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing | Leave a comment

    Do You Want Impressions & Clicks or Dollars In Your Pocket?

    Some dental marketing firms will tell you about “exposure” and “branding.” Others will talk about “hits” and “clicks.” Still some might even show you “impression” charts and complicated measurements of readership.

    Are you marketing for “branding, impressions and exposure,” or are you marketing to bring in the new patients with money to spend?

    The downside to all of these is neither tells you EXACTLY how many dollars came back into your pocket.

    Last Friday I had several monthly strategy calls with our dentist clients. We embrace phone call tracking with every piece of marketing we do, so naturally they are a hot topic for conversation during these monthly calls.

    Here are the results from two practices we’ve been working with for about 4 months. Think about it.. …
     

    Practice 1 – July 1-Sept 31, 2011
    189 Phone Calls from Website Only
    143 Calls from Newspaper Print Ads
    Practice 2 – July 22-Sept 31, 2011
    140 Phone Calls from Website Only
      
      
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    Interested in getting a landslide of new patients into your dental practice? Send me an email at colin@smartbo

    
    Posted in Company Announcements, Drip Marketing, Local Search, Mobile Search, Offline Marketing, Paid Search (SEM), Phone Tracking, Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing, Video on the Web, Video Productions, Web Marketing, Web Site Design | Leave a comment

    Google rolls out Behavorial Targetting for AdWords

    Google has been rolling out its behavioral targeting with their AdWords system since 2009 and been testing it, deploying it in different markets and trying to figure out exactly how it works best and they have finally released it to the general public. What this allows you to do with your AdWords targeting is, we all know about cookies and their tracking mechanisms, Google’s behavioral targeting allows you to utilize all the data that Google has harvested to look at what sites they’re visiting, how recently, how frequently they’re visiting different sites. You can actually select different interest categories that a user has recently looked for and target them with your advertisements. So say you are a dentist that does veneers and you want to throw your advertisement up at people that have maybe searched in the past seven days for cosmetic dentistry, now Google can deliver those advertisements to you. As you can imagine that’s going to be an extremely relevant advertisement delivery system because you’re showing ads to people that, within that past couple of hours or days, have just searched for this topic. They see your advertisement when they search, they see it a couple of days later with this behavioral system. This is really going to yield some good results; I see Google going some serious places with this and doing some great things.

    Posted in Paid Search (SEM) | Leave a comment