The Digital Marketing Funnel
Marketing as a business function proves itself when it is measurable and monitorable. To 
this end, knowing how users engage with your site is a useful way in determining effectiveness and evaluating marketing resources.
Understanding the marketing funnel of your dental website and finding gaps where data can be collected within each section can provide invaluable insight into your sites effectiveness in fulfilling its objectives.
This blog describes the tools that can be used to gather the valuable data throughout the funnel process.
The below graphic illustrates the journey of the digital marketing efforts in fulfilling its goal to attract and retain customers.
The funnel can be used to identify the channels that are best performing for you. Once you know those, you know where to invest depending on your practices needs or goals.
But how do you know what’s performing best?
The funnel can be grouped into pairs in order to look at it in more detail.
1) Exposure and Discovery
The top of your marketing funnel is where the first interactions with your brand take place. This is typically attributed to search or organic, but is that really the case for your website? Consider the process of the patient and how they utilise the website. Tracking search, PPC, social media, email and direct can be done using the various tracking tools across these channels.
Word-of-mouth is harder to consider. Often a word-of-mouth referral is supported by a visit to the website before making an enquiry and it can be useful to ask if a visit has been made, even if the referral is attributed to a friend or family referral.
Using Google analytics, it’s useful to view page flows from individual channels. So for instance if a social media dental implant offer is running, viewing the traffic from this channel and where flow travels through the site can help to determine effectiveness. If traffic is flowing to the dental implant page and contact page etc, then this can be utilised in evaluating the campaigns overall effect.
2) Consideration and Conversion
Your patient is now considering whether the information they have found is going to fulfil their needs. In order to benefit from this consideration and achieve a conversion, these needs must be met. But the fit is not just one way. Ensuring the site is relevant to its most successfully ranking search terms is key to optimising conversion rate.
Webmaster tools allow us to see search term data of the site including rank, impression and click-through. Whilst it may be great achieving high visitor numbers, if the best performing keywords are not relevant, (i.e a search for ‘dental implant costs’ and your site doesn’t contain any prices), then it’s less likely to convert and more likely to add to the bounce rate. For PPC campaigns ensuring negative keywords are monitored and kept up to date addresses this part of the funnel.
Search engine optimisation, search engine marketing efforts, and site design all come into their own in this segment of the funnel and must prove themselves worthy in delivering the push needed to complete the journey. A well optimised, well designed, user friendly site which delivers a great user experience will benefit from pushing through the consideration phase, achieve a conversion and ensure success with retention following on.
3) Customer Relationship and Retention
So your patient-to-be has converted. They have called the reception desk to make an enquiry about a dental implant cost/treatment. At this end of the funnel, the customer service experience needs to be of high quality or, at the very least, the standard of quality expected for a £3000 treatment!
To this end training and monitoring your most important asset (people) will pay dividends in completing the digital marketing funnel from top to bottom. Call tracking is a useful way to monitor enquiries. Individual phone numbers can be used per campaign in order to accurately monitor the outcome of each dental marketing drive. Tracking patient journeys in the long term is a useful exercise in working out what’s working and what’s not.
The first patient visit experience, practice ethos, your people, your care and efforts that you make to ensure your new patient values the service you provide will ensure retention. Your website can be reintroduced here to your patient to encourage engagement ( a great retention tool). Ask for a review of their visit, direct them to find out more information about further treatment and inform them that they can find out all the latest practice news via your news page on the site.
Helping your patient invest in the practice in this way, will ensure they visit the site again, refer and enjoy your online presence for future as they become a lifelong patient – the ultimate return on investment from a website.
Call Dental Design on 01202 677277 for more advise of how to we can help you monitor your digital marketing funnel for greater pooling of resources and attaining patients for now and the future.
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