Your video finally went viral. Great but…
How many patients did you book?
Dear Business Builder:
There is a lot of talk about the importance of social media for your business.
The benefits of making yourself known there, and increasing the number of followers “organically”.
Every day, new gurus come out boasting about their ability to go viral… you even see stories of people whose lives changed when it went viral.
However, you have also achieved going viral in some videos. But something does not fit… How can those tens, even hundreds of thousands of views not bring you almost any new clients?
The short answer:
Your business is local, so chasing hundreds of thousands of people to see you most of the time is not going to have any effect on it. Well, yes… it may have one: increasing the number of followers, which is a meaningless objective that does not translate into Money or recognition for your business.
Let me say it again.
Your business is local. Virality is national and global. So the people who will see you, in most cases, cannot get to your clinic, period.
But that’s in the rare case that you go viral with useful content because that is what makes people want to visit your clinic.
Which sadly seldom happens… Because once you focus on getting more people to see you, you start doing strange things to get attention, things that most of the time are funny.
And even if you’re in the business of fixing smiles, you must first show that you are competent. Your business must show that it is competent, not how well the people who work there dance… or how funny they are.
Ok, you must think that by only showing your work and results you will kill of boredom your future patients… But think for a second I will sell you my dental marketing services. Will you choose me because I’m a great dancer, or because I’m handsome, or because I will make you laugh the hell out of you?
Maybe that applies when you choose an influencer to work with, and that’s why the results are so poor most of the time.
To sum up:
More views, it isn’t what you need. What you need is a predictable and consistent way to get new patients.
But that’s not what the “marketing experts” and social media gurus tell you. Those whose business is to make you believe that all you need to do is create more content and the customers will eventually start coming…
Look
While free traffic to your website or social media profile has been a buzzword for almost two decades…
When you can’t buy traffic at will, your business is one “update away” from financial struggle.
Plus, why wait for people to find you by chance when you can speed up the process?
Besides, do you remember what I said to you about people seeing your content who can’t go to your dental practice?
What good are those free views if you can’t convert them into patients, clients, and money?
Ok, I know you want to help, that’s your main mission but…
Seriously, do you want to nurture the other dentist practice?
Will it be practical for you to create a content strategy to show the benefits of Invisalign over braces to people who can’t even go to your clinic?
You may think: “But some of those who see that piece of content will become my patient” and I ask you, are you sure?
How can you be? Do you have any way to measure that? Again, the short answer is no.
On the other hand, for example, Facebook became a multibillion-dollar company not only for connecting people but by its ability to use the network to sell ads.
That means you can reach a small percentage of your followers, like 2 to 10% for free. The other 90 to 98% cost money to get to. That’s why if you have 50k real followers, it often is hard to get the same amount of views. This is for many reasons, and not for Facebook’s greed. But the point here is that:
You must stop centering your attention on “vanity metrics”.
Do you know that there are “bot farms”?
Yes, those fake followers, fake comments, and fake views that many people buy to brag about it, and that only end up annihilating their credibility.
To do this doesn’t make sense unless you want to impress someone with those numbers so they hire you… just like many so-called influencers do.
Vanity is dangerous… and costs a lot of money.
So forget about getting more views by posting pretty and funny things just for the sake of it. Test your headlines. Think about what pain points you want to target. Check which posts get more traction, read the comments, and see if they want to know more about your services or that specific treatment. Then use this info to predict which advertisements will perform better.
Remember, the goal of posting content isn’t to “organic grow” the number of people who know you exist. The goal of creating and publishing content is to grow your business.
That may seem like the same thing, but it’s not.
And in case you’re saying to yourself: Who would forget such a thing!? You must know that if you work with the wrong dental advertising firm, forgetting about that will be the least of your worries.
It’s easier than you think. For example, if the first option you’re given is dental Facebook Ads, that’s a red flag because the first place in which you need to advertise your dental practice is search engines.
And because Google is the most popular search engine, doing dental Google Ads is the first logical step.
I say ‘logical’ because you have to make sure that when people search for a solution to a dental problem, your clinic is among the first results they see. When people search for a solution, often means they are ready to go.
You have to position yourself as the solution to an existing problem.
Then worry about finding people who are unaware of having that issue; or who are aware of that concern, but don’t know that there is a solution.
In this case, social media ads for dentists can be the way to go.
And the main advantage of doing social media ads is that you can control who sees that post. This means that everyone who sees the ad can actually visit your dental office to find out more, unlike organic content that people can watch worldwide.
Most marketing and advertising agencies are stuck in the belief that digital is only about local SEO, Google Ads, or Meta Ads.
Forgetting that there are other powerful mediums such as email marketing, advertorials, etc… also, social media is not only Facebook and Instagram.
Furthermore, today’s world is indeed digital, but offline strategies such as direct mail for dentists still have a powerful effect in getting new patients if done well.