Paid Advertising Dentists

Online paid advertising gives dentists a compelling marketing tool with fast results and a sound return on investment.

While organic search engine optimization and content marketing are an effective long-term means of promoting your practice, paid advertising can bring targeted traffic to your website or a dedicated landing page right from the start.

And that traffic will arrive at the optimum time – when individuals are searching for dental services in your location.

Paid Advertising Options

Paid advertising in the digital world typically includes search engine marketing (SEM) – buying ads on search engines to drive traffic to your website. This is usually done on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis – also known as cost-per-click (CPC).

With pay-per-click advertising, you pay for each click on your ad. This generally takes the form of a fixed daily budget, with the value of each click depending on factors such as search volume and competition.

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) remains a major force in PPC advertising but other options – including social media sites – also provide good advertising opportunities for small businesses like dental offices.

Google Ads

Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and keyword-based Google Ads allow you to reach out directly to people in your area looking online for dental services.

Benefits of paid advertising for dentists via Google Ads include:

  • Fast results. Your ads will immediately appear in Google search engine top positions if you outbid the competition. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) can take weeks to become effective.
  • Customization. Google Ads enable you to tailor your campaign to fit the specific requirements of your dental practice marketing.
  • Targeting. Your message is presented to potential patients at the exact time they’re looking to find a new dentist.
  • Measurability. You can gauge how well your campaign is working, allowing you to make modifications to enhance performance.

Microsoft Advertising

Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) uses an auction system similar to that of Google Ads but you’ll get less competition as you bid on keyword phrases. This can give you effective advertising that costs one-third less than Google Ads and with better click-through rates.

Advertising on the Microsoft Search Network is shown across a range of platforms including MSN, Outlook, Microsoft Edge, AOL, and Yahoo, as well as on Bing.

Facebook

Facebook advertising works on a pay-per-click basis or cost-per-impression (CPI) when you pay each time the social media resource shows your ad, whether anyone clicks on it or not.

Facebook ads feature prominently across desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets, giving dental practices a powerful online presence.

A key benefit of paid advertising for dentists through Facebook is the combination of a high number of prospective patients and fewer competing dental offices.

YouTube

YouTube advertising can be extremely cost-effective, allowing you to focus on prospective new patients by parental status, age, and gender, as well as location.

YouTube targeting solutions enable you to create a productive, localized promotional campaign at reasonable costs – you only pay for views or clicks from people seriously interested in the dental services you provide.

As a major video-sharing resource, YouTube is highly effective in connecting with your prospective patients on an emotional level.

LinkedIn

Advertising on LinkedIn can help your dental office by establishing a consistent, professional presence on the business networking platform.

This can help you to maintain a trustworthy reputation that can ultimately result in more repeat patients and referrals.

You can fine-tune your advertising campaign by focusing on targeting factors such as location, gender, and age.

Instagram

Now part of Facebook, the Instagram online image-sharing platform has become one of the most popular social networks in the world.

People are more responsive to images and videos than written content, and Instagram advertising produces far greater engagement per follower than Facebook or Twitter, with less competition from other businesses.

Instagram attracts many young adults, allowing your practice to connect with millennials as they grow up and start to raise families – people who can all become lifelong patients.

How PPC Can Grow Your Practice

When you place a dental ad, you can rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for your chosen keywords as soon as your campaign goes live, which can mean an immediate increase in traffic to your site – people likely to convert into paying patients.

By outranking other dentists in search results, PPC makes you stand out online – particularly beneficial in high-competition localities to get the visibility you need to expand your practice.

PPC can also greatly increase brand awareness and, unlike traditional advertising in print publications, TV or radio spreads the word among users of all types of computers – from desktops to mobiles. Online ads also create a stronger offline association with your brand.

A further advantage of PPC advertising for dentists is that it helps you control your marketing budget. You only pay when someone responds to your ad by clicking on the link to your site. With conventional advertising or other methods of digital promotion, you’re forking out for ads that may largely be ignored.

PPC also allows you to see a direct relationship between the type of ad you create for your practice and how it performs.

Need Help with Paid Advertising?

Paid advertising by professionals in the field is a cost-effective method of driving traffic to your website, with benefits such as:

  • Instant prominence on search engines and social sites.
  • Effective targeting of potential patents by language, location, and online devices.
  • Measurable results so you know exactly how your promotion is performing.
  • Customization with adjustments to your campaign to improve results.

However, for the uninitiated paid advertising can be extremely time consuming and tricky to optimize, resulting in a poor return on your investment.

In our next post, we’ll be looking at pitfalls to avoid with paid advertising. Meanwhile, if you’d like to find out more about the benefits of paid advertising for your dental practice, DentalROI is here to help you.