What would make your life easier? Would it help to have one unified marketing platform that enabled you to plan, launch, track, and continuously improve your marketing efforts? HubSpot is an inbound sales and marketing software platform does just that. From the HubSpot dashboard, you can see how your prospective patients are responding to your website, emails, advertisements, special offers, and social media. You can dive deeper in to each element of your campaigns to review its content and its place in the workflow.
Let’s look at how inbound marketing works:
In the beginning of the buyer’s journey, your prospective patients are strangers. They have not heard about your practice, your team, or the services you provide.
- In the attract stage, we seek to capture their attention with compelling content that speaks to their specific concerns and interests (as determined by their personas). Their first introduction to your dental practice may come through a Facebook ad that highlights a blog about ways to brighten your smile. When they click on the link, they are brought to the blog post on your website. They find the content of the blog post to be interesting and informative, so they go to the home page to get more information about your practice.
- They decide to subscribe to your blog, converting their status from a website visitor to a lead. As they continue receiving valuable, high-interest information from your practice, they also learn more about your team and the services you provide until they are ready to contact you directly.
- During the closing stage, they call your practice, speak with your staff, and schedule an appointment.
- After experiencing your exceptional service, they post a complementary review on a third-party review site and share it with their friends and family on Facebook. You thank them for the kind words and welcome them to return to your practice anytime. This is referred to as the delight stage.
The beauty of the HubSpot platform is that each interaction we have with visitors, prospects, and patients is captured. By monitoring our analytics, we know which blogs, social media posts, and downloadable assets resonate the most, who is attracted to each marketing asset, and which assets has been viewed by each prospect. We can use this information to provide messages and resources that can influence them to progress to the next stage in the process.
Let’s look at the tools we utilize at each stage of the sales process.
Attract
There are many tools that can be used to capture the attention of prospective patients. These are the most essential marketing tactics we use for inbound marketing.
- Detailed Buyer Personas – With an inbound marketing strategy, we focus on understanding the needs, desires, frustrations and obstacles that our prospective patients face. We do this by developing buyer personas, which are like characters in a novel that represent our ideal patients. Each persona has a unique socio-economic and demographic profile that we use to guide our marketing strategy.
A Responsive, Optimized Website – What device do you use to find the answers to your questions? If you are like most Americans, you use the one that is always on-hand: your phone. For this reason, it is of paramount importance that your website is designed to look good and function well at any size. In addition, all of the content on your website should be created with keyword phrases that reference the interests and concerns of your buyer personas. That is the only way your dental practice will appear in their Google search results.
- Friendly, Informative Social Media – Remember, social media channels are wildly popular because they are primarily a social forum. Honor the style and tone of this powerful tool by making most of your social media posts friendly and informative and only present an offer every now and again. Rest assured, if followers see sales pitches more often than value-added content in your social media posts, they will stop acknowledging your presence.
- Relevant Digital Advertising – Whether you choose to pursue Google pay-per-click (PPC) ads, sponsored banner ads, or highly-targeted social media ads, you will have very few words in which to drive home your message. It is very important that you identify the topics that are most important to your ideal patients, and present messaging that hits the mark.
- A Library of Resources – Because they give you space to engage, entertain, and educate your prospects and patients, blogs are one of your most powerful resources. Here you can establish yourself as a thought leader, ease fears related to a common procedure, or introduce each of your team members on a personal level. Blogs help you keep the conversation going, keep prospects thinking about what you do, and ensure that once the time is right, your name will be at the top of their minds.
- Engaging Video Stories – When we see words on a page, we sometimes try to read them. If we see images and words on a page, we first scan the images, and then the headings. But, when we see a rectangle on a page that contains a person speaking directly to us, we are mesmerized. This is the power of video. It captures our attention in a way that no other medium has ever done. There are many ways that you too can use video to attract prospective patients to your practice.
Attracting prospective patients to your website is crucial to your success. By integrating all of the tools you use in one platform, you simplify the process and allow your team to understand what’s working and continuously improve your results.
Image source: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/sources-user-guide-v2/a-quick-tour-of-the-marketing-dashboard
Convert
Once we have succeeded in capturing the attention of our prospective patients, we need to convince them to provide us with their contact information to enable us to continue the conversation. To do that, we need a high-quality offer to make to them. Here are some of the ways we do that:
- Blog subscriptions
- Informative eBooks
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Procedure demos
- Special offers
- Checklists
By consistently offering highly-engaging and informative content, we convince prospective patients that it is worthwhile to provide us with their contact information. After they become a lead, we must continue to provide highly-targeted material that will continue to build trust over time, until they are ready to make a decision.
Image source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-automation-examples
Close
Much of the value HubSpot brings to the sales process is when the prospective patient is nearing a decision. Because we compile data on every interaction we have with each lead, our staff members have a wealth of information to guide their conversations when interacting directly with them. These are a few of the tools that make HubSpot such a powerful platform.
- Customer Relationship Management – The date of first contact, content and response to each email message, and all available contact information are just a few of the fields that are available in the HubSpot CRM.
- Integrated Reporting – Regular weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports can be set to run automatically or on-demand using provided formats or custom reports. Any piece of data in the system can be provided in a report, ensuring full transparency and control.
- Marketing Automation – If we know that our friend Bob has a birthday coming up, we can send him a personal message and a special offer from the staff at his favorite dentist. For leads who are still considering their options, we can automatically send a series of informative emails that are directly related to persona and our interactions to date.
Delight
We’ve brought them in, treated them well, and they leave us with a bright smile. Are we done? No way! Before we say goodbye, we need to encourage our patients to provide feedback in writing – on third-party review sites, on Facebook and other social media channels, satisfaction surveys, and facilitate referrals whenever possible. We can also ask them to provide testimonials, participate in special events, give them exclusive offers, and keep them up-to-date with ongoing content that has been crafted just for them.
Fuel Your Growth with HubSpot
As a HubSpot-certified partner agency, ClearPivot has used this comprehensive marketing platform combined with our years of experience in medical marketing to attract, engage, nurture, and retain loyal patients for numerous clients with great success. If you would like to increase your visibility, simplify your sales cycle, and experience the benefits of seamless integration, contact us today.
