Video marketing for dentists: video is all the hype these days with the argument that we make a deeper impression on potential customers by using video rather than other market formats like the written word or audio as people can both see and hear us.
Video marketing can sound very broad but in its simplest form just means to use video as the creative format instead of audio, images, or articles. We still have to define where we’ll show the ad, who we’ll show it to, and all the other fun marketing stuff.
If you want to dive straight into the video marketing examples, feel free to scroll down to the last chapter of this article.
The 6 things you need to decide before hiring
Before we reach out to our internal team or contractor, we need to have a general understanding of what we are looking for as it’ll save us a ton of time in the long run. In this chapter, we’ll dive into an overview of each of those items so you’ll be able to answer the expert’s question they ask (because they will).
The items we’ll look over are:
- The goal
- Who to target
- Marketing channels
- Which service to offer
- The video’s message
- Budget
Let’s dive in!
The goal
The first thing we need to figure out is when we’ve done a good job with the project – that’s our goal with the video marketing campaign. Do we want more people to know that we exist, in general, or are we looking to get more bookings as a direct result of the video marketing campaign?
Whatever that is, it will determine how we approach the project. I know that you might be thinking that both of those sound good and if we want results, we’ll have to focus on just one depending on our overall marketing strategy.
The goal also determines how we track the results. For example, if we want to increase the general awareness of our dentist services, we can look at the bookings that came off of the project but we can’t hold the project against the metric to gauge its success. If that’s what we want, we must focus on bookings as the goal.
Once we’ve decided on one simple result, let’s look at the next item: who to reach with our video marketing.
Who is the video marketing for?
The most common answer is “everyone” and even if that’s the case, brainstorming smaller groups that different types of patients fall into will make your life easier.
On a client project, we first launched our dentist services to the mass market and it was just fine but we saw much better results when we segmented the campaigns into smaller groups as our marketing message became more specific and clear. Meaning that it was easier for those who saw it to relate to it.
The segments could for example be people scared of going to the dentist or those with cavities. I’ve found that a good technique is to think of one person you know for each group as an example to help the creative juices flowing.
By now, we have our goal and an idea about who we’d like to reach with our campaign.
Video marketing placements
This step is all about where we want our video to show up among all the channels out there. That all depends on who we’d like to reach as outlined in the step above and it will help us and the expert understand which format and dimensions we need the videos to be in, as each placement has different requirements.
Since this is video-specific, some marketing channels are not available to us like Google search. The most popular channels tend to be Facebook and Youtube along with highly targeted health-related websites that allow us to use the video format instead of standard images.
You don’t have to know all the placements as that’s your media buyer’s job, just a general idea will do since this also depends on your budget.
Your service and offer
The service and offer is where you’ll particularly notice a difference between branding and direct response video marketing for dentist services.
The biggest difference tends to be that branding campaigns don’t have an offer but usually end with your business name, logo and slogan. On the other hand, direct response video campaigns tell the viewer something they want them to do by the end of the video, such as booking an exam or signing up for a newsletter.
The one we choose depends on the goal we decided on at first. The offer could for example be a free cleaning if they sign up for another service at the same time, a combo package or a discount when signing up for the email newsletter.
The video’s message
Second to last is what we want to convey in the video marketing campaign, meaning the overall direction. I can’t guide you much here as the message depends on you and the creative expert but a good starting point usually is to work your way backwards, starting with the end in mind and build a bridge between where the viewer is when they start the video compared to where you want to end.
A few questions to consider to get started are: where and on which website are they seeing the video? What are they doing when they find it? What state of mind are they in?
We’ll dive into specific examples later in this article.
Budget
Finally, the last and perhaps most important item – the budget. Often we don’t know what a good budget looks like and we might not want to just throw numbers out there as some vendors adjust their recommendations to assume they’ll get the entire budget.
In that situation, I’ve found that it can work well to reach out to a few vendors, explain roughly what you are looking for (I suggest creating a template brief to save yourself time) and ask for examples of similar video marketing projects they’ve done in past and what the budget or pricing was for each of the projects.
By doing that, we can get a lay of the land before making our decision and in the final chapter of this article, I’ll show you where to find experts that can help with video marketing for dentists.
The biggest myths about video marketing for dentists
Before we move forward, I think it’s worth debunking two of the biggest misconceptions around video marketing for dentists.
The first is that you don’t need a crazy budget or high production value (video quality) to get started. Sure, it can help but don’t let that hold you back from getting started as many businesses see more authentic videos often perform better in direct response campaigns on social media.
The second thing is that viral videos are not a thing made to order. Sometimes viral videos are used as a buzzword that just refers to videos on social media or something along those lines – the point is virality is something more or less coming from luck, although a part of it can be manufactured but that doesn’t prove good results.
The best way to look at a video going viral is as a nice bonus but it isn’t something to plan for and it’s worth being hesitant if someone promises you that.
Hiring in-house vs. contractors
One of the challenges many tech startups have around video marketing for dentist services is whether to hire in-house or outside help.
With the many “cloud” options and the development of the gig economy today, an easy rule of thumb is to hire in-house only if you have more than enough work for someone full-time. Even though contractors can seem expensive, managing someone ambitious, full time, without enough work is challenging and might lead you to choose the wrong direction on some projects in order to give that person more things to do to fix the problem.
An entirely different way to approach this problem is, could it be solved with a slightly more templated solution through some of the software and stock video content available out there? That way, your team might shoot certain short clips and add more affordable stock photos as relevant filler (e.g. from unsplash.com) to test out your ideas before increasing the budget significantly.
This approach tends to be particularly powerful if you aren’t sure if video marketing is a good fit for your goals – it doesn’t make sense to assume it’s a winning tactic when we can easily track and test the performance to know with certainty.
Hiring video marketing contractors for dentists and startups
Finally, let’s look at how to find marketing consultants to help with your video marketing.
You might have been searching for “video marketing for dentists” because you feel ready to hire outside help and wanted to compare specific agencies and freelancers.
I bet the search might have yielded some potential candidates, and besides that Upwork can be a good resource as it isn’t only low-quality workers you’ll find there. Other options are productionhub.com, videopixie.com, thumbtack.com, and 90seconds.com.
Another option is to post on LinkedIn asking your network. Sure, you might get a bunch of unsolicited messages from strangers but if none of them appear like a good fit from their first message, it’s easy to ignore them. Another trick is to look for video marketing examples from other dentists and ask them who they used.
To find some, we can for example use the Facebook ads library to search for ideas being used in ads. Select all countries and all ads, search for a relevant keyword like “dentist” and you are off to the races.
After starting the search, you can also filter only for video ads by clicking on “filters” and selecting only the video media type.
Here are a couple of examples I found when searching:
If you want to look at the exact same ads as in these examples, search for the fanpage name in Facebook’s ad library.
If you are looking for a personal recommendation, feel free to join my private newsletter below and reply to the welcome email to get in touch with me. I can’t promise that I have any on hand that I trust to refer to, but you never know.
Takeaways
- Doing some initial preparation work before reaching out to contractors will make your project go so much smoother – especially, defining your goal and who the campaign is for
- Because the gig economy and cloud contracting is such a developed industry these days, it often makes sense for tech startups with dental services to use contractors for their video marketing projects unless you are certain you have more than enough work for a full time employee
- When looking for contractors, we tend to get the best results by starting with our own network first before looking for people we don’t know