Dental marketing relies on the same guidelines as any other healthcare business, but the added challenge of attracting patients is educating them or helping them overcome the fear of visits to the dentist.
However, relying on paid ads and passive content without any strategy to promote it can be pricey and ineffective. The average cost per click for dental clinics is between $2 and $10, and click doesn’t necessarily mean engagement, sign-up, or a new patient.
While content marketing indeed is one of the best ways to educate, engage and befriend an audience, in 2019, it is all about personalizing the experience and delivering it to the audience that is highly likely to sign up for your email list or start using your services.
In this article, we will show you a full-proof, step-by-step guide to the dental marketing strategy that helped numerous health businesses build their email lists and earn thousands of dollars in revenue.
1. Learn how to tap into patients’ micro-moments
Let’s not jump headfirst into advertising. Let’s take a step back and put ourselves into the shoes of the patient. To devise a good dental marketing strategy, first, you need to think like a person who is in need of a dentist.
Marketing in health industry approaches with a very specific state of mind. This person usually has a problem that requires an instant solution. Google described this state of mind as a “micro-moment” and you can see its basics in the picture below.
Blue Corona adjusted these moments to the healthcare industry, pinning them down to the following questions:
a) What’s-wrong-with-me?
Your patient is experiencing toothache, bad breath, problems with gums, teeth staining, etc. They want to know what causes this problem and they will search for content that gives them basic information about their issue and possible solutions.
This is where content marketing steps in – you want to make sure that your blog posts targeting these topics rank as high on Google as possible. You can achieve that with good SEO (and we will tell you how in a minute).
b) Where-can-I-get-treatment?
With health businesses, it is often all about convenience, and being close to potential patients’ homes or workplaces is a great plus for your clinic. If you want to make sure your clinic pops up as soon as somebody googles “dental clinics near me,” you also want to make sure that your local SEO is on point.
A significant number of your customers will come from this micro-moment – the “near me” searches for health-related services have doubled since 2015.
c) Who-can-I-trust?
What is the first thing that will trump convenience for any potential patient? Recommendation. There are plenty of people who will be ready to walk or drive longer if they are assured that their dentist is professional, considerate and dedicated.
You can build your online reputation with promoting testimonials and awards on your website, as well as encouraging your existing patients to write reviews for your clinic.
d) I’m-ready-to-book
With each of the previous micro-moments, the follow-up action prompted by this micro-moment should be at the ready.
Make sure you enable your patients to book an appointment immediately – put scheduling links at the end of your blog posts, at prominent places on your website, and in the review section. With the help of tools like Genbook, you can easily manage appointments online and ensure that you provide the best possible customer service.
If you want to learn more about ways to boost your SEO and reach the local community, I strongly recommend that you study these two articles:
- 3 Steps Towards the Top of Google Maps Marketing
- 5 Lessons About Local Marketing Nobody Ever Gave You
However, these are the basics – the catch is that every moderately marketing-savvy dental clinic is doing this. So how can you attract more patients? This is where our strategy begins. It is simple:
- Interactive content to attract an audience and segment it
- Email marketing and passive content delivered to segments of the audience based on their needs and preferences, as well as readiness to schedule a visit to your dental clinic
- Nurturing the relationship with the audience with passive and interactive content based on their engagement with your emails and website
The numbers work in favor of this approach to patients – majority of patients want better email communication from their doctor, while 41 percent of consumers say that content found on social media has an impact on their choice of clinic or doctor.
2. Create a quiz
Quizzes are one of the most popular types of interactive content on social media. They are equally popular among customers and marketers, who claim that good quizzes can score a 50% lead capture rate (lead capture=emai sign-up) and 39% click-through rate (meaning that respondents completed the quiz and visited the link displayed in results). Imagine the wonders this could do for your dental clinic?
So why are quizzes this popular? It is not hard to understand why. Dental marketing quizzes can be:
- An engaging learning experience for your potential and existing patients
- The way to collect email contacts, build your brand exposure, and sell products and services
- Interactive surveys (for market research purposes)
- Pure fun!
Depending on these goals, you can create three types of quizzes:
Trivia quizzes usually offer light-hearted content with the great potential to go viral, helping you build brand awareness, attract attention or identify your target audience.
Personality quizzes are a good option for established dental clinics that want to segment their target market into groups of customers with specific needs. Using these quizzes, you can understand which type of content you should use to engage people on your email list.
Knowledge quizzes can either be general or built for smaller segments of your target market with specific needs (for example people with a specific type of braces). They are a good solution for addressing specific and urgent problems.
How to make a dental marketing quiz
Now let’s put these suggestions into action. We created a personality quiz that assesses a patient’s overall health condition, habits, and diet to calculate the level of risk to their dental health. You can take the quiz here.
This is the landing page. There are a few ways you can promote this quiz.
You can embed it on your website, or in blog posts that have the highest traffic. You can place it in a pop-up window triggered by particular visitor’s searches or actions such as exit intent. Hello bar is another, less intrusive option than the pop-up window, as it is constantly present on the page, but it doesn’t disrupt the user experience.
If your goal is to reach as many people as possible, you can share this quiz:
- On your Facebook page
- In Facebook groups that gather your target audience – for example, you can target potential patients in maternity groups. Of course, make sure you get a green light for this kind of impromptu advertisement from the group administrators. Don’t be aggressive or intrusive.
- Run it as an ad. This way, you can target the audience based on their location, interests, likes, and demographics. For example, you can target parents or teenagers with quizzes related to general dental health or braces. You can target older people with quizzes revolving around dentures and problems specific to their age.
The personality quiz I created as an example is pretty general and can be used for a broad audience. A good quiz should:
- Have least 8-10 questions
- Be interesting
- Remain on topic and follow a logical line of thought – don’t skip from one topic to another, group together the questions relating to a similar topic
- Have short questions
- Use simple language
So let’s see how this looks like in practice. Our risk calculating quiz has 14 questions. We started with the most basic one.
The follow-up questions are:
- How often do you floss your teeth?
- Do you use a fluoride toothpaste when you brush your teeth?
The fourth question refers to the frequency of visits to the dentist.
I attached a logic branching question to this one. While respondents who choose options A, B, C are forwarded to the question about the last time they have undergone cavity filling, the respondents who visit the dentist rarely have an additional question.
This question can be a great way to segment and engage the “difficult audience.” You can send them personalized content that addresses their concerns – for example, the common misconceptions about painful dental work, the dangers of missing your dentist appointments, or the discounts and conveniences your clinic can provide for its patients.
The quiz continues with questions referring to any problems or discomfort the respondent might be experiencing, previous dental interventions, diet, and current health condition.
In the end, there is a sign-up form as a prerequisite for getting results.
Of course, positioning your opt-in form at the end of your quiz is not mandatory – you can include it in the results or redirect respondents to your website.
We created three possible results for this quiz about dental health risks – low risk, moderate risk, and high risk. Based on the results, we linked to different examples of personalized content and included a scheduling link for those who would like to set up an appointment immediately. This is how it looks like.
3. Fine-tune follow-up based on quiz results
Once the respondents become your leads, you can start nurturing them or jump straight to a hard-selling strategy. Based on their results and some individual responses, you can segment them into several groups. For example, any respondents who visit the dentist regularly are highly-qualified leads, and all you have to is convince them that your clinic is the right choice.
You can do that by nurturing your relationship with engaging content, asserting yourself as an authority and a provider of great service. You can also target them with special offers, such as a free e-book, discount or free consultation.
People with “moderate risk” and “high risk” results are also highly qualified leads, so your content and promotion campaigns should be tailored to instill the sense of trust and urgency. For example, you can target these respondents with another quiz that will help you nail down their specific problems.
These quizzes can even come with an opt-in form asking for a phone number, so you can contact your leads and present your offer and personalized solution.
The respondents with “low risk” result can be targeted with educational content and promotional campaigns.
After the visit, you can follow up with a survey, asking your patients to rate their experience – you can find a guide to making patient satisfaction survey here.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this story, we mentioned that an average dental clinic will pay between $2 and $10 only to have people click on their advertisement. But when you use quizzes, the chance of click translating into meaningful, desired customer action, grows significantly. This, in turn, drives down the ultimate price you have to pay for each new patient you acquire. Don’t believe it?
Believe numerous LeadQuizzes’ successful customers from the health industry. Meno Clinic used our quizzes to grow an email list of targeted and engaged people interested in thyroid and adrenal health. Using Facebook ads to promote their quizzes, they generated 2,918 leads in one month, with each lead costing them only $0.31. That is almost 7 times less than the minimum CPC for traditional advertising!
Integrative Healthcare used quizzes to generate 1,600 email sign-ups and 40-60 consult requests per month. More than half of them became patients of this clinic, with each new patient valued at $1200 per year. Using Facebook ads with LeadQuizzes, Dr. Anthony Capasso built his email list by 3,676 leads for only $0.31/lead in just his first month.
If you want to see more testimonials from our clients from all industries, check them out here. If you want to reinvent your dental marketing, just click below.
