Grow Your Dental Practice With PPC

May 22, 2019, My Digital Dentistry

The world of business has always been competitive, but nowhere is that competition more apparent than in the field of dentistry. With most privately-owned dental practices now turning to digital marketing to bring more new patients through their doors, the race to growing their dental practice has become all-too tight for dental professionals across the country.

At present, dental practices have a world of options for their online marketing strategies. Of these choices, the one that is showing the most promise for dental practices is PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

What is PPC?
If your dental practice has been making search engine optimization or SEO part of your digital marketing strategy, then you are aware that to enjoy a certain amount of SEO success, you must follow best practices to earn traffic organically. You should also be aware that with SEO, it’s going to take a long time before you see any measure of success.

With PPC, there won’t be any waiting for organic visits because you only have to pay for them instead.

You read that right. PPC works by having advertisers—dental practices in this case—pay a fee for every click on their ads. It’s a model of internet marketing that allows you to buy visits to your site to boost traffic and generate more leads.

So why should dental practices consider incorporating PPC to its dental marketing strategy?

1. It works fast
Essentially, PPC brings instant traffic to your dental practice website. The moment someone clicks on your PPC ad, you have an on-the-spot visitor who can potentially become a lead and eventually, a patient that will drop by your office regularly. Making results come faster is the fact that PPC gives you the ability to serve up ads not only to desktop users, but also to mobile users, who have long outnumbered the former. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that with enough PPC clicks, you can go straight to the top of search results.

2. Tracking and measuring it is easy
If you’re running PPC ads through Google AdWords, then you have Google Analytics and the AdWords tool at your disposal, and they will make tracking and measuring the results of your PPC performance quite easy. Figures that concern clicks, impressions, and conversions will be available to you with a click of the mouse, allowing you to assess how your PPC campaign is going thoroughly. These tools will also help you determine not only your spending, but also if all that money is bringing the traffic and results that you want.

3. You have complete control
Unlike traditional means of advertising your dental practice, PPC campaigns allow you to have full control over how it’s being run. Deciding which placements or keywords to target, for example, is entirely in your hands.
PPC ads are also highly-targetable, and you can do so with precision. Whenever someone searches for any of the services that you happen to be offering, you can be sure your PPC ad will show up as well and compete for that user’s attention.

4. It provides better budget flexibility
Aside from being a less expensive alternative to traditional dental marketing, a PPC campaign also gives your budget a little flexibility. How you spend your budget depends on you, and if you think that the cost per click is becoming way too high for it, you have the power to pause or even discontinue your PPC advertising anytime. Conversely, if you see good results and you want more, then you can decide to put more money into your campaign.

5. PPC and SEO work well together
From the very beginning, we have been talking about how much faster results are with PPC compared to SEO. However, both your SEO and PPC campaigns can benefit from each other.
Your SEO strategy, for example, can be enhanced by the kind of insight that performance data on impressions, clicks, and conversions that those PPC tools mentioned earlier can provide. Your PPC campaign, on the other hand, could use SEO strategy and performance data from organic traffic to figure out a better way to run it.

6. PPC is great for testing a new offering
Are you introducing a new cosmetic dental procedure into your arsenal, but have no idea if people will bite? If you want immediate answers to that question, then you should run a campaign on Google Adwords to see if people would be interested.
With a PPC campaign, you should be able to find out early on if your new offering has the potential to take off or is meant to fail. While a PPC campaign is still going to cost you, at least you won’t be wasting a lot more time and money in the future promoting on traditional media a service that people aren’t really buying. And if the results are encouraging, then you can thank your PPC campaign for helping you see in advance that you’ve got a winner on your hands.

7. PPC can drive phone inquiries
Clicks on your PPC ads are fantastic but do you know what would be greater? That would be calls to the phone number you should always feature in your PPC ads.  When a prospect calls that number after seeing it in your ad, you get to benefit from PPC without paying for it, because the potential patient didn’t click your ad. He or she just called you directly.

You need to play it smart if you want to get the most out of your PPC. First, you have to make sure that all your ads have your practice’s phone number featured prominently. Then limit the time your ad will be on display to your office hours to make sure that if someone calls, you or your staff can answer personally and turn the caller into a patient.

The above is by no means an exhaustive list of the reasons you should consider making PPC a part of your dental marketing strategy. Nevertheless, they should be good enough to make you take a second look at PPC. For all you know, it’s the digital marketing strategy that will be instrumental in the growth of your dental practice.

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