How the Emergence of Digital Local Affects Dental Labs in 2016 and Beyond

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

The philosophy behind dental lab marketing used to be relatively simple. Digital marketing strategies made sense to raise brand awareness, but to get people in your neighborhood, more traditional methods were most reliable. A print ad in a community magazine, sponsoring a local event, or even a telemarketing to get the people around you to pay attention to your products and services.

But increasingly, digital marketing seeks to compete with these traditional methods, creating local advertising possibilities that you should not ignore. As we move into 2016 and beyond, these digital marketing opportunities are becoming increasingly easy to access, meaning you should give them serious thought as a part of your budget in the new year. Let's discuss digital local marketing opportunities relevant to small businesses today.

Local Search

When Google first introduced its Pigeon algorithm update in 2014, it changed the game for local search optimization. Without boring you with the details, the update prioritized local results over national results as appropriate for search queries related to your business.

Today, search is ubiquitous among your audience. Especially thanks to the rise in mobile, a potential customer who is looking for a way to get your product or find out about your opening hours simply pulls up Google and types their query into the search bar. Do you know what shows up when they do?

As it turns out, the search engine actually lets you control the result to some degree, by allowing you to set up and optimize a My Business Profile. If you have not done so yet, you should make it a priority before 2016 or, at the very least, a New Year's Resolution. Potential customers will search for your dental lab, so you want to be sure you can be found easily.

Local Targeting Possibilities

But your opportunities to go local go beyond mere search optimization. Thanks to the in-depth targeting options of many digital channels, particularly on social media, you can now target very specific areas, neighborhoods, and even individual blocks with distinct advertising.

Facebook, for example, allows you to set targeting parameters for its ads to a specific zip code. Google, on the other hand, lets you engage in geo-targeting, even allowing marketers to target based on specific IP and household addresses. This hyper local targeting means you can be sure to reach your audience, no matter how geographically restricted it may be. 

Combining Digital with Traditional

Here, email marketing can come into play. If you use your digital ads as an opportunity to gather leads, or if you request email addresses from customers for post-sale nurturing opportunities, emails can be crucial tools to connect your initial ads and your customer experience. By allowing you to reach out to your target audience in a personalized way, it establishes your dental lab and brand as an important part of your customers' mindset and consideration point for future purchases.

How can email marketing become a part of your local marketing efforts? Contact us to learn more.

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Online Marketing Ideas for Dental Labs: Bypass the Landing Page

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Dental Labs trying to generate leads digitally can be a complicated process. You need outlets like social networks or digital ads to promote your content, but that content generally only sends your audience to your landing page - where your users can sign up and become leads.

Those additional steps often mean that some of your potential leads drop off somewhere in the process, losing you potential leads. So here's an online marketing idea for your small business: bypass your landing page, and generate leads straight from your social efforts.

Social Media Lead Generation

It may sound like a pipe dream, particularly if you're used to the multi-step process we explained above. But in reality, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have realized the increasing number of marketers using a lead-generating inbound philosophy, and adjust their marketing opportunities accordingly.

As a result, you can generate leads directly using Facebook and Twitter ads, feeding them directly into your CRM for your nurturing efforts. Let's examine in more detail how the individual networks can help you generate your leads

1) Twitter Lead Generation Cards

Dental Labs that already advertise on Twitter, you likely know the 'cards' that the network offers to marketers. Essentially add-ons to your regular advertisements, they allow you to add additional, rich content to your sponsored tweet that exceeds the usual 140 character limit.

Typically, these cards are used for advertisements on which marketers seek to generate clicks to their website (and landing pages), because they allow marketers to add a visual image along with a descriptive link and even a call to action button, increasing the possibility for click-throughs.

As it turns out, Twitter offers similar cards specifically for lead generation. These cards also allow marketers to add an image and headline, but the call to action button is slightly different. You can entice your audience to 'sign up' or a similar lead-generating prompt.

Once a user clicks on the button, Twitter automatically draws their name and email information form their public profile, and shares it with the marketer. As a result, you can generate leads without your users ever having to leave the network.

Early studies of these lead generation cards have been overwhelmingly positive. One company saw their leads increase by more than 900%, along with a significantly lower cost per lead. Eliminating the extra step of sending users to a landing page where they can sign up means maximizing the amount of leads who land in your CRM.

Facebook's Lead Ads

For two years, Twitter's lead generation cards gave the network a significant advantage over its major competitor Facebook, which did not offer marketers a similar opportunity. That changed this summer, when Facebook began to offer its own version of lead ads.

The general concept is strikingly similar to its Twitter counterpart. By eliminating the extra step of sending users to a landing page, the network hopes to improve lead conversion rates and appeal to inbound marketers.

But the ads themselves are slightly different. Like Twitter, the network draws form a user's public profile information once they click the call to action button. But unlike Twitter, the options on Facebook extend beyond mere name and email; indeed, as is the case on a 'regular' landing page, you can ask for any information you'd like. Facebook automatically fills up the information it can find, and the user can individually fill in the rest right on the network.

Facebook major advantage over Twitter, of course, comes in its targeting opportunities. While the latter 'only' allows marketers to target based on geographic location and stated interest, Facebook options go further - from educational level and age all the way to list-based targeting and remarketing options.

In the end, both Facebook and Twitter offer intriguing advertising options that should simplify your lead generation efforts. And of course, the more information and leads you can bring into your CRM for nurturing, the more successful your business will be. To learn more about online marketing and lead generation, contact us.

DentalLabSupport.com  1-888-715-9099

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Any inbound marketing effort depends on effectively capturing leads. If you focus your energy on using your dental lab website to generate leads, you should be absolutely sure that the process you have in place maximizes your resources in capturing them as well as it possibly could. Over the next few weeks, we will look at the various factors that influence this process. Today, we'll begin with best practices for the core aspect of capturing leads on your website: the landing or conversion page.

Dental Lab landing pages, of course, are the pages to which your visitors navigate - from a social media post, email, or call to action button on your website - when they're ready to make the leap and become a lead. A variety of factors play into the success of this page, and we'll discuss all of them in the post below.

The Landing Page Content

As you can probably imagine, the content of your landing page can make or break its success in capturing leads. You want to be convincing enough about the value you can offer your visitors that they're compelled to fill out your form (more on that later) and become a lead, without being so pushy that they bounce off your page.

Another danger in writing your dental lab landing page content is to become too exhaustive; more quickly than you can anticipate, your well-intended copy can turn into a wall of text that no mobile user will read. Instead, keep it short, use bullet points and subheads where needed, focus on the benefits of signing up, and include plenty of visuals to keep your audience engaged.

One type of content is so successful, it deserves its own section:

Social Proof

Social proof on your landing page means testimonials of past users that your visitors can relate to and add credibility to your claims. You can add these testimonials as short paragraph or, even better, as videos that show your visitors the claims and success stories come from real customers.

Social proof from peers is so successful and important in capturing leads because it appeals allows you to verify your claim from an independent source. Of course, that also means you should be careful not to include testimonials that are so positive, they seem unbelievable. Instead, tell the story of your customers and include images at the very least to make them seem as real as possible. 

Attention Ratio

Web visitors are easily distracted, so including multiple opportunities for them to click or take action takes away their attention from what should be the main goal, which is to get them to fill out a form and become a lead.

So Gardner proposed the following idea, which has since been verified in multiple studies: the fewer opportunities you have for your users to do anything but fill out the form, the greater the chance they'll take the desired action. In other words, you should not include links to other pages, your social media profiles, or even your site's navigation on your landing page. Instead, the only way to take action for your visitors should be to fill out the lead conversion form, which is exactly what you want them to do.

The Conversion Form

Speaking of which: as you can imagine, your conversion form is a major factor in whether your visitors do or do not become leads. A wide range of factors go into creating an optimum conversion form that maximizes your lead capturing success. Stay tuned for a post that discusses this topic in more detail.

For more information please visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099.

How Effective Reporting Maximizes Conversions on Your Website

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Any experienced dental lab marketer knows: reporting is crucial to digital marketing success. Without it, you simply don't know which of your efforts was successful and the famous statement that "half of my advertising money is wasted, but I don't know which half" remains true.

Of course, reporting is crucial for inbound marketing as well. In fact, we'd argue that, if possible, it's even more crucial than other digital efforts. That's because effective reporting can maximize conversions on your website. In fact, here are three reports you can use your reports for conversion optimization.

1) Google Analytics Sources

Google Analytics should be a centerpiece in your reporting efforts. The search engine's internal solution allows you to track almost everything on your website, from the time spent on individual pages and incoming backlinks all the way to where your visitors come from.

That last part is where we want to focus on for the purposes on this post. You can use Google URL Builder to create unique URLs for each of your individual initiatives, allowing you to know exactly which of your efforts bring in visitors.

But you can go even further: set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics, and you can go beyond visits to analyze which of your visit sources drive the most conversion. Armed with this information, you can optimize your efforts and budget to focus on the sources that drive the most conversions.

2) Individual Channel Reports

Google Analytics offers you a big picture view of your digital marketing efforts. But of course, you are likely running several campaigns within the individual channels, from Facebook to Email, all aiming to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. To make sure your efforts within these channels are optimized for conversions, you should run regular reports for each channel.

Fortunately, that undertaking is easier than it sounds. Most social media networks now offer their own internal reporting tools, from Facebook Insights to Twitter Analytics, which allow you to delve into your individual efforts to see what works. For email marketing, you should always track open and click-through rates, as well as trends (such as send times and dates) that might affect these rates.

3) Sales Tracking

Finally, as you know, visit-to-lead conversion should never be your end goal. Converting your leads into customers is at least as, if not even more important to make sure your inbound marketing efforts are successful. Sales tracking enables you to make sure your leads are always on the right track to becoming customers.

For example, you could create a sales pipeline that enables you to follow your leads through the funnel. Setting up individual milestones like 'first meeting' and 'proposal,' allows you to assign likelihood metrics that the lead will turn into a customer to each step necessary for that conversion. As a result, you can closely track where each of your leads stand in the funnel, and how much it still takes to turn them into customers.

Reporting is a crucial tool in the box of any digital marketer. When optimizing your digital efforts for conversion, especially as a small business, you need to be sure that all of your efforts and budget are optimized to achieve that one goal. Fortunately, Google Analytics, individual channel reports, and sales tracking enable you to ensure just that, helping your business achieve lasting digital success.

How are you tracking your inbound marketing efforts and conversion optimization? Do you need help, or are you still looking for tools that help optimize your email marketing or sales tracking? In that case, contact us. We'd love to help your dental lab integrate an effective system that gets your conversion optimization on the right track.

Visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 for more information.