Are Paid Ads Worth It for Dental Practices?
Hey everyone, Kelsey here with Roadside Dental Marketing.
A question we get asked a lot is:
Are paid ads even worth it?
Do they still work? Am I going to make money? Is it worth investing my hard-earned marketing dollars?
Well, today, I thought the best way to answer that is just to do a brief video.
Are paid ads worth it?
So: are paid ads worth investing in? Yes? No? Maybe?
Well, according to recent studies, the answer is yes. It’s not a maybe, it’s not a no, it is an absolutely yes.
For example, on average, depending on your vertical, depending on your industry, for every $1 you put into ads, you will get an approximate return of $3 back.
Meaning, for every dollar you spend, you’re looking at a 300% potential ROI on that investment. So if you’re any kind of an investor on anything else, $3 or 300% is a massive return.
But a lot of times you’re also asking, “Well, what will be my ROI? What services should I advertise for? Should I just cover everything? How much should I spend on ads?”
Today we’re going to break this down into three different sections.
What to advertise
So first, we’re going to look at what you can advertise.
What are some specific services? What are some technologies? What are you able to advertise for them? How can you do that? How can you look at how much you’re supposed to spend? How could you look at where you are in your physical area or your competitors and what they’re doing?
And then, finally, the bullseye, what everybody wants to know is, what can I potentially make from running ads?
So first of all, let’s look at what: Some of the things you can run ads for is your own brand.
If you want to build up brand awareness, if you’re a brand new startup practice, or if you’ve been around for a long time, but maybe you have a new associate doctor that’s come on that you want to start promoting, well, then you can run paid ads to promote your brand.
You can also run ads on technology. Maybe you’ve added an iTero scanner. Maybe you do some sort of implants that are not a normal type of implants. Maybe metal-free or porcelain veneers. Those are the types of things you can run ads on. You can run ads on specific services or, on a much broader scale, cosmetic dentistry or family dentistry. You can hone in on implants or Invisalign or clear aligners.
Where to advertise and how much to spend
You can also run ads on one platform or multiple platforms.
For example, you could run ads only on Facebook, or we could look at your competition where you are, and it might make sense for you to run ads on Google, Facebook, and then Instagram.
But now we go a little bit narrower. So how do we come up with a budget for you? How do we come up with a recommendation for you while we look at your competition?
We’ll look at who is doing the best in your area, and we’re going to look at how much they’re spending. We’re going to look at what keywords they’re targeting. And we’re also going to look at what the average cost per click is based on the competition and the search volume.
Then we also want to look at what your scalability is. What do we mean by scalability? Well, you might be advertising or running ads for a service that you could realistically only take on maybe one or two patients.
How much you’re going to spend for that is going to be different than if you were advertising a service where you could take on 50, 60, or even a hundred new patients. So we want to look at your scalability.
Then thirdly, we want to look at your profit margin. If you were to run ads and you have a set budget that we’ve recommended for you, is that going to be a 90% profit margin? Are you going to be able to double your money or are you only making a very, very small amount? So we take all of those into consideration before we make our recommendations on how much, what service, and where you should be running ads.
And then that brings it to the third part.
Calculating your ROI
How we calculate ROI is, we dig into what the average lifetime value is for the specific service that we’re running ads on.
So for example, if you’re targeting just ‘family dentistry’ or ‘cosmetic dentist’, or you just want new patients, then we would look at the average lifetime value of a patient who comes into your practice.
Maybe on average, twice a year, they get a cleaning done. They refer one or two people. That gives us your average lifetime value.
If you’re being more specific, if you’re advertising for dental implants or you’re advertising for orthodontics or Invisalign, well, that average value is going to change based on where you’re physically located and what the average cost is for that service. That now becomes the average lifetime value. And that’s what we’ll use. Then what we do is subtract or take out the cost of your ads. So whatever your budget is, that has to come out of what you potentially stand to make.
Once we’ve figured that out, we can come up with a very close estimate of what you realistically could get in your return on your investment.
Why choose Roadside?
Now you might be thinking: “Okay, but there’s a lot of other agencies that run ads. So how are you different? What does Roadside do that’s different from other agencies? What kinds of ads do you offer?”
Well, the Roadside difference really is: We know dental.
We’ve been in your shoes. We have 20+ years in the dental industry. We’re not a big box company and we’re proud of it. We like being able to have a quick turnaround and that personal touch. We want to work alongside you to succeed.
We’re certified in Google, Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn advertising. We offer monthly account maintenance and automatic split-testing of all of your ads to ensure the highest ROI and the highest click-through ratio.
We look at the affordability of your ads and the scalability of your ads. Meaning, if we find something that you could be doing to get more results by spending less, then we’re going to present that to you.
We also have detailed reporting so that you have enhanced transparency. We want you to know exactly where your hard-earned dollars are going and what you’re getting back.
We also have increased flexibility compared to other agencies, meaning that if you want to pause your ads, or if you want to increase your ad spend or decrease your ad spend, there isn’t a long turnaround time for that. You simply just send us a message or an email. You get a hold of your Account Manager and we can do it on the fly.
Request a free ads ROI analysis
So are you interested, do you want to know more about what you could potentially get from your ads? Well, you can request a … This text opens a new tab …free ROI analysis.
This is absolutely totally risk-free. You can let us know what specific service or what you’d like to do more of, or how many new patients you want to get, and we’ll look into your specific area and come up with a set of recommendations that you could use to run paid ads.
