How Do Dental Practices Generate Leads? | Nicki Rowland and Simon Young

Why did Simon launch s.media?

s.media launched because YouTube was where we were getting amazing results for clients. We have been a full service marketing agency, offering everything from video and PPC to creative and websites, but s.media is a pure YouTube media buying agency, launched off the back of that.

My background was in accountancy a long time ago, and I got into building websites and SEO, and I loved the geeky side of it. A couple of years ago I merged with another agency called And Create and we created the Institution brand together. Andy, who runs that business, has worked as creative director for many of the top agencies in the north of England, so my geeky, analytical side plus his creativity meant we started working on a lot of search campaigns.

How do you make search ads stand out from the generic competition?

You make search ads stand out by writing something unexpected instead of the obvious keyword. Traditionally on search you see very generic ads: if it was a dental practice you might see "dentist in Doncaster" or "Invisalign braces", and if four ads appeared at the top of a search for Invisalign, they would all look pretty much the same.

One campaign that springs to mind is for a client who ran time and attendance systems, for people who are late for work. The typical ad for that would just say "time and attendance", and I would have written ads like that in the past too, because the people running PPC campaigns are not usually the creative ones. We spent time looking at how to differentiate it, and put up an ad that said "Sarah's late for work again?" instead. People thought that was a bit odd, a bit different, and it made them think a bit more. Put that together with twenty years of PPC experience and a genuinely creative team, and we applied the same logic to YouTube.

Why is it hard to get good YouTube ads made?

The biggest challenge is getting people to make the video in the first place. If I say to a dentist "come on, I want you to go on camera, here's a script", the reaction is often "whoa, hold on a minute, that's not what I do". Three or four years ago I did not really want to go on camera either, and now I have to. The world is changing, people are less afraid to do it now, and people want to buy from real people.

There are ways round it: you can write a script where someone only has to read four or five short pieces to camera, and in between you cut in images, bits of video and your logo. That comes together into something that actually works, especially if you can make it fun and make it stand out, and then people click through.

What results has a dental practice actually seen from YouTube ads?

One dental client got leads at around three pounds each from a spend of £150 in a week. People think you have to spend thousands, but these clients were spending £10 a day. Over the last week shown, they had spent £150 in total, had 114 clicks through to the website, and a 20 per cent conversion rate, with around 23 people booking in, tracked as phone calls rather than online bookings. The return on investment for ceramic or fixed braces at that lead cost is immense, and you do not have to book hundreds of those people to see a return.

The real beauty is that it is properly scalable. A lot of clients who had been doing a lot of advertising on Facebook found the trouble was staying on top of it: you have to spin new ads up every other week, and sometimes a campaign that looks like gold dust suddenly falls off a cliff and everybody panics.

How does YouTube's targeting beat traditional search PPC?

YouTube lets you combine demographic targeting with recent search intent, which traditional PPC cannot do. You could target mums with kids of a certain age in your area for braces, and that gets you halfway there. Overlay that with the fact that they searched for Invisalign, ceramic braces or teeth straightening in the last 30 days, and you can hardly go wrong putting the ad in front of that person.

That is different from traditional search PPC, where if someone searches Invisalign on Google, the ads at the top might cost two, three or four pounds a click, so for every hundred people that is £300, and you are not necessarily sure those are the right people. With YouTube, someone could be watching any video at all, and I have had pushback from brands who assumed their audience was not watching YouTube. Trust me, it is: YouTube is watched more than TV now, and there are 600 plus hours of footage uploaded to it every minute, so Google literally cannot fill it up with ads. Every channel people watch gets monetised, so YouTubers are making money from it, unlike Facebook, where nobody gets paid just for growing a good group.

Because of the skip option on in-stream ads, if someone skips within the first 30 seconds you pay nothing as the advertiser, but you still get the impression. From a brand building perspective that is huge: I had a client who spent two and a half thousand pounds on ads last week and got eight and a half million brand impressions. You could not get that on TV for two and a half grand.

Is Google really listening to us?

I believe Google and the platforms are trying to predict what you want before you know you want it, and I always compare it to the scene in Minority Report where they can see a crime before it happens. That is almost what Google is trying to do. I invite people to try an experiment: sit in your car with your phone on and talk about something you have never bought. I was sat in my car with my business partner talking about Ford Rangers, because I am looking for a new car, and he has never owned a Ford in his life. We both had our phones on, and the following day we both had Ford Ranger ads on Facebook and YouTube.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and there is no real revenue stream in WhatsApp itself, so the point of it is that it is listening and harvesting data. My daughters say the same thing, that it feels like Big Brother.

How should businesses build content for the answer engines that are coming?

Businesses should build content directly around the questions people type into Google, because that is what the coming generation of answer engines, like Alexa, Siri and Cortana, will eventually be built from. At the moment Google is pushing video hard, because it thinks people would rather watch something than read it. If you search a question on Google, alongside the ads you will see "people also ask", and I encourage people to use those questions as the topics for their content.

I built a tool, part of what we call questions and answer engine optimisation, that lets you search a question like "how do I get fitted for Invisalign" and it builds out a tree of every related question people are asking, which you can expand and even download as a CSV. I tell people, do not bother writing blogs any more, nobody reads them, use a tool like this instead and pick the questions that matter, so that when someone finds the answer from you locally, you are the expert. You could take twenty of those questions, treat it like being interviewed in a magazine, and answer them on video. If you structure the code behind those questions correctly, you might well find you come up in the Google answers.

Right now, if you ask something like Alexa a very specific local question, it does not know the answer, it will say "I don't know that" or "I found this on the web". Eventually it will get to the point where it says "you need to speak to Nicki Rowland about that", because she is the expert. That is the way search is going. Microsoft is still trying to back Cortana on its PCs, but it is not quite there yet. Fast forward three, four or five years and you will probably be able to get all of this just by asking.