Digital marketing is an essential part of any successful business. With a plethora of online services and website builders available, it can feel overwhelming to maximize your digital marketing budget. We’ve put together a list of five digital marketing must-haves that will bring in leads and help grow revenue.
While a good website is a critical tool for any growing business, there are many more aspects of digital marketing to consider when building your orthodontic practice. Keep reading as we take a closer look at five digital marketing must-haves that will help your practice thrive!
Solid Branding
Your brand is how you present yourself to the world. This will include your mission statement and the core values that your business operates on. When thinking about your brand, consider what you want your company to represent. Another vital component of your brand is your target audience. You want to be sure that your voice is appropriate for the group of people you’re trying to reach. For example, you would use different tones when talking to college students that you would a mother of two children.
In addition to your values, you must consider the more cosmetic aspects of your brand. The colors and logo you choose will lend to the overall aesthetic of your office. Branding tells your story. Connecting with your audience through your brand will help you build lasting relationships and help you leave an impact.
A Website That Converts
If you want to be number one when it comes to search engine optimization, the most important thing you need is a website that is built to convert. Believe it or not, all sites are not created equal! While big-name companies may be able to create a fancy-looking website, they usually aren’t built to do what they need. Anyone can create a site that looks good, but not everyone can make a site that Google pushes to the top, giving authority to your services, information, and blog posts.
Your website should be designed to convert traffic to consultations. The first thing a potential patient should see when visiting your website is your offer for a free consultation. When you have a website that optimizes SEO, you can successfully generate organic traffic, resulting in more appointments that you can turn into new patients.
Strategic SEO
There is some pushback in digital marketing in regards to SEO. When you’re looking at it from the outside, SEO can seem like a closed box with no way to see inside. However, when working with a team of experts, it doesn’t seem so complicated. The key is to be strategic with your search engine optimization. In comparison, a website template from Wix or similar companies is packaged as SEO-optimized, that often isn’t the case.
When you’re working with the team at Neon Canvas to build a completely customized website, we can implement excellent SEO optimization techniques that will help you gain market share. A few things have proven to produce a useful website for search engines such as Google, including:
- A responsive and user-friendly site
- Content that is unique, engaging, and fresh
- Keyword optimization, meaning your website includes words that are commonly searched for
- Quality backlinks, which refers to another website with more cache that links back to your website, and
- Page load speed
The first and last points both directly relate to your website. If you have a website that isn’t designed to meet your SEO needs, you won’t turn out the results you’re after. The other three points require updated interior pages, landing pages, and blogs. These will contain the keywords that most commonly appear in Google searches in your area. Backlinks are the hardest to come by, as they require writing articles for other publications that will link back to your website.
Good Advertising Strategy
It’s quite common for businesses to build their advertising budget around Google. While that often produces quick results, it’s very short-sighted. In one case, from May of 2017 to May of 2018, organic search traffic yielded 294 leads, whereas Google ads only resulted in 42. In reality, 85% of people click on the first three search results for their search, leaving only 15% who click on the ads. With the right ad strategy, you can own the first two spots in search results as well as renting ad space!
Pay attention to your ad strategy by how much money it’s bringing you. You should always know how many leads are coming in as a result of ads. Knowing your ROI calculation will help you maximize your advertising impact. Having a team that understands the machine learning process of Google and knows how to optimize your advertising budget will ensure that you’re always bringing in the most significant return on your advertising investment.
Avoid Shiny Objects
We know it might sound odd at first, but hear us out! There are many tools and apps out there that can be incredibly useful and helpful in adding new patients. Virtual visits and virtual consultations are wonderful, and if they’re bringing in more revenue, then, by all means, invest in them! However, if you’re implementing chat apps while no one is visiting your website, your money could be more effectively used elsewhere. Your primary focus on advertising should be getting people from the internet interested in your services and into your office. That’s it.
At Neon Canvas, we don’t focus so much on those shiny toys (although we have an incredibly useful analytic software!). We’re focused on creating leads. We feel confident in the services we offer because we believe that orthodontics is a life-changing field. Orthodontics helps people achieve health and confidence, and we believe that it deserves recognition. By focusing on the SEO of your website, from the brand design to writing blogs and social media posts, we’re working to help you gain organic traffic, consultations, and, ultimately, new starts.
Get Started With The Team At Neon Canvas
It can seem overwhelming when making decisions that will best benefit your practice but don’t miss the big picture. You have to have a website that converts, get people there, and has a story that people will believe in. Knowing the return on your investment will help you stay two steps ahead and make the best use of your budget. At a minimum, you should dedicate 4% of your budget per year to advertising costs, and if you want to be a market share leader, that number will be closer to 8-10% of your budget.
Tracking return on investment will come directly from tracking your leads and where they originated from and how many continue to be patients. When you’re able to see where your money is coming from, you can feel confident in your marketing strategies.
Here at Neon Canvas, we create your unique brand to optimize your advertising and help you build lasting relationships with your audience. We offer a full range of services, including a new Neon Now option, if you’re looking for smaller-scale digital marketing services. We also provide a FREE digital marketing audit that you can use, even if you never plan to use our services. We want you to have the information you need to be successful!