Dental video marketing, just like every other type of video marketing, is on the rise. In fact, 91% of businesses today use videos as a crucial marketing tool. From channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to websites with video overlays, videos have captured people’s interests since the beginning. If you’re a dentist who has been running marketing campaigns the old way, here’s your chance to up your game and highlight your practice on the internet.
The following blog will take a deep dive into the nature of dental video marketing, the rise of short video format, and the ways you can build your own dental video marketing strategy. Read along to know more.
What is dental video marketing?
Let’s first understand what dental video marketing really is. Dental video marketing refers to the act of promoting a dental practice, team, equipment, or services via videos across different channels. As a dentist, you’re most likely handling patients and their ailments. While it should always be your primary concern, promoting your practice shouldn’t be left on the backburner either.
With videos, you can discuss anything and everything related to your profession, patients, services, equipment, and more.
Types of videos for dental marketing
Now that we’ve understood what video marketing is, let’s look at the different types of videos that can help you put your practice on the map. Bear in mind that we’ll be discussing different formats found on many channels that are popular these days:
- Social media videos: Social media videos form the most popular dental video marketing tools. You can post them across different channels like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tikok and more. These videos are mostly short, as most channels these days are implementing vertical viewing formats that are 30 to 60 seconds long. Social media videos are not just popular as they shape user behavior as well. If created the right way, a social media video can transform a casual user into a patient.
- Explainer videos: Explainer videos explain things or topics of interest. You can use them to explain different procedures, how different equipment works, and for other ideas that you might have. Explainer videos are widely available in short and long formats. You can make videos that range from 30 seconds to even an hour-long one. About 39% of marketers create explainer videos as they’re one of the most popular video types.
- Patient review videos: Another popular video type is the patient review video. These videos are comprised of your patients sharing their experiences with the users. Every business records the reviews of their customers and presents them on social media, either via images or videos. Customer reviews and, in this case, patient reviews are crucial as they help your practice gain more public trust while giving the patient a shoutout of sorts. This makes their words feel valued while highlighting your practice further on the platform.
- Dental practice tour videos: As the name suggests, this video type generally comprises descriptive tours of your dental practice. These videos can be recorded easily as you have to record them yourself or get your crew at the practice to record them for you. Practice tours are easy to plan and record as these videos showcase the location of your practice, the types of equipment available, and some funny stories from among the crew members.
- Live broadcasts: Live sessions have been around for quite some time now. These videos are raw and showcase your communication skills and capabilities. For obvious reasons, you won’t just begin live streaming a dental procedure as it is irresponsible and dangerous. However, you can use live streaming for questions and answers, webinars, and even showcasing tips that you’ve just discovered. As of 2023, live streaming was more popular than the typical tutorials and educational videos. Hence, one shouldn’t overlook the usefulness of live-streaming services available on different channels.
How to build a dental video marketing strategy?
Building a dental marketing video strategy is a skill that every modern-day business owner must have. Every year brings new trends, which are reflected in the type of content we consume. It would be safe to assume that video marketing is one of the first marketing paradigms to shift based on the trends of the year/decade.
As a dentist, your strategy should revolve around your patients and the way you can improve your services. Here’s how you can build one with ease:
Set your goals
The first step towards creating your video marketing strategy is establishing its goals. Ask yourself what exactly you intend to extract from the strategy you’re working on. What channels do you want to target? What would be your preferred demographics?
There are a gazillion objectives out there. All you have to do is choose a handful that resonates the most with your practice’s growth. You must consider the buyer’s journey while establishing your goals as well. A buyer’s journey basically details the stages within which a customer’s interests might fall:
- Awareness: This stage focuses on the aspects that introduce a product or a service to the customer. When creating a dental video marketing strategy, your content assets should be created to reflect this awareness type. Videos that give a general description of a procedure or a practice tour are preferred.
- Consideration: This stage focuses on the fact that the customer is now showing consideration towards their problem and the probable solution. Your video marketing strategy should include features such as the inner workings of certain common procedures, unknown tips and tricks for better oral health, and more.
- Decision: This is the buyer’s journey’s final and perhaps the most crucial stage. It involves aspects that enable the customer to decide on a product or a service. Your strategy should include video ideas that drive viewers to make a decision, such as limited-time offers on their next session or discounts on medications.
Define your audience
One of the most important factors in creating your dental video marketing strategy is finding the right audience. In fact, it’s not finding but defining the right audience that may resonate with your campaigns the most. Audience sets are different and can be defined based on a multitude of factors, such as age, location, preferences, marital status, interests, hobbies, etc.
Different marketing channels like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok give you analytics on the videos you post. These analytics contain metrics such as impressions, active geographies, and watch times. However, when boosting or promoting your videos via a paid method, you can set the type of audience you want to run your video campaign for.
In fact, PPC campaign channels such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Amazon Ads allow you to define your target audience. Hence, when creating your dental video marketing strategy, be sure to consider the factors that define your general audience, followed by defining the characteristics that might help you narrow down the audience set further.
Work on a tone and a story
Another crucial aspect to consider while creating your video marketing strategy should be your videos’ tone and general language. List down your video ideas and distribute them among the following categories:
- Interrogative: Videos that intrigue the viewer with a question or a series of questions.
- Factual: Videos that share a fact or a bunch of facts regarding your practice, general oral hygiene, equipment, and more.
- Casual: Simple short stories of your patients and crew members.
- Conflict: Videos that differentiate between two methods, equipment, tricks, or check the validity of a viral method.
Build and follow a calendar
Finally, you should build a content calendar that includes all the channels you intend to focus on, followed by the date and time of posting. You can use platforms such as Hootsuite and Hubspot to schedule videos on different topics across a week. Try to maintain a schedule for a week, followed by a month, and gradually build an annual calendar for all the postings you intend to do.
A video content calendar will allow you to focus on experimental ideas, as the automated scheduler will handle the posting times and dates. It’ll also save your practice time and money as you won’t require a 24×7 social media specialist because you’ll learn the system’s intricacies in the time being.
A well-structured dental video marketing calendar aids your campaigns, helps you build further resources, and allows you to observe micro changes that may have affected your campaigns previously.
To sum it up
Building a dental practice and promoting it online requires careful planning, patience, and lots of learning. Videos are perhaps the best content assets that can not only showcase your practice’s capabilities in the online realm but also give you an idea of the changes in trends. From casual challenge-based videos to live streams and fact bytes, dental video marketing encompasses all. Now, the next time you think of starting a video marketing campaign but don’t know how to start, think of the ideas listed above.
