By: Christophe Basset
CEO StarStar DENTIST
Advertising your business requires more than just spreading the word about your orthodontic practice. Getting to the top of Google search results for key search terms, or sending thousands of postcards is great, but it doesn’t guarantee that prospective patients will book appointments. You want people to take action! If you don’t have as many new patients as you’d like, it’s time to fine tune your strategy. When it comes to boosting response rate, small changes make a big difference. Here are some of our favorite strategies to do that:
Do you Know Your Target Your Audience?
Before you start making changes to your marketing campaigns, you’ll need to determine if your existing campaigns are optimized for your target market. This not only goes for the ads themselves, but also for the places where your ads are running. Even your website and landing pages should be designed to appeal to your target audience. For instance, you’ll want to make sure your radio ads run during programs that your target demographic listens to. In other words, your marketing mix matters just as much as the ads themselves.
What’s Your Call to Action?
No matter what kind of campaign you’re running, you’ll need an effective call to action. Potential patients need to be told exactly what to do before they take action! For instance, if you want them to call you to get a free consultation, make sure that your ads and landing pages urges them to do so. The call to action needs to be compelling enough to inspire them to pick up the phone. You may want to consider split testing several options to determine which call to action is the most effective.
Ever heard of CRO?
CRO stand for Conversion Rate Optimization, it provides a significant opportunity for practices of any size to convert more website visitors, and viewers of your ads into new patients. Even by targeting the right audience, and having a great call to action, you’re still wasting money if your advertisement or your website does not convert visitors into calls. A scientific approach to optimizing websites and advertising materials in most cases will result in a significant increase in call volume. In fact, 90% of the websites and marketing pieces we review have huge optimization opportunities. However, in most cases, the biggest issues are that there is no strong call to action, too many confusing calls to action, or the calls to action are in blind spots and not standing out. These cases are usually a simple fix that result in significant improvements to advertising conversions.
Can Your Audience Remember Your Number?
Did you know that easy to remember phone numbers could increase response rates by 25-50%? When it comes to encouraging people to call your practice, easy to remember phone numbers are your best bet. For instance Star Star numbers like **BRACES increase response rates because it’s very easy to remember, and immediately resonates with braces. People are more likely to call you when they remember your number long after seeing or hearing your ads. Easy to remember numbers like **BRACES or **INVISALIGN not only reflects what you do best, they differentiate you from the crowd, and patients will regard you as the undisputed expert in your market. If you are currently using a ten digit phone number on your dental marketing, you’re wasting your dental marketing money, and making your life way harder than it needs to be! Imagine meeting people and rather than telling them your 10 digit, hard-to-remember phone number, you just tell them “Call me at Star Star BRACES, when you need braces!”
Are You Tracking Your Marketing Results in Your Practice?
Are you tracking your marketing results? Do you know the conversion rate of your ads, and your website? Using call tracking and analytics, you will be able to make any needed changes to your campaigns even while they’re running. For instance, even if you have analyzed your target audience, and have created great ads with effective calls to action, analytics will help you determine which ads are most effective. It is impossible to know if your advertisements are effective if you’re not tracking your results. Investing in marketing without a memorable number that utilizes tracking is as effective as throwing money out the window!
Christophe Basset, CEO
Mr. Basset provides a very useful structure for orthodontists who may not be well versed in marketing. While marketing is not quite rocket science, the scientific approach he advocates can definitely reveal valuable information—which in turn can produce greater revenue from more effective marketing.
One point of Mr. Basset’s that I’d like to underscore is “Small changes make a big difference.” Tracking marketing results (or Bench-marking as it is sometimes referred to) is critical because it enables you to make small but critical changes to your digital marketing campaigns. For example, you can easily deploy multiple versions of the same online ad and see which one is drawing more attention. Is it the one with the smiling teenager or the smiling dog? Is it the one with the humorous headline or the serious headline? You can quickly gauge activity in your digital advertising and adjust accordingly—often in real time.
This is a bit harder to do in nontraditional media like print, radio, and television, but you can still conduct pretesting through a research firm…or at least get some informal focus-group style input from friends, family and trusted patients. Sometimes, changing a headline, beefing up the call to action, or replacing an image with a more powerful or relevant one can dramatically increase the response rate.
It is almost always better to take the time to fine-tune your marketing efforts in the strategy stages as opposed to experiencing the disappointment of hearing “crickets” by not planning.
— Dennis R. Hanlon