Lifestyle Targeted Marketing for Dentists
Successful dentists understand that it’s more cost-effective to market to a targeted pool of potential patients wherever possible. Digital or traditional campaigns directed to an entire community doesn’t make sense if a dental practice specializes in orthodontics or endodontics.
Who they serve – and hope to serve – shapes the ideal patient profile for which the marketing is tailored. And that patient’s lifestyle information is invaluable for creating a targeted marketing strategy.
Identifying Your Ideal Patient
There are many factors that go into forming a profile of your ideal patient’s lifestyle. It will typically include age, gender, income, occupation, education level, family status, geographic location, and even personal interests. A highly detailed profile of your target audience’s lifestyle, needs, and pain points ultimately allows your practice to speak to potential solutions.
Identifying your ideal demographic can be done several ways: researching the local competition, conducting surveys or focus groups, or gathering data from social media analytics. Marketing messages across all platforms can then be customized based on that information to resonate more successfully with specific patient groups.
For example, marketing campaigns can promote specific services like orthodontics to families, cosmetic dentistry to higher income brackets, sedation dentistry to anxious patients, first-time visits to newcomers in the area, and so forth.
Targeted Marketing by Lifestyle Segments
If you’ve ever seen an ad pop up while navigating the internet that “coincidentally” ties in with your recent product searches, that’s targeted marketing at work. Once you’ve identified your ideal patients and where to find them, there are several cutting-edge strategies for reaching them in the same manner.
• Lifestyle-related venues. Place either traditional or digital ads in locations your lifestyle segments frequent like gyms, golf courses, family activity centers, retirement communities, etc. Geofencing is a hyper-targeted, location-based marketing tool that delivers ads to your audience as they navigate the internet. Dentists can also target their marketing to only reach people within a certain geographic radius of their practice location.
• Retargeting. Website retargeting is the cornerstone of a successful digital campaign. Pixels and cookies allow dentists to retarget patients who have already visited the website with customized ads and offers. Other lifestyle marketing tools include keyword retargeting and contextual advertising.
• Social media targeting. Detailed targeting options on platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow dentists to refine their ideal audience and serve them customized, relevant ads based on age, gender, behavior, interests, and more. Facebook is the most popular one with more than 3 billion monthly active users.
Likewise, Google ads offer precise targeting by keywords, demographic, and geography for anyone using their search engine.
Making Lifestyle Marketing Work for You
Don’t just let the technology do all the work. Be sure to create customized content that’s tailored to select lifestyle segments. Write dental health articles and blogs, post engaging social media content, and include videos that appeal to your target demographic.
Sponsored community events can also provide a great way to meet your ideal patients where they are. Make your brand visible through youth sports, parent-teacher organizations, senior health fairs, corporate wellness events, and more.
If you use email marketing campaigns, segment your list by lifestyles so that messaging is hyper-targeted and personalized.
Lifestyle targeted marketing should ultimately be cost-effective. You save by focusing your marketing dollars on your ideal, high-value demographic using their unique interests, daily habits, and pain points.
With more than 20 years of dental marketing experience, RAMP can help you home in on your ideal patient based on their lifestyle for increased conversion rates and better ROI. Contact us today and schedule a free strategy session.
