The Power Of Retargeting Advertising For Dental Practices

Hi and welcome to our 7th webinar of 2022. Today, we’ll be talking about the power of retargeting advertising for your dental practice. My name is Ian Cantle, and I’m the founder and chief strategist at Dental Marketing Heroes. We’re a dental marketing agency whose mission is to help dentists just like you thrive, so your team and your families can thrive, so you can give more back to your community and worthwhile causes that you care about.

Today, I’ll be sharing information that has the potential to radically impact your practice and increase your new patient numbers. So, without further ado, let me jump right in. Today we’re going to be really digging into this important and valuable topic, and this is what we’ll be covering:

And let me remind you that if you stay until the end of the webinar, I’ll be providing a code for you to get a copy of our free Ultimate Dental Online Marketing Checklist.

If this is your first time joining us for a webinar, let me provide a quick intro…

I’m a co-author of an Amazon best-selling marketing book. I’m also honored to be a weekly contributor on the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast. I bring over 20 years of marketing experience. I’m constantly staying on the forefront of marketing, and I have a track record of producing a very high return on marketing investment for my dental clients. So I hope that helps you know that you’re in good hands when it comes to this topic.

So, let’s jump into retargeting. So the most obvious place to start is by explaining what retargeting is.

What Is Retargeting?

In essence, retargeting solves a problem. It’s a problem that’s inherent with any website. Visitors come to your website and they leave and they never come back. And you as a business, lose your influence on that person. But imagine if there was a way to still reach out to those visitors even after they leave your website. Sounds pretty great, right? Well, that’s what retargeting is. So let me explain it in a little bit more detail.

You have a prospective patient looking for a dentist in your area. They search on Google and they see a bunch of results. They choose to visit your website. They look around, but they’re not ready to contact you yet. And eventually they leave your website. It’s a very sad moment because they didn’t complete a form or call you.

But wait, there’s still hope. Retargeting can present ads to them with an offer on a variety of platforms, and this has a high potential of bringing them back to your website. This is a highly simplistic flow chart, as you can see, but it’s very powerful. The key to all this working, though…

… is a small piece of code that’s saved by a script or cookie on the visitor’s browser. This safe code allows the ad platform to know if they were on your website and present them with retargeting on the ad platform or social platform. 

It allows the ad platform to determine:

• if they visit your website
• visit a specific page — for example, ‘implants’
• if they complete a form
• if they click your call button
• if they click on the ad platform itself
• whether they interact with your ad
• whether they watch your video ads

And this raises the next question you may be asking…

Why Do I Need Retargeting?

Now, if you’re like most business owners, you have a lot going on and you’re probably wondering, why should I bother with retargeting advertising? And it’s a great question, and there are some very compelling reasons. Let me share some recent retargeting data with you.

This stat is one you really need to understand, that around 97% of visitors that leave your website will never return to it. And that’s vital to understand, that even if you’re attracting people to your website, you need some way of bringing them back.

Web traffic increases by a staggering 700% with retargeting.

An effective search retargeting strategy can increase your conversion rate up to 150%. And conversions are one of the most vital metrics when it comes to advertising and websites.

Retargeting beats all other ad placement strategies with a whopping 1,046% efficiency rating.

And ads are three times more likely to be clicked by retargeted visitors than new ones.

Those are some pretty compelling reasons you should retarget. So here’s the bottom line. People come to your website and they leave. A small fraction of those visitors will convert into patients, they will come back and they will convert. Retargeted advertising can boost that number significantly. So why wouldn’t you do it? The next question many people have is…

What Ad Platforms Can I Retarget On?

Essentially, you can retarget on almost every single ad platform and social ad platform. The most powerful one is, of course, Google, because those people are actively searching for your service. But then there are a host of others.

There’s some ad aggregators like AdRoll, which is one of the best in the industry. There’s another one called Retargeter, and these are powerful cross-platform retargeting engines. This helps you show up in things like the Weather Network and some other apps that people commonly use, as well as on main advertising platforms.

Then you can also retarget on specific social networks. If you know where your ideal customers spend time, then it just makes sense to keep presenting them through retargeting. With advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, even on TikTok, Snapchat and others. And you can also retarget on YouTube.

So one of the key things to understand, especially with the social ad platforms, is to understand where your ideal clients are spending time, your ideal patients, and to present ads, retargeted ads on those channels. Now, you may be wondering what activities can I retarget?

Who Can I Retarget?

This list is long, but I’ll give you the highlights on the next few slides.

• You can retarget all website visitors, so anybody that comes to your website, you can present a retargeted ad.
• You can retarget to visitors of a specific page. So if you want to retarget to only people that visit your teeth whitening page, or your implant page, or your braces page, or phenotype, you can do that.
• You can retarget to visitors who complete a form, whether it’s your contact form or appointment form or a form to download some content.
• You can retarget to visitors who click on your phone number — or you can exclude those people.
• You can retarget the people who interact with your ads on the ad platform
• You can retarget the people who view your video ads
• You can retarget the people who like your page on the social platforms, people similar to your patients, you can even do look-alike campaigns.

You can also target by off-site events, by what they searched for, people who consume similar content, people who interacted with content. And if you have a list from an event, you can even retarget those people.

And finally, if you want to go to the next level, you can essentially create a retargeting funnel. This is super powerful. It’s a way to move a prospect forward with micro agreements, to move them through their buying journey and pre-educate them along the way. And most dentists understand that when you pre-educate a prospective patient, they are a much higher value patient and have a greater opportunity to stay long-term with you.

This is a very powerful, but pretty complex funnel to build. But the reason I mention it is to let you know that you can start small by just retargeting website visitors, but then you can build on that to some very powerful retargeting strategies like this one.

Why Is Retargeting So Powerful?

So why is retargeting so powerful? Well, it keeps you in front of a prospective patient, a patient who’s not quite ready to act yet. They’re still exploring and discovering their options, but you want to stay visible in their decision-making process. So this is a fantastic way and one of the few ways that you can actually do that. It allows you to keep your clinic top of mind with prospects or even to upsell or cross-sell existing patients.

It’s a fantastic way to do that. It also provides a way to nurture prospects and it can successfully draw people away from your competition. So while they’re in their discovery phase, they’re trying to find a dentist near them. Even when they’re off your website, you can continue to present your brand to them and draw them back.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering…

Is Retargeting Expensive?

What’s the cost of retargeting? Let’s take a look at that. Is retargeting expensive? And the answer is not at all. It is one of the least expensive forms of advertising because you’re only advertising to a small group of people who have already shown interest in your clinic. Most retargeting campaigns stay in the range of $75 to $100 ad spend per month.

This is usually sufficient to keep your brand top of mind. Of course, this budget can expand if you want to retarget on multiple platforms or if you choose to do more sophisticated retargeting, as mentioned earlier with the retargeting funnel.

Does Dental Retargeting Work?

So does retargeting really work? Does it work for dentists? Yes, it does. Here’s a real life example that’s indicative of most clients we work with.

This dentist has a retargeting budget of $75 per month. They get about 16,000 impressions each month. That means their retargeting ad shows up over 16,000 times a month. And last month they had over 200 returned visitors to their website from retargeting alone. That’s pretty powerful stuff. For $75 plus management fees. That is a significant way to impact people and draw them back to your website into your sphere of influence.

Now, you might be asking, do you need to be advertising already to do retargeting? The answer is no. But it’s much easier if you are. There’s less setup involved. And if you have an agency managing your advertising, it’s more effective to add on retargeting to their current management fees than just to do retargeting alone. But don’t let that stop you from starting. My best advice is to start now, so you’re not losing hot opportunities that you may already be losing to your competition. So start retargeting right away.

Now let’s look at what’s involved in setting up retargeting.

How Do I Set Up Retargeting?

There are a lot of variables involved depending upon the platform you choose, but let me walk you through the high-level elements that are common across all the platforms.

• First, you should have an ad plan. Always start with strategy first. What are your goals for retargeting? What will success look like for you? Is it bringing back ten people? Is it bringing back 20 people? If you’re not doing it now, what’s a realistic goal?
• Next, who is your target audience you want to focus on? Is it all website visitors or a subset of people that visit your website? Perhaps those that visit a specific service page, like implants or teeth whitening? Or maybe those who download something?
• Next, you need to set a monthly budget for retargeting for your ad spend. And I suggest starting with $75 minimum per month per platform. So if you’re advertising on Google, retargeting advertising on Google spend $75, if you’re retargeting advertising on Facebook, $75. You need sufficient funds on those platforms in order to retarget well.
• Next you need to consider what you will offer that will attract people, that will motivate them to click on your ad and draw them back to your website? Will you just promote your practice as a brand? Or will you offer a lead magnet like an eBook or a checklist or something like that? Or maybe a discounted offer on teeth whitening or something?
• Once you’ve got your plan, you need to set up an ad account on the platform you’re choosing to advertise on, if you haven’t already got one.
• And of course you’ll need to provide a form of payment.

Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to set up the elements of a retargeting ad campaign.

Elements Of A Retargeting Campaign

• First, you have your ad campaign, your ad group, your actual ad and the copywriting for your ad — make it super compelling if you want to be successful.
• Next, you’ll need great ad creative that’s engaging, that pops when people see it, so they click on it, it gets in the way, it disrupts what they’re looking at enough in a positive way that they want to click on it to find more information. This isn’t just about being a good designer, it’s about getting people to act.
• Now, what happens when they click on your ad? Where does it send them? Research shows that compelling, strategic landing pages specifically aligned to the ad and the offer that you’re presenting in the ad produced significantly higher results than sending them to your website. Never just send them to your home page, that is a recipe for poor results.
• Next, you need to send them a follow-up email after they’ve requested your offer. And you can continue to nurture them with a series of emails by providing value and information and presenting your clinic’s core difference.
• And of course you need to be tracking and measuring and reporting on results so you know that your campaign is either successful or needs to be tweaked. Or maybe you should invest more budget into your campaign because it’s working that well.

Common Retargeting Mistakes To Avoid

I also wanted to share some common mistakes to avoid when retargeting.

• Number one, don’t overload people with ads. You need to set limits as to the number of ads that they’re presented with on any given day. The common best practice is never show more than ten ads a day to a single person, otherwise they become overwhelmed.
• Next, don’t be creepy. Don’t be a virtual stalker with your visitors. Make sure your ads are positive. Don’t get too personal or specific. The feeling you want people to think of is, yeah, that’s what I’m interested in and I don’t want to look at that again and I don’t want to keep looking for it. I want to click here because I’m interested in it.
• Lastly, you don’t want to set it and forget it. You don’t want to abandon your campaigns and let the weeds grow and not optimize them on a monthly basis. If you leave them, weeds will grow and it will lose power. This means making tweaks and changing up your creative every few months. Otherwise you will see a continuous drop in momentum and effectiveness.

All right, we’ve really dug into retargeting, but how do you as a practice owner get started with retargeting?

How Do I Get Started With Retargeting?

1. Well, as you just saw, you need to find a good, proven retargeting ads provider. You can do it yourself, but it’s pretty complex and there’s a lot of variables, and you have better things to do with your time. And if you’re already talking with somebody or have employed somebody to do your advertising as a whole, this is a great addition to that.
2. So find a good retargeting ads provider, get your landing pages, ad copy, and call tracking set up, and make sure you have that plan first, because if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
3. And start with a small retargeting ad spend of $75 to $100 per month — that will get you started.
4. Next, monitor it, tweak it, improve it over a three-month period, and make sure it’s working for you. Then invest more in it because it just makes sense to invest more in what’s working.

Important Questions To Ask Your Retargeting Ads Provider

Also, some important questions you should be asking your retargeting ads provider…

1. How much of my budget goes to Google ad spend or retargeting ad spend versus your management fee? And watch out for hidden costs. Most businesses that are on the up and up, ad providers and ad managers who are on the up and up will actually split out their management fee from the ad spend. This gives total transparency to what that split is.
2. What type of tracking will they be putting in place? Will they be able to attribute calls and form completions to the retargeting campaigns?
3. Will they be setting up specific landing pages for each ad group? Or will traffic just go to the home page? As we mentioned prior, that’s not a good way to do it. And if you do set up landing pages, is it included in the management fee or is this an additional fee? And quite often it’s an additional fee because as you continue to build out your campaigns, you can also continue to build out landing pages.
4. How often will they update their ad creative? This is really important because, as we mentioned earlier, it erodes with time. So you want to make sure that creative ad copy is in continuous optimization.
5. How will you report on retargeting results? How will you as a business, as a practice, be informed of the success and the tracking of your retargeting campaigns?

Armed with these questions, they will help you avoid bad retargeting agencies and help you hire a good one. I know it’s a lot to understand and even more to implement. It takes a lot of training and experience to do it well. And for most dentists and orthodontists they will never do this themselves or even have an in-house team adept at it. So you need to find an external partner to help you. And that’s where we come in.

Our Dental Marketing Heroes team is here to help you. We’ve become well known for our expertise in the advertising world. We’re a National Excellence Award winning agency, and for the past three years, we’ve been named a Top Digital Ads Agency and a Top Web Design Agency. We’re an SEO for Growth Certified Consultant, and we’re a Strategy First Master Certified Duct Type Marketing Consultant.

I also co-host a weekly small business podcast called Marketing Guides for Small Businesses. And I co-authored a book about local SEO and content marketing for search, how to create content that Google loves and prospects devour.

All that is to say that my team and I can help you with your retargeting efforts, and we are super passionate about it. We find that when we implement our comprehensive marketing engine into practices, we consistently achieve a greater than five times return on your marketing investment and retargeting. And advertising is a key part of our formula to doing that.

So if you’re interested in learning more, please schedule a free consultation with me.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this webinar, I wanted to provide you with a special offer. There’s a great resource that we developed that will help you determine where you are with your marketing. It’s the ultimate Dental Marketing Checklist, and you can get a copy by scanning in this QR code right now with your phone.

Or you’ll also receive a link in follow-up emails. So scan that code, watch for the link in your emails and be sure to get that helpful resource.

And lastly, I would like to invite you to join us for the next webinar in the series that will cover the important topic of ‘How a Dental Marketing System Will Help You Grow Your Practice And Win At Marketing’. This will be on the first Friday in August, which is August 5, 12:00 P.m. Eastern Time.

I hope to see you there, and in the meantime, keep calm and market on!