You’re updating the decor of your patient restroom and want to find a sleek-looking mirror to place over the sink, so you go online and find just the right thing: a Storjorm mirror cabinet from Ikea. You place the order then decide to check out some reviews of last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, so you head over to Google. While looking for your favorite GOT fan site, you notice an ad for Ikea. That’s because Ikea has used remarketing to make sure you remember it.
Why Remarketing?
If your quest to find the perfect mirror had been interrupted by a patient with a dental emergency, you would have abandoned your search immediately. Ikea wanted to make sure you picked up where you left off the next time you sat down to your computer, so it added remarketing to its marketing campaign. This same principle works with marketing your own practice.
No matter where we are or what we are doing, we are plugged in. Laptops, smartphones, and tablets give us 24/7 access to the Internet. Even when Jill refers your practice to her brother-in-law, Steve, he’s not going to simply take her word for it. Steve is going to go online to do some investigating.
If Steve starts browsing your site at 2:53 but has to stop at 3:00 for a conference call, remarketing will remind him of what he was looking at before he was called to duty at work. When he sits back down at his computer at 4:30, your ads will appear on his search page and maybe even in his Facebook feed, he will recall his conversation with Jill, and then he will resume looking into your practice.
How It Works
When someone visits your page, clicks on an ad, or even completes a form on your site, a cookie—a piece of data from your site—is stored on the user’s computer. This is what gives you the opportunity to remarket your practice. The same thing applies when people visit your practice’s social network sites. Regardless of what they view later, ads will appear in their feed to remind them that, at one point or another, they were interested in the services you offer.
Using remarketing can be as simple or as detailed as you choose. You can remarket to anyone who visits your homepage, or you can target your remarketing to those who visited specific pages, such as your page for teeth whitening. You can determine how long the cookie remains on the user’s computer. You are in total control of how you remarket your practice.
Get Started
If you aren’t already using Google Adwords to promote your practice, then get started yesterday! Seventy percent of the search engine market is now owned by Google. From PCs to mobile applications, Google constantly searches for ways to improve its services. Once you’ve created an Adwords account and have a minimum of 20 to 100 unique visitors per month, Google makes it easy to do the rest.
From the Adwords dashboard, go to “shared library” and click “+ remarketing list.” From there, you will need to name your campaign, specify the landing page that you want to target, and then establish rules and the duration of your remarketing campaign. Additional steps require little more than checking boxes and copying and pasting URLs. Finally, Adwords gives you a chance to preview your ad before you officially post it so you can see what your prospective patients will see when your site is remarketed to them.
If it’s time to up your marketing game, then remarketing just might be the way to go. If potential patients are interested in making you their preferred dentist or if they’re simply interested in having their teeth whitened, remarketing increases your chances of bringing them through your doors, which then increases your chances of getting them to come back again and again.
Ms. Stonaker has been writing for My Dental Agency since 2014. She enjoys learning about new trends in both the marketing and dentistry industries and sharing her acquired knowledge with both dentists and their patients. Her passion is turning strictly informational text into approachable and creative yet professional articles that people want to read—even those who are not in the industry. For more information, call (800) 689-6434 or email robin.stonaker@gmail.com.
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