Special message from Brad, co-founder of Client Connection Group.
Client Connection Group (CCG) just passed a very impressive milestone: We have spent 1 MILLION dollars in ad spend for our dental clients on the following platforms: Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Dental implant advertising for CCG is all about knowing and educating your audience. Screaming discounts will work in the short term, but truly valuable information, relayed with skill to the audience, will produce and nourish genuine organic urgency.
What else have we learned through the course of spending that much money and helping that many people to achieve their dental implant advertising goals?
Here is a list that I put together to guide you in your own dental implant advertising endeavors. So much thought and experimentation goes into the spending of other people’s implant advertising dollars and the market is constantly changing, but these general principles will help each and every one of us.
1. No matter how good the marketer, someone still has to make the sale.
If you are a dentist or a treatment coordinator, this is the most important point for you to take to heart. If you are presenting treatment to a large number of patients that aren’t moving forward with at least some level of care, you need to study how you can improve your case presentation skills.
Whether or not a patient enrolls in treatment with your practice is influenced by many factors: how at home they feel the moment they step through the door, how comfortable they feel with every single person they interact with, how emotionally connected they are with their dental needs, how the money issue is presented to them, and how the follow-up after their consultation goes.
The good news? You have control over every single one of these.
2. The more options you have in your dental implant advertising arsenal, the better your chance of success.
Rotating ads will keep ad fatigue at bay in the minds of your audience, and you will always have a fallback option if your existing campaign starts to falter.
3. Test things you don’t think will work.
This is pretty self-explanatory, but you want to use a portion of your budget, say, once a quarter, to test something way out of your comfort zone. This will keep your creative juices flowing and speed up your innovation.
Sometimes you just need to take a day off and think of the most out-of-the-box thing possible in dental implant advertising. The results may surprise you.
4. Data over opinions
You can know all the numbers in the world, but if you prefer your opinions to data, you will always fail as a marketer or as a dentist trying to direct your marketing director or agency.
A good marketer will constantly live in the data, and everyone else involved in the dental implant advertising of the practice must also agree to respect this principle or turmoil can easily ensue. Trust the data or fail.
5. Knowing your numbers is crucial to your success
This is, without a doubt, one of the most important, but also most often overlooked parts of running any marketing campaign and is certainly true for running a dental implant advertising campaign.
At a minimum you need to know (1) your gross margins and (2) how much revenue you get per one dollar spent in marketing. Without these two numbers in place, you will never know what your REAL return on investment is.
An amateur marketer will only focus on ad-to-revenue cost, and I’ve come to realize many dentists use only this metric as well.
But there’s a better way.
If you know your gross margins – what percentage of the total amount the patient paid you is left after your treatment expenses are covered (treatment expenses do not include fixed costs such as building and equipment cost) – you know EXACTLY what percent of your collections from your patient actually makes it to your bank. Now take the amount of revenue you make on every dollar spent on advertising and multiply that by your gross margin percentage, and you have your REAL return on investment. Now you know if you’re losing, breaking even, or making money on your dental implant advertising!
And, remember, either your gross profit OR your margins could be the problem, so consider speaking with a consultant to make sure your numbers are in line.
6. Know your demographics
This is one of the most important ingredients for a successful campaign. Since I specialize in dental implant advertising, which is, by and large, targeted at an older age group, I need to make all decisions accordingly. If I make decisions based on “what the kids are doing,” I may completely miss my demographic, since most kids don’t need dental implants.
I’ll give you an example of two things I tried, one that worked and one that didn’t.
Around the beginning of 2022, we rolled out TikTok ads for dental implant advertising. Now many people would think that TikTok is a prime example of “what the kids are doing.” But data was showing that more and more older people were also adopting TikTok so we decided to give it a try. The result? We found it to be a wonderful source of new patients for both ourselves and our clients.
So I decided to run another test on a platform that has been around significantly longer: SnapChat. But Snapchat completely failed. I tried and tried but simply could not find an approach that gained any significant traction.
It turns out that Snapchat is an app that IS still used primarily by younger people, and even the older people that have accounts are not logging in frequently.
So, I speak from experience when I say, “Know your demographics” and if possible, take it one step farther and interview several of your intended audience to gain more insight into their habits and the ways to align your marketing more closely with them.
7. The more you give, the more you can take.
Give more than you take. If you want a sustainable marketing plan, ponder this thought: What is my community learning from my messaging, EVEN IF THEY DON’T BUY?
Create what I call “goodwill” in your community. When your community actually appreciates you, it is significantly easier to get a return on marketing. Many marketers use obnoxious designs and bold headlines as a crutch to get attention, and in doing so, feed the common mindset of “I hate advertisements.”
This is why, historically, infomercials have worked so well. People were willing to watch them because they felt like they were learning something; in other words, someone was giving something to them through the ads instead of simply taking their attention and trying to take their money.
Another way to provide value is through entertainment. Some of the most effective ads in history were just flat-out fun to watch and the company’s sales skyrocketed as a result.
If the ad makes the viewer like you, it will pay dividends for a long time. If the ad makes people annoyed, it will cost you more than it makes.
At CCG we take seriously the above thought; our goal is to make our customers LIKE us through our ads! We believe that the goodwill that this creates is the same thing as money in the bank, and our dental customers across the country have definitely found this to be true as well.
Many advertisers assume that gaining the genuine good will of their audience is not an achievable goal, but we know better! Our customers report that people come into their office all the time asking “Where is the man in the ad? Does he work here?” They are captivated by someone taking the time to specifically explain the true benefits of implants in their dental implant advertising, someone who is seeking to truly GIVE first rather than simply taking from them.
Contact Client Connection Group today to learn more about our unique advertising approach and the way that it can grow your dental practice and put money in your pocket as it has for so many other dentists!