Traditional dental marketing, offline style
There are plenty of ways to use digital marketing to advertise your dental practice. But is that all there is? What if you are still falling short of your goals and want more visitors? It’s time to look at traditional dental marketing!
If you’re wondering how to advertise your dental practice, there are some other, somewhat forgotten, traffic sources out there that may seem a bit more Golden Age than Digital Age. But they can still be well worth including in your dental advertising strategy to boost the results you’re getting from digital ads.
Radio/TV advertising
Television advertising has been around for nearly 80 years, and radio even longer. Dental TV commercials and radio spots may have passed their prime thanks to online media, but they can still be effective in the right markets. Broadcast media tends to be better for long-term, brand awareness campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you can’t include a call to action that sends people to your dental landing page.
Print advertising
Believe it or not, people still read things printed on paper. Dental ads featured in local newspapers, community newsletters, and niche magazines are all opportunities to reach your offline audiences. Long before there was social sharing, newspapers and magazines were how to advertise your dental practice. They were passed along from one person to the next and spread out in waiting rooms, multiplying their readership. And those publications also tend to lie around for a while, so you get your ad in front of multiple people multiple times. You’d have to pay extra for that kind of repeat exposure online. Print also gives you greater flexibility than digital media in terms of ad sizes. Nothing stands out more than a beautifully designed full-page dental advertisement!
Billboards
Speaking of big, traditional dental marketing doesn’t get any bigger or more “hey, look at me” than dental billboards. Outdoor advertising is primarily a visual medium where you need to catch people’s attention and get your message across to them in a matter of seconds before they go zipping by. If you succeed (by using a great visual, headline, and a call to action that’s easy to remember), you’ll be rewarded with a lot of landing page traffic.
Promotional giveaways
If you hand out free stuff, you probably have your website address printed on it. It may be more effective, however, to use the opportunity to direct people to your dental landing page instead. If you have giveaway items that will be highly visible in public and have ample space for printed messages (e.g., t-shirts, tote bags, soft coolers), consider adding your promotional offer and landing page address.
Direct mail
Email marketing has an exceptional ROI, but in many ways dental postcards are still a more effective method of dental advertising than their digital successor, including better open rates and better response rates. Purchasing targeted lists of email addresses can be expensive, but Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) can be a more cost effective alternative for blanketing neighborhoods near you. Like dental print ads, printed mailers can give you greater creative freedom in the design of your marketing than email.
Special advertising considerations
If you are only familiar with digital marketing, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind with these offline approaches. First, they can be more expensive (which is one reason why digital is so popular). Second, they aren’t as easy to track (the other reason why digital is favored). If you want to keep tabs on your ROI for these types of campaigns, get an easy-to-remember custom domain name or tracking phone number to be used specifically for that marketing effort. Then you can clearly see how much traffic has come from that source.
Getting their attention is just half the battle
Once you have a good handle on how to advertise your dental practice and get people to visit your landing pages, you still need to convert them to leads. And to do that, you need a great promotional offer that will get them to fill out your form and hit the submit button. Download our FREE Dental Promotional Offer Idea Guide to find the incentive that will get new patient leads pouring into your dental marketing funnel.
