The immense power and reach of online search, social media and mobile has compelled many dental practices to shift their marketing strategies almost entirely online. Some of these practices invest a considerable portion of their revenues into online marketing every year. However, the key question remains: Are you achieving your desired business goals with online dental marketing, and is it really working for you?
In a highly competitive market environment, it is naturally important for your dental practice to justify every marketing dollar it spends. You can do that by determining the actual return on investment (ROI) that your online marketing campaign is producing.
One of the challenges is that many potential patients, who may want to make an appointment with your dental office after learning about your practice through your website, may do so through a phone call, and not by filling an online contact form or using the online appointment system on your dental website.
You can overcome this challenge to a great extent by deploying an efficient call tracking software in your office. This system will keep a track of all the phone calls and phone conversations to help you determine whether the caller reached your practice via your dental website, social media, blog, column, online forum or newsletter.
Google Analytics is another important way to measure the performance of your online dental campaign. With this tool, you can find out whether your target audience from your local area where the practice is located, are visiting your website. Google Analytics will provide you valuable insights about how much time on average these visitors spend on your website and what kind of online engagement they have on the site.
One of the simple, direct and time-tested ways of determining the success of your dental marketing campaign is to create a small questionnaire for your new patients to seek their feedback, comments, testimonials and information about the source from which they learned about your dental practice.
Analyzing your search engine rankings for major localized keywords, activity over your social media channels, the number of visitors to your blog, and the number of people subscribing to and reading your e-newsletters are some other ways to evaluate whether your online dental marketing campaign is progressing in the right direction.
About the Author
Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of 140+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dentists who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.
