YouTube Advertising for DentistsVideo-sharing platform YouTube provides dental practices with a powerful, far cheaper alternative to marketing via traditional television advertising. Besides being extremely cost effective, YouTube advertising enables you to home in on your target audience – prospective new patients – by geographic location, parental status, age and gender.

Video is the fastest-growing digital medium. It grabs and holds your audience’s attention, and is more effective than other formats in establishing an emotional connection.

To regard YouTube as a place where people just want to be entertained would be missing an opportunity to attract more patients to your practice by taking advantage of the numerous benefits of YouTube advertising for dental practices.

Many of the millions who visit YouTube are looking for valuable information about products or services they’re interested in – including the dental treatments that you offer. A 2015 survey found that more than 70 per cent of Americans had in the previous 12 months searched online for health information, with millions seeking dental videos.

Prospective patients want to know how dental procedures work, what kind of results they can expect, and what your patients have to say about you. YouTube video advertising provides an ideal means to engage with these people.

Connecting with Your Prospective Patients

YouTube began life in 2005, set up by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, who had worked together for the PayPal online money transfer resource when it was a startup. YouTube is now one of the most popular sites on the Web, with six billion hours of footage being watched monthly and a hundred hours of video uploaded every minute.

Compared with other social media channels, YouTube tends to hold the attention of visitors for longer. YouTube viewers stay on the platform for 40 minutes per session on average. During this time, your dental office can show them adverts.

Running an ad on YouTube allows localised businesses such as dental practices to engage with potential patients through a more targeted approach than TV, radio and print channels of marketing.

One of the main benefits of YouTube advertising for dental practices is that it gives you an array of targeting options, including topic (the subject of your video), demographics (age and gender), keywords (search terms relevant to your ad), placement (specific YouTube pages relevant to your ad) and category (user interest). You can also reject content, categories and keywords to avoid association with unrelated videos.

YouTube adverts are cost effective because you pay per video view. A further benefit of YouTube advertising for dental practices is its powerful analytics tool, which gives you a clear insight into how your video marketing campaign is performing, so you can fine-tune it as and when necessary by tailoring your content to enhance your YouTube channel.

YouTube Advertising Options

The YouTube network offers several advertising choices for both video and text-based ads, including:

  • In-stream ads. With a TrueView in-stream video ad, your video advertisement is shown before, during or after another video. Viewers can skip your video after five seconds. You’ll only be charged when someone watches the first 30 seconds or the entire video, whichever comes first.
  • In-stream non-skippable ads. These adverts are also shown before, during, or after someone else’s video, but the viewer can’t close down your video after five seconds. With this option, your video ad must be only 15 to 20 seconds long (depending on the region). These advertisements are charged on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis.
  • Display ads. These adverts are displayed on desktop computers in the YouTube right-hand top column when someone is watching a video. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad.
  • Overlay ads. These ads appear over a YouTube video being played on a desktop computer. They don’t interrupt or otherwise affect the playing of the video, and are displayed on top of your in-stream ad.
  • Remarketing video advertising. Remarketing allows you to target people who have previously watched your videos on YouTube or on the Google Display Network.

How to Make a Great Dental Video

Any digital marketer worth their salt will tell you that content is the most important element in an online promotional campaign. So, just as you need your website written to a high standard, your YouTube video must also get your message across in a persuasive way within a short time frame.

Dental video marketing on a professional level can help your practice stand out from the competition and generate a steady stream of new patients. Fortunately, you don’t need a Hollywood budget to produce a captivating YouTube video. In fact, the process remains affordable because of its sound return on investment (ROI).

Here are three tips to help you create a quality video to make the most of the benefits of YouTube advertising for dental practices:

  1. Keep it simple. If your dental office focuses on certain services, make one video for each of these specialties, and explain how your expertise solves your patients’ problems. For example, if you specialize in orthodontics, show potential patients how you can straighten their crooked teeth to give them back their winning smile. This sort of scenario lends itself to images of previous patients, before and after treatment.
  2. Keep it real. The best way to engage with your target audience is to show them the real you, so your YouTube promotional strategy should mirror the culture and philosophy of your practice. Talk about why you became a dentist in the first place, what you think makes your dental office unique, and any treatment options you’re passionate about. Let prospective patients know exactly what to expect when they walk through your practice’s door.
  3. Keep to the point. There is compelling evidence that the human attention span is becoming shorter. The first few seconds of your video are crucial in grabbing the attention of your audience and persuading them to stick with you, rather than wandering off elsewhere to admire cute, fluffy kittens frolicking around! A further advantage of getting straight to the point is a financial one: viewers who realize they’re not really interested in what you’re telling them will likely skip your ad quickly, which means you won’t have to pay for it in this instance.

It’s also a good idea to include patient testimonials in your video. These are particularly effective in easing concerns of people who are apprehensive about dental visits. Ideally, these testimonials should include a variety of your patients, spanning the range of conditions and demographics treated by your dental office.

You should also include contact information at the end of your video, along with a call to action, to encourage people to take the next step in becoming your patient. In other words, tell them what they should do now, with “Schedule a Consultation Today” or “Visit Our Website” link, for example.

Why YouTube Advertising is so Effective for Dentists

YouTube dental video marketing enables you to introduce yourself to potential patients. You can give them a virtual guided tour of your dental office and show them what they can expect at their initial consultation.

Video advertising is no longer solely the province of large corporations. A major benefit of YouTube advertising for dental practices is precise targeting, including demographics and location. This makes it ideal for promoting a local business such as a dental office.

YouTube targeting options enable you to create an effective, localised marketing campaign at very reasonable rates: you’re only paying for views or clicks from people genuinely interested in your services.

Professional Dental YouTube Advertising Help

As you can see from the above information, YouTube can be a very valuable marketing tool for your dental practice, but there is a lot that goes into creating and maintaining a profitable YouTube advertising campaign… That’s where we come in! We are experts in the field of all things digital marketing and that includes YouTube Ads. Give us a call today to have us create a YouTube campaign that will have new patients calling your practice in no-time!