6 Things Dentists Should Look for in a Digital Marketing Agency

Do you have enough patients in your practice? Marketing is more than your current patients recommending your office to their friends and family. If you want your practice to grow you need to actively be working toward getting more patients through your door. To do that, you need to invest in good marketing.

Why Is Marketing Your Dental Practice Important?

The value of a good digital marketing company is paramount to your dental practice’s success. If you haven’t seen any new patients show up on your list, it’s possible that you aren’t spending enough in marketing.

You may feel like your practice is making money, but if you aren’t comparing the cost it takes to run your business to your revenue, you could be in trouble. In today’s market, you have to invest time and money into your marketing. This money goes toward growing your practice and encouraging both old and new patients to keep coming back.

A strong marketing strategy can:

• Encourage current patients to keep coming back to your practice
• Get your practice to show up when people search “dentist near me”
• Build trust with your patients and create a better online reputation
• Get more patients to schedule appointments with you
• And more!

To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to spend money to make money. While you can hire someone in-house or even ask your office manager to help you build your marketing strategy, it may be more cost-effective to look elsewhere, like for a dental marketing agency.

Hiring an Agency vs. Hiring Someone in Your Practice

If you are paying attention to your business’s numbers and know you need more patients, the best strategy is to invest in a digital marketing agency instead of choosing someone to work in house.

You might already have a website, but is it giving you the results you need? You might already be posting regularly on social media, but is it reaching the right audience? You might not even know where to start when building your own marketing strategy, and that’s okay!

No matter what marketing tactics you are currently using, consider looking for a digital marketing agency to become your own marketing team.

But, there are a lot of agencies out there, and some promise good results but use malicious tactics to get there. To find the right agency for your practice, here are the top 6 things you should look for in your digital marketing agency.

1. Find a Dental SEO Agency That Markets Specifically For Dentists

Marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all choice, and it’s important to find someone who understands not only your practice, but your industry. Finding a digital marketing company that focuses on the dental industry has many benefits. They can start diagnosing issues right away, by figuring out:

• How people are finding your practice
• Where you’re currently ranking on Google searches compared to other dentists in your area
• How well your website is performing
• What keywords your business should be targeting with SEO and PPC efforts
• Are you converting new contacts into new patients

They know the right questions to ask and can help you understand what you need to know about your marketing to take control of your story online. Specializing in an industry also means that agency has access to tools and data that other agencies just won’t have to start getting you results sooner.

Besides being able to understand the dental industry, they also have the experience and knowledge to write good, compelling dental content. With good content backed by keyword research and authoritative resources in the industry, your website’s content can be written to help users who read your content and build credibility in Google’s algorithm.

2. Find an Agency That Can Help You See a Return on Your Investment

It can be hard to navigate through all the different services each agency offers, but it’s crucial to find one that’s ultimately going to focus on giving your practice a huge return on your investment (ROI).

A good marketing agency may be expensive, but that’s okay! With marketing, you have to spend money to make money, which is why you have to focus not on the cost of the company, but the ROI they provide.

Think of it this way: A patient spends on average $1,000 their first year on dental services. If you spend $1,500 on marketing and that marketing brings in 4 patients, it means you’ve received $4,000 back, with a $2,500 return on your investment. This is a basic analogy that doesn’t take into account other business expenses, but the concept is the same. You can make more money by investing money into your marketing budget.

This return on your marketing investment can make sure your practice is thriving and lets you invest back into your practice with better equipment to provide an even better experience for each of your patients.

Calculating this return on your investment for each patient doesn’t include the lifetime value. If that patient who chose your office through your marketing efforts keeps coming back, you’ll see an even bigger return without spending more money.

Ask your potential agency to provide a general idea of what your return will be and hold them accountable. If they don’t get the results you want, ask them what they plan to do with your marketing dollars, and if you aren’t happy with your results, shop around.

However, marketing doesn’t get results overnight. It can often take at least 6 months before you start to see the return you want, so be patient, and keep an open communication with your marketing agency.

3. Use an Agency That Takes Care of Everything

Someone on your team may be able to do certain parts of your marketing strategy, like posting on social media, answering direct messages, or even writing blogs for your website. But relying on one person to handle everything means there may be missed opportunities, and you may see a lower return on your investment.

The advantage of choosing a marketing agency is that you get a team of professionals who all have different specialties. A PPC expert will manage your ads account, a professional content writer will be writing content for your website, and more.

A good agency should be your one-stop shop for a holistic strategy, and should offer services in:

• Website design and development
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click ads (PPC)
• Social media management
• Social media ads
• Graphic design
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• Call tracking
• And more!

If you find an agency that markets themselves as a creative digital marketing agency, that means your team will look for out-of-the-box ways to market your practice and get good results! If you find a good agency that offers all of these services, make sure to ask what types of work they’ve done for their dental clients in the past so you can see what to expect.

Get excited about fun branding campaigns, infographics, or even videos that may come through a creative marketing team!

Learn More: Why You Should Use an Agency for Your Marketing

4. Find an Agency That Is Open With Their Reporting and Results

Good results aren’t everything when it comes to marketing. In fact, good marketing is an experiment. Some things might work, while others don’t. The important thing is to find an agency that’s on your team and gives you the reason behind your results and is willing to adapt and adjust their strategy to help your practice see better results.

They should explain the logic behind their strategy. If your agency recommends certain platforms or marketing avenues, they should be willing to answer any questions you may have about the platform and what you should expect by investing in it.

Look for an agency that focuses on helping you understand how marketing works, and one that may even provide the tools to control some elements of your marketing yourself! An agency should feel like an extension of your team, not someone working independently of your practice.

5. Find Out if You Work With a Dedicated Team

Getting a good agency also means having someone dedicated to your account and available to answer your questions and provide updates to your marketing strategy. Your story, the reason behind starting your practice, is important! Some agencies take control of your website, your brand, and your voice.

Not us. Something unique about Oozle Media is how we get to know our clients and how we organize our teams to market for your practice. We put a team with a dedicated PPC specialist, content writer, SEO specialist, and more on your account to get to know your practice to build consistent work that showcases your story best.

You’ll always have someone readily available to help you answer questions when you need it.

6. Look for Marketing Agency “Red Flags”

Something key is a lot of agencies do digital marketing wrong. They waste your money to get a quick profit without showing you the results. You can tell a good company from a bad company by what they promise you and their methods:

• Are they offering to get you a top spot in Google overnight or even at all?
• Are they saying they’ll get your website 100 strong backlinks within a month?
• Are they saying they have “never-before-seen” tactics that get big results?
• Do they promise to get you a specific number of leads each month?
• Do they promise a new website but don’t give you access to it?

These are all red flags of a bad marketing agency! When it comes to marketing, there is no “silver bullet” that’s going to grow your dental practice right away. A good agency should be providing tried and true strategies to grow your practice.

And, sometimes, tried and true methods don’t always work. That’s why choosing an agency that is honest and open with their methods and results is the most important part. Even if results aren’t what you expect, a good company will work with you to explain what happened, own any mistakes, and build a stronger and better marketing campaign for your practice.

Are You Looking for a Dental Digital Marketing Agency?

At Oozle Media, our philosophy is to work with each of our clients to help them grow their business or practice. We embrace the unique differences of each of our clients and do everything we can to showcase what makes you and your practice unique.

We want to highlight what you want to share to your patients through good marketing. Our goal is to help your practice be successful, and save you the headache of managing your marketing yourself.

If you’ve decided that you need to find an agency for your practice, get in touch with Oozle Media! As a first step, we’ll provide you with a free analysis of your current marketing efforts and help you determine the next steps you can take to get new patients coming to your practice. Reach out today!