"Align Your Ads" - Online Advertising for Orthodontic Practices (feat. Brian Craig)

In this episode of "The Dental Domination Podcast," DentalScapes co-founders Dan Brian and Brian Craig discuss the intricacies of online advertising specifically for orthodontic practices. They explore various advertising options, including Google Local Services Ads (LSAs), traditional Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, and social media advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In this wide-ranging conversation, Dan and Brian discuss the importance of understanding each product's unique features and benefits in developing the right advertising mix for your ortho practice. The conversation also highlights the significance of front desk call handling and the necessity of data-driven decision-making in developing and implementing online marketing strategies for orthodontists. Learn more and snag the free guide to orthodontic front desk call handling on the show notes page.

Transcript

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All right, welcome back to the Dental Domination podcast. I'm super excited to be here today. My name is Dan Brian. I'm here with a very special guest today who will be a recurring feature, I hope going forward. If I don't piss him off. This is Brian Craig. He is the co-founder over at Dentalscapes as well. He manages our client services team and is a master at all things on the client services side of the operations. And I will just be quite quite blunt and say that he is the most of the brains behind the operation in any case. But Brian, I'm so excited to have you here today. And today we're to be digging into something that I think is very timely for a lot of folks as they're considering plans for the year ahead. But we're to be digging into online advertising options. And today we're going to really be focusing on orthodontic practices. And so it's a very specialized area. It's obviously a specialized type of practice. And there's a lot of different considerations that go into deciding what online ad products to use and actually how to use them. And so I'm really excited to dig into it today. But where do you want to start? mean, let's let's actually start at the beginning. So let's say I am an orthodontist. I own my own practice and I've never done online advertising before. And let's just say for for sake of of you know, this topic Let's say my practice is relatively young not yet super established in the local market What are your initial thoughts when it comes to putting together an online ad program for that type of practitioner? Yeah, that's a great question. So the first thing I would say is that there are three different types or three different ad products, I'll say, that we see most practices use. Two of them are from Google. One of them is from Facebook. You have your traditional Facebook ads. You know, as you're scrolling through, seeing what your child or your friend or whatever did for the day, you may see like a local business pop up there, you know, promoting something or... That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Facebook and Instagram. So that's the first type of ad that we see a lot. The second, Google has two different ad products. One is pretty simple. The other can get very in the weeds and is very highly competitive. So the first practice starting out, I would recommend what Google calls their local service ads product. Yeah, those are known as LSAs. Correct, yep, yep. And those LSAs are easy to set up. They show at the top of the search results. You get a little green check mark that says Google Guaranteed. So they build trust really quick with potential patients. And just real quick for the interest of our audience, how do you actually get Google guaranteed? I mean, what does that process look like? Yeah, so it's fairly straightforward, although it can take a week or so to complete. What you'll do is you'll apply via Google's LSA portal, and they'll ask you for a couple of different pieces of information. You'll have things like you'll fill out the practices info, you'll fill out info for each provider with their MPI identifier, with their dental license info. And you'll also have to provide things like general liability insurance for the practice and then professional liability for each provider. But it's a pretty straightforward process. Yeah, and that's something that our agency and others out there typically handle for clients when they get onboarded. You you and I have been talking about LSAs for a long time. And I remember, you know, probably well over a year ago, we did an online training on that. And I'm actually going to put a link to that in the show notes here. But, you know, you personally, what do you like most about LSAs and especially for orthodontic practices? What's most appealing about that ad product for you? Yeah, I think the most appealing thing for, for LSAs in my opinion is their simplicity. They're fairly easy to get up and running. You don't have the complexity of bidding on keywords. You don't have the complexity of landing pages. It's, it's really straightforward. And you either get those potential patients via a phone call or via like text message via messaging. So. You know, it's a lot easier for most practices to field phone calls than it is for text messages, especially starting out. So there's a lot of attractiveness in that piece and in the consistency of what it costs. Cause if you've ever run Google ads, you know, especially if it's not something you're doing day to day, you can see your costs all over the place and you won't know why if you're not in it day to day. And we're going to talk about the complexity of Google's traditional pay-per-click ads versus LSAs here in a second. another thing that I love about LSAs is that it is a cost per lead product. And, you know, by that, I just mean, you know, you only pay when a qualified patient calls or messages the practice. And so that's, that's very different from Google's, you know, traditional and sort of flagship ad product, which is pay-per-click or PPC. where you are paying, like you said, you you're bidding on specific keywords and you pay when that person clicks with no guarantee that they're going to end up, you know, converting into a phone call. And so I really liked that about the LSAs. I think it's really nice. And like you said, it is easier from that standpoint and a little bit more economical in terms of managing costs. So I think, and maybe a little bit more predictable even in terms of what you spend and what you get. So, You know, typically in most markets, you and I are able to provide clients with an estimate of what they're going to pay per phone call or message and what they're going to ultimately pay based on their conversion rate per new patient. And obviously, you know, one thing I wanted to touch on really quick too with you, because like I said earlier, you are managing client services for the agency. And so you're really hands on with ortho practices, front desk teams and of the equation when it comes to how well are your online ads going to really work? know, marketers, we as an agency can only deliver the qualified leads. It's really up to the front desk team to convert them into that actual appointment. So what are some of the things that you're typically looking for when it comes to handling those calls coming in and following up with the ones that maybe don't immediately connect? Yeah, for sure. So one of the big things with LSAs is, and this isn't necessarily the case with traditional ads. I could argue down the line that both are applicable. picking up the phone, not going to a voicemail during the business day, picking up the phone, and a timely response to messages are actually a ranking factor for Google's local service ads. So, you know, if your practice is letting those leads go to voicemail, you're going to be showing up lower in the results over time because Google... our end were wincing. Right. Yeah. Because, you know, ultimately, yes, Google wants to make tons and tons of money, but how do they do that? You know, in theory, they do that by providing a good, reliable experience for visitors and searchers. So those quality signals like picking up the phone, you know, responding quickly to messages, those tell Google, hey, my practice is going to be better. serving clients, clients are going to be happier. That means searchers are going to be happier with what they found via Google. So, you know, those, those are actually ranking metrics for LSAs. And that's something that we make sure to over communicate, to practices. And one thing you and I always emphasize with clients is the importance also, speaking of ranking factors and making sure that your LSA ad appears as often as possible, is reviews. And Google reviews specifically, those are really, really tightly integrated with that ad product. What can you tell listeners about that? and what are some of the things that you really look for and strive to do in managing those LSAs with respect to reviews. Yeah, so you're absolutely right down that reviews, mean, if there's one thing that practices could do to increase the results from their marketing, it's reviews. You know, it used to be that LSA reviews and Google Business Profile reviews were separate. They're unifying those in January. So getting reviews for your practice on Google, those five star reviews, is going to help you in the LSA ranking like you just mentioned. It's also going to help you a ton in your organic map ranking. So, you know, this is the one thing you can do that's really going to give you a boost on both sides of the equation. Yeah, and that just goes to, you know, again, support something we've talked a lot about on this podcast and some of our trainings previously. If you don't already have it, those listening, and I'm pretty confident that most practices do in some way, or form now, but if you don't already have it, make sure you've integrated some kind of automated review request system that can consistently generate those five-star Google reviews. super important, as Brian just said, not just for reputation management and establishing credibility and trust, but also ensuring that your LSA advertisements actually are prioritized by Google and show up. And it also just makes you look better. So yeah, definitely important. Anything else, though, that folks should know about LSAs as orthodontic practice owners specifically? you know, are there specific services that, that, you know, you can, you can set those ads up for. Yeah. So you can get more granular than orthodontist in the console. Google has 16 different kind of sub services, I will call them, that you can turn on and off depending on if there are specific types of cases that you're looking for. Yeah. they've got stuff like braces, TMJ treatment, retainers, clear aligners. There are a number of different categories within there you can turn on and off. So if you say, hey, I'm just looking for Invisalign or SureSmile cases, whatever it is, you can turn off 15 of them and leave on clear aligners and get really granular in the types of new patients that you're bringing in. on your competitors, I mean, the, cost that you pay per lead, again, this is a cost per lead product is going to vary based on those services that you're going after because obviously, you know, a full course of Invisalign is going to be much higher value than a single retainer. So, yeah, absolutely. Now, the other thing that I think is really interesting and is sort of a nice transition as we want to talk about traditional Google pay per click ads is that, you know, in online marketing, you and I always talk about it. one of the primary goals and one of the best ways to capture the most leads possible and in turn, generate more appointments and grow your revenue is to own as much digital real estate as possible. And so when we talk about, you know, your online real estate, we're primarily talking about the Google search results page and you want to own as much of that. You want to as possible. You want to be in the map pack as we call it, or the local pack sometimes call it. So those are those top three prioritized search positions that show up sort of next to a map with a click to call button and all of that. But you can also own more real estate by engaging with these online ad products, these Google products like LSAs that we've been talking about and also like pay-per-click advertisements, which actually appear below the LSAs but are also prioritized above other organic. search rankings. And so that's also super important. And I just wanted to say, as we transition into that, I think for, you know, maybe ortho practices that have scaled beyond the startup phase, or a little bit more established, it is always worth considering both ad products on Google, simply so that you can own the most real estate possible. And, you know, to that end, I just wanted to make sure that our listeners were aware, you can run Google Local Services ads or LSAs. alongside Google PPC ads. And we found that to be a pretty effective solution for, again, those practices that are a little bit more established, maybe or definitely have a little bit more ad budget, you know, to spend each month. But it's another option out there. But I kind of put the cart before the horse. So what do you want to say? What do you want to communicate to ortho practice owners about traditional Google pay-per-click ads and how have they changed over time? Yeah, so I think the main thing that I would point out about traditional Google Ads is if it's not something that you do as your job, if it's not something that you're in the platform seeing a ton of different campaigns and seeing what other folks are doing, what's working and what's not. It's very, very easy to set money on fire in traditional Google Ads. And things like smart campaigns and AI recommendations that Google's implementing, for the most part, the only thing those do is help you part with your money more easily. That's right. That's right. You'll notice every one of those recommendations results in more spend. Yeah, well, often, often as we've noticed, while getting worse results. Correct, yeah. And it makes sense to a point, because if you are just blindly auto-applying what Google recommends and you're doing what everyone else is doing, it's just going to bid it up higher and higher. So if you're running traditional Google Ads, it's going to work better if you are working with an agency or someone who has experience doing them. Generally, what I tell folks about traditional Google Ads is it's a more advanced strategy. Because with LSAs, everybody's ad looks the same. You can put pictures up, you can check little boxes for the things that set you apart, but there's not much variability in them. Whereas when you're looking at traditional Google Ads, you're designing all the headlines, you're designing all the content, you're determining does it go to a phone call? Does it go to a landing page? Does it go to a service page on my main website? And then you're on your own to figure out how to attribute new patients to come in from it. So, you know, there are lot of different levers to pull on a well-run PPC campaign. Yeah, and it is, like you said, a much steeper learning curve. so typically caution ortho practices against having someone in-house or on the team run those ads simply because one, it will take a lot of time to get up to speed initially. And also this is an ad product that is constantly changing. I was going to say, you you reminded me when you were talking about it, this is going to date me, but probably 15 years ago or so I was at another agency. Yeah. then it was a beast. and, and I remember, you know, getting immersed in that environment and getting up to speed on, how to manage those campaigns appropriately without, like you said, relying on, on Google's auto optimizations, which, you know, sound really nice, but, you know, in practice or expensive and maybe not as effective. It's yeah, it's a lot of work. But as far as the mechanics of how the ads work, can you just walk through pretty, you know, just pretty straightforward? How does the Google ads product differ from LSAs and what does it look like in practice? Yeah, so there are actually a lot of or some similarities from the bidding side of things, but essentially based on a number of targeting factors like searcher history and the profile that Google has built up on the searcher, their physical location, the actual search term, you know, there can be time of day, location modifiers. There can be device modifiers. if, you know, within a campaign, you can bid more if somebody is searching on their phone versus on their computer. So there, like I said, there are a lot of levers to pull on these campaigns, but at their core, they're an auction against the other competition in your market as to who's going to show at the very top and who's going to show at the bottom of the page and who's not going to show at all. So yeah, I mean, like you had mentioned earlier, functionally, like when someone does a search that Google interprets as having local intent, like you're searching for a local business in Google's eyes, you are going to have those LSAs at the very top. They're going to be very simple. They're going to show a picture. They're going to show the practice name. I believe they showed the address and rating. I've seen different modules that that do and some that don't. And you can click to call or you can click to message and that's about all they have. Traditional Google Ads on the other hand, you know, have a lot more options. So it's custom verbiage that a lot of times Google will dynamically generate from a bunch of options you give them. But yeah, you had mentioned you want to show up in every spot. So LSAs, traditional Google Ads. Matpak, and then traditional organic. And if you do have the budget to do that, it just builds confidence with the searcher. You look legit if you're showing up in all four places. Yeah, really run the floor. Now you mentioned the cost per click, the amount that you bid is going to be heavily dependent on the market area you're in and the local competition. And we've seen even over the last couple of years, ad costs on Google really skyrocket in particular markets. And obviously it's going to be more expensive in say Dallas versus Pineville, North Carolina. But that's just an example. What are we talking about going back to LSAs and looking now at Google ads, PPC? What are we talking at just as a general ballpark for, you know, various markets in ortho when it comes to these online ad products? Yeah, on average in ortho, we're seeing between $80 and $100 cost per lead. that is whenever somebody contacts your practice through Google LSAs and Google thinks they are a potential new patient and they now use AI to determine that. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was six months ago. So they're making progress there. That's when you're charged on the, for these LSAs. Now, when you're calculating costs per patient, what I tell folks a lot of times is your marketing company or consultant or you, if you're doing your own marketing, you can, you can control the side where the patient contacts you. Like we can say that's 80 to a hundred dollars or we'll say a hundred dollars for, for easy numbers here. But the other side of that is how well is your practice converting those leads? How well is your front desk handling them? Because if you have 10 people call in for an Invisalign consult and you only convert five of them, like you get five starts out of that, then your cost per new patient is doubled from what your cost per lead is because you're converting 50%. That's a big lever there is how well is your front desk converting these folks for all of these ad products. And that's going to depend on your call handling, like you said, and also, you know, the offer that you make specifically, we work with ortho practices that, know, just, just as a standard and a lot of ortho practices out there doing this. And I would say it is best practice. You know, they're, they're not only booking the appointment, but they're bringing, they're essentially inviting the potential patient in for a free digital X-ray and exam and that kind of thing. And so. you know, anything that you can do to position the value upfront at zero risk to the patient is, going to go a long way in terms of boosting that conversion rate. And we talk about conversion rate too. you know, I get a lot of questions and calls with clients and potential clients about what that looks like. And it really varies by the practice and you can have super high converting practices, ortho practices that are converting. 80 % of qualified phone calls into appointments and that's phenomenal. Generally looking at you know something closer to for ortho 65 70 as sort of a healthy indicator of conversion right there but yeah totally agree with you. Marketing is the top of the funnel and then it's really up to that front desk team to close the deal so so definitely. One thing we haven't talked about yet though is sort of the other elephant in the room, which is social media ads. And you mentioned upfront you were talking about Facebook and Instagram. What's different about those ads when it comes to your objective and how do they fit into the overall marketing puzzle? Yeah, Facebook and Instagram ads, they differ from Google traditional ads, PPC and Google LSAs, in that those Google ad products are displaying your ad to people who are actively searching for your services. So somebody searching for Invisalign dentists near me, or they're searching for braces near me, or whatever. whatever that service that they're looking for is. And Google, both of Google ad products are surfaced during those type of, you know, high intent searches. Whereas your Facebook and your Instagram ads. Now there are exceptions. I'll say to this, like retargeting, if they visited your website, you're targeting them everywhere. You know, that's not what I'm talking about here, but retargeting, by the way, folks listening, when we talk about retargeting, we're talking about the creepy ones that follow you everywhere. Creepy but super effective, as I like to say. And yeah, they are super effective. And I know I've experienced this personally a lot is, you know, I'll be up late one night looking for something and then I'll be like, okay, I'm going to shut my laptop and go to bed. And for the next four days, every website I visit says, Hey, didn't you want this? And eventually I'll be like, I didn't want that. You know, I'm going to click on it and take the next step here. So they do work, but enough of chasing that squirrel, so go on. No, no, you're good. It's good info. Facebook and Instagram ads are going to be inserted into people's feeds and the demographic that you're targeting, whether or not they're searching for your services. So it's more of a branding and awareness play on social media. Where we have seen great success with these types of social media campaigns, are with newer practices or newer to the market practices that may be fast growing, but don't have the brand recognition of say a practice who's been in the market for 20, 30, 40 years, whatever that timeframe may be. So you can blanket a large population repeatedly with Facebook and Instagram ads for relatively low price. I was going to say really quite cost effective. The other thing that's really cool, I think about Facebook and Instagram ads for ortho practices specifically. And of course it applies to, you know, general dentists and pediatric dentists as well. but the targeting options are quite sophisticated. And so for an ortho practice looking for, you know, teens, for instance, you can actually target, you know, parents with teenage aged kids, which is of course, sort of a gold mine for orthopractices. So the targeting options are really sophisticated. Yeah, targeting is very impressive on Facebook. From the flip side, that means you know how much data they're collecting about you every time you go on there. But yeah, like you said, Dan, you can target parents of infants, parents of toddlers, parents of elementary age kids, middle schoolers, teens. There are a ton of targeting options like that. And then you can even target by interest. So if you're let's say we're going to get as granular as you're wanting to target a certain school or something, you can say, interest is in this page and know, X, Y, Z. So you can get really granular with the folks you're trying to reach with, with Meta, with Facebook and Instagram ads. Absolutely. you know, it's interesting to Facebook ads give you a lot of flexibility in terms of, how you measure performance, how you actually set up the ads, can pay, there are certain products, like we were talking about LSAs earlier, there are certain cost per lead products on Facebook, there are products where you'll pay per click as you would on Google. You can even, you know, for like the kind of awareness building campaign you were talking about earlier. That's something where you would pay per impression and you can actually, you know, pay that's, just a fancy marketing term for paying per thousand views essentially. but a ton of options, and, definitely a good fit for the right ortho practice, you know, as you said, and definitely like we were talking about owning the real estate doesn't have to mean just on Google, you know, owning both, places is, is a great option for more established, practices with a little bit more budget. But in any case, I'm going to close out here. This has been a great conversation. Is there anything that you would want to leave ortho owners with at this point? As far as online advertising goes, you had one takeaway, what is it that you would want to leave folks with? Yeah, I would say, you know, let your decisions be data driven. How we usually recommend practices approach this is don't say, okay, I'm going to spend$500 on Facebook and $500 on Google and $500 on LSAs. You know, say my entire advertising budget is X and then decide where it makes sense to allocate it. If you spread it out like that at low dollar amounts, you're not going to get great results. you know, put the dollars in the product that makes the most sense for where your practice is today. And then track what comes out of it because the number one thing that I see causing issues with potential new clients that we talk to here at DentalScapes is that they may have appropriate spend, it may be inappropriate products, but the targeting and the tracking is not there where they can actually say, hey, for $10,000, I got one new patient or I got 50 new patients. They just don't know. And those metrics are really important to making the right decisions with your marketing. and growing versus setting money on fire. Yeah. And speaking of data-driven marketing and avoiding setting money on fire, we actually have an entire blog post that really goes into granular detail on sort of the cost per click, cost per lead, cost per acquisition that you might expect for your ortho online advertising. And so I'm to put that link in the show notes and folks can check that out there. If you are interested in learning a little bit more, or maybe are considering online advertising, Brian and I would love to talk with you. Just go to dentalscapes.com slash start. We can set up a free strategy call. Love to connect. But in any case, I just want to thank you, Brian, for taking the time today and thank everyone who is listening out there. Hope that this was valuable for you. And if you did find it valuable, please take just five seconds and leave us a quick rating and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It is the best way and easiest way for us to reach other orthodontists and other dentists out there. that we can hopefully help. in any case, thanks so much for listening, everyone. We will be back at it. Typically release these episodes about every other week. We'll be back at it here. So stay tuned to the Dental Nomination podcast and subscribe if you are interested. We would really appreciate it and love to stay connected. So thanks all and thanks, Brian. All right, man, we'll see you.