Another Internet Marketing Strategy for your Consideration

Four weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about general re-targeting of ads across the web. By using this technique, once someone has visited your website, you can follow that person around the web with ads specific to what they were searching for. This is an excellent solution for dental practices that already have great web traffic.

Today I want to discuss a different strategy called search based re-targeting. This solution is best for dental practice websites – that for whatever reason – do not have prominent Internet visibility. A beautiful website is of little value if prospective patients can’t find it. These practices might be located in a very competitive Internet marketplace like a large metropolitan area flooded with other dentists. Or perhaps they are a relatively new dental practice website. Google gives serious preferential treatment for rankings based on the length of time a url has been active. So a new website has tough sledding to get noticed. Perhaps these dental practices do not have other mechanisms in place such as Facebook ads or Google Ad Words to drive traffic to their websites.

Search re-targeting allows a dentist to follow consumers around the web based on what they searched for even though they never landed on YOUR website. How this works is a bit confusing even for a sophisticated Internet savvy person. So by definition, this is way above my pay grade to explain. But essentially there are data programs that can identify an individual who has performed a search on Google, Yahoo, or Bing and landed on another website. These programs capture the url and the search term that was just used.

As an example, let’s say a consumer in Worcester, Massachusetts does a search for “best dentist in Worcester”, or perhaps “dental implants/Worcester”. For reasons mentioned above, that person does not land on your website. But using search retargeting, a dentist in Worcester can target that consumer with ads about his or her dental practice providing information on exactly what that consumer was searching for. Even better, those ads can be further refined by income level, age, and gender.

When you place an ad on the radio, you certainly don’t need to understand the mechanics of radio signals and broadcasting for the ad to be effective. That same logic applies to these more advanced Internet ads. The bottom line is that search retargeting is simply a prospecting tool, and when executed properly with effective display ads, it can be a great strategy to find potential new patients who otherwise would never find you.

If you have any interest in learning more about this cutting edge marketing approach, please call Heather LoGrippo at 617-957-3868.