Wonderist Agency helps you build your new business by creating a customized dental marketing plan that fits your needs and helps you reach patients. The right strategy might include SEO Management, PPC Campaigns, Direct Mailers, or Targeted Social Ads. But a cross-channel marketing strategy will use several of these approaches to attract patients throughout your market.
Dr. Beth Herko came to Wonderist Agency months before she opened the doors of her brand new dental practice in New Providence, NJ. With more than a dozen other dentists located within a 3-mile radius of the practice, we knew that the competition for a scratch practice in the area would be a challenge. Together with Dr. Herko, our team determined that a cross-channel marketing strategy would be most effective for filling the initial patient roster of her startup dental office.
Cross-channel marketing is the practice of utilizing multiple marketing channels to reach potential patients. In this case, we recommended building a new website, implementing separate SEO and PPC campaigns, and deploying direct mailers to specific geographical areas around the practice location. We’re proud to say that after Dr. Herko opened the doors of her practice to the public, the combination of these marketing efforts generated more than 137 new patients in her first 90 days of business.
Prior to starting any of our marketing strategies, our dental design team worked on creating an exceptional new website for Dr. Herko. We designed the website to complement and showcase her charming brand and aesthetic, wrote custom content that highlighted her unique voice and vision, and optimized the site’s user experience to make it seamless and easy to navigate.
Next up was search engine optimization or SEO. The goal of dental search engine optimization is to increase organic traffic to your website by ensuring that the website ranks highly in search engine results pages (SERP). SEO is a powerful strategy that allows practices to increase their exposure by targeting the keywords that new patients ultimately search for when looking for a new dentist online.
Once the site was complete, our SEO team optimized each page for specific targeted keywords, including:
After we launched Dr. Herko's site, we saw a direct correlation between our optimization efforts and her results. During the first 90 days post-launch, the site’s ranking for keywords increased 32%, jumping up more than 1,200 spots in Google’s search results. There were more than 270 new organic visitors to the site and nearly 400 organic sessions.
In a world increasingly dominated by online search, your dental practice's website is often the first impression you make to potential patients. Wonderist Agency dental marketing creates modern websites for dentists that help set them apart.
Google Ads is a pay-to-play strategy that consistently gets a site to the top of search engine results pages (SERP’s)-- for a price! Using pay-per-click pricing, dental practices compete in an auction for the top ranking positions of targeted search queries, for example, “dentist near me”. Each day a dedicated budget is allocated to bid against other advertisers vying for visibility in SERP’s for common searches made by prospective dental patients in a specific geographical area. For a scratch practice like New Providence Dentistry, one of the most important aspects of a Google Ads campaign is its timing. Dr. Herko wisely agreed to begin her PPC advertising weeks before her practice’s official opening date, which set her up with new patient appointments before a single light in her dental office was ever turned on.
Furthermore, with the campaign beginning immediately after her website’s launch, she gained invaluable visibility in SERP’s well before her website could possibly rank organically in such a competitive market. Ascension in organic rankings would soon generate an enormous number of patients for the practice but in the meantime our PPC strategy filled in the gap between the site’s initial launch and it’s first organic rankings. As a matter of fact, due to the Google Ads campaign’s significant return on investment, Dr. Herko’s advertising has remained active well after her website achieved its organic rankings. Consistently converting users at a conversion rate greater than 12%, the campaign continues to produce at least one lead to the practice for every 10 clicks paid for.
With Dr. Herko’s website launched and the digital strategy in full effect, it was time to shift gears and let the offline world know that an amazing new dentist would soon open her doors to the public. To increase community awareness and reach a more digitally detached demographic of families and retirees, we set out to design an unforgettable and unignorable direct mailer. Armed with Dr. Herko’s new patient special, the mailers enticed potential patients with a tangible offer that led to more than 50 tracked phone calls in just 90 short days.
Additionally, with the URL of the new website also being promoted on the mailer, organic and direct traffic was in all likelihood bolstered by this initiative. Any additional interest in a website seen by Google’s algorithm can serve to reinforce efforts driven by our SEO team. When a website receives seemingly spontaneous organic and direct traffic, Google sees this activity as an increased signal of the website’s authority which in turn helps improve a site’s rankings.
10 years ago, a cross-channel marketing plan would have looked a lot different. Now that everyone is on social media, targeted Facebook Ads are a must. We can use social content and ads to reach people where they spend a significant amount of their leisure time. Best of all, by targeting for specific audiences, we can curate our ads and messaging and speak to your ideal patients. This means your ad spend is being used as efficiently as possible and leading to a more positive return on your investment.
Since Dr. Herko opened her scratch practice over a year ago, her social ad spend has only been around $1,300 and has resulted in over 2,300 clicks to her website! One of the things we love about Facebook ads is that we can spend a modest budget and still see strong impression share and traffic to the site. It's a great addition to a cross-channel marketing strategy because it gets a new practice's brand out there and generates new patient leads.
With the foundation of a carefully designed marketing strategy that began well in advance of her practice opening, Dr. Herko has experienced continuous growth in her new patient numbers. One year after opening her doors, Dr. Herko had her best month with 86 tracked phone calls. For a scratch dental practice, creating a cross-channel marketing campaign was essential for getting new patients and launching the practice successfully. Each marketing campaign targeted a different type of audience and helped address different marketing needs, helping her cast a wide net that kept patients coming.
With the right multi-channel strategy in place, one channel can reinforce another. For Dr. Herko this meant converting paid traffic from PPC campaigns with high-quality landing pages on the website, using a direct mailer to reinforce signals of authority for SEO purposes, and using Google Ads to fill in the gap between her website’s initial launch and it’s first organic rankings. These campaigns worked together seamlessly to form a strong foundation for her practice, and have helped her achieve both short-term and long-term goals that have propelled her business forward.
"The best!!!! You won't regret it!"
Dr. Beth Herko
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