Tired of googling about how to run Facebook Ads for Dentists? Yes, you aren’t asking for some celebrity-level fame, just better revenue, more patients, better reach, and traffic. What’s your best bet doing that? Analytics show us that nothing’s better than Facebook ads for a profession that thrives on credibility and reviews.
Yes, Google ads and marketing works in the long term. You can and should build a user-friendly website with all the blogs and FAQs people like to search about. But does it get you online traffic NOW? It may but it’s far from what Facebook ads promise. If delivered right, a Facebook ad campaign can make you earn quick bucks without being the number one marketed dentist in your area.
You may ask how? Well, the simple answer is that the PPC advertising mechanism is highly targeted. If you do it right, you are directly pitching people who are already looking for an oral health checkup or service like yours in your targeted area. And there’s hardly any platform better than Facebook to do that with its user base surpassing billions and expanding everyday. Your Facebook ads can help you reach thousands of users every day who are most likely to visit your clinic or book an appointment.
But before getting into how you can use Facebook as a tool to boost your visitors and revenue, let’s look at the options you have. Of course you want to weigh in all your options before investing your time and money into anything. Let’s dive into that without wasting any time.
How do you attract new patients through Facebook Ads for Dentists?
You do your job well, have the ability to retain patients and provide affordable services. But is it enough to attract new patients to your clinic and help you meet your monthly goal? Probably not until you market yourself right. A solid marketing plan is essential to meeting your patient goals. The first step towards that is doing a SWOT analysis. The term does seem technical but is pretty simple to understand. It is made up of analysis of 4 factors:
- Strength – How does your service stand out? Why is your dental clinic better than others in the area? Is it less costly? Or do you have denture facilities available? Find that out.
- Weakness – It’s time you be honest with yourself and recognise the negative feedbacks you got from people. That will help you improve on that.
- Opportunity – Think of what your competitors lack. Which is one thing that nobody is offering? List all the possible opportunities that you can pounce upon.
- Threats – Do you need to tackle some possible obstacles? Make a list of that too.
SWOT analysis will be the first step of your marketing campaign. It will let you know your exact position and help you set up a theme and agenda of your targeted campaign both offline and on Facebook. Here are a few popular methods you can use to attract new patients after this:
- Start a Referral System: In a profession like dentist, word-of-mouth matters a lot. Your patients have first hand experience of your service and can pitch prospective patients. Give them an additional bonus of a referral program to get that extra motivation.
- Know your Demographic: Understanding your target audience can go a long way in making your social media marketing campaigns successful. We have discussed the target audience for a dentist further in the article.
- Insert Testimonials: Reviews make for the major factor to judge a business’s credibility on the internet. Add reviews on your website homepage, Facebook page and even ads as people trust patients more than the dentist himself.
How do Facebook Ads for Dentists Work?
It can be challenging to chalk out a plan for advertisement for dentists since you don’t want to overtly market yourself. But at the end of the day, you need to find a way to reach out to people and tell them that you’re a reliable option. Here are a few methods that dentists around have been using to exponentially grow their customer base. The campaigns have taken a local approach and unsurprisingly Facebook ads top the list:
- Localized Facebook Ads
People find it hard to trust dentists because of the painful procedures and unsure results. The first thing people want is a dentist close to them. Someone in Pennsylvania will only look for dentists around the area instead of looking for a dentist in Minnesota. Facebook allows you to reach people in a short radius of your clinic. You don’t have to spend money advertising people who are a 100 mile away as some people presume looking at Facebook’s wide reach.
- Demographic targeting through Facebook
Facebook has a huge database and is a dynamic tool to target people according to the demography. You can target people according to their marital status, language, income, searches and much more. Researches suggest that women make 90% of the dental buying decisions taken in a house. Here’s your opportunity to target them unlike offline banners, pamphlets and more.
- Income Targeting
While you as a dentist may want to assume that everyone gets professional flossing, only a few people in reality go for dentists or floss their teeth for that matter. You should understand that a person needs to be in a certain income level bracket to think about these things because it’s not your regular health checkup or illness. It’s important to focus on these factors and analyse which brackets work best for you on Facebook ads.
- Remarketing
Remarketing is the easiest and one of the most effective forms of advertising. Your potential clients, people who clicked on your ad or have inquired for your service are mostly likely to avail these at a certain point of time. It’s important that you use their email addresses to customer match on Facebook and show them your ad again. Create a personalized ad for people whom you want to remarket your service like a reminder and entice those patients again.
What Makes Facebook Ads for Dentists so Effective?
You may ask why should Facebook be your priority when it comes to marketing on the internet. Well, the foremost reason is the wide yet localised targeting it offers apart from being one of the most inexpensive alternative source of advertising. You can target previous customers, website visitors, people in a radius, a particular demographic and more. Not only does it provide higher chances of lead conversion but also costs only what you take benefit of. Here are a few notable benefits of advertising on Facebook for dentists:
- 80% of all internet users are on Facebook. Even older people above the age of 65 are active Facebook users who check their accounts several times a day. Facebook as a result provides you an audience like no other.
- Facebook is one of the best platforms for targetting a niche. For a dentist, targeting becomes very important as not everybody will be interested in your service. It’s also pretty cheap and you can literally reach over a thousand people in just $5!
- Conversion rate is very high on Facebook making it one of the most engaging and beneficial platforms. You can instantly start getting calls if your ad is good enough and has targeted the right audience.
- It helps build brand awareness and credibility. People would recall your clinic from Facebook when they see it around their area. If your ad is catchy enough, it puts an excellent impression on them.
- The advertising is measurable on Facebook. You can analyse your ad’s success using their highly dynamic analysis tools and calculate ROI in real time. Also, you will be able to track people who viewed your ad, clicked on it, the time they spent watching your video and more. You can then easily target them in your next advertisement.
- Facebook boosts attribution. As people repeatedly see your ad, they will be likely to try your service down the line. Think that if someone watches your ad and then has an oral issue later. Then they watch your ad again when they already have an oral issue, so you are likely to be the first one they call.
- Facebook advertising also boosts offline retail. People in your area may watch your ad and then visit your store if they liked what you offer.
- You can also resell to your old customers on Facebook by putting in customer emails on your Facebook campaign. These people are most likely to buy from you again so you must not miss targeting them.
- It’s not your regular advertising and also builds engagement. As your audience engages with your content through likes, comments and shares, you are create a feel-good value and impression for your brand. Engagement also boosts the trust factor which is so essential for a dentist.
- Engagement on your social media handle also boosts your SEO rankings as search engines rely on social signals like likes, shares and more to rank websites. If you have a blog, you can bridge the gap between Facebook and the blog and boost your traffic there using ads. That will help people gain some insight of your services and understand why they need to avail them.
How to Target Facebook Ads for Dentists?
If you can learn to use Facebook as an advertising tool strategically, it would not take much time before your appointments and slots start to get full. Of course your capability, service and results would play a role but that’s for later. Here we are trying to let you know exactly what you need to being a dentist to target your patients on Facebook. Since you’re in a health related business, you have a lot of restrictions to deal with and must stay from false or superlative claims to avoid getting banned. Here are a few effective practices for dentists to target their patients on Facebook:
- Personalize Ad Copy
We can’t stress enough how important it is to speak directly to your patients instead of speaking as a third person and just praising yourself. You may be tempted to rush through the process and blandly list your services but that can be a deal-breaker. You must try to make your copy unique and get heard. If you are offering services for kids, pitch directly to their mums and focus on the pain points.
- Use Different Ad Types
Facebook audience value creativity. You can’t be running one ad for all audience and think about appealing. Instead you can create different ads for different targets or show your creativity with a carousel style ad. You can also bring in your staff to show how you offer personalised and patient-centric services and have to offer much more than just oral check-ups and dental implants. You must research on different ad types like those for stories before finalizing on one.
- Display Your Personality
No one would really find a regular dentist promoting his clinic much appealing. Think out of the box and come up with a personality. You can take up a healthy initatiative or create something funny. Videos are the most sharealble content on Facebook, so make something that builds your image and appeals to your audience. Use humor and try to feed something that people relate with. You can also use SEO to make it happen.
- Create Season-specific Campaigns
Dental marketing has a seasonal element to it as you may have realised having been running a clinic. People need to get their children’s oral checkups or braces done before the calendar gets busy with soccer classes and Debate programs after August. You can also specify and schedule different ads for different times depending upon when your target audience is active.
Apart from these you should also try to pitch and target people who have recently moved in your area as they would be looking for a new doctor, dentist and more. Try offering a little reward or some incentive to attract first-timers. Make it time-limited so people act quickly and don’t just skip through.
How to setup Facebook Ads for Dentists?
Okay so now you know how to target your audience and promote your ad campaign on Facebook. But how do you set it up? You would need to head over to Facebook ads manager. But before that you must have a Facebook page. If you haven’t created it yet, it’s time to do it now before starting your ad campaign. Once you have done that, follow these steps to go through this process easily.
Choose your Ad’s objective
After creating your facebook page, go to the Campaigns tab in the Facebook Ads manager. Then choose from the campaign objectives listed there. You can go for brand awareness to introduce your clinic, especially if you are new. Selecting reach allows you to expose your ad to maximum number of people. If you want to increase traffic, you can do that and drive it to your website.
Selecting video views or app installs can help you reach your goals in these things. Lead generation is an important objective for you as you can find new prospects by this method which helps if you are new in your area.
You can pay per click or for action in conversion based objectives while you’d need to pay for impressions if you select reach or traffic.
Set Budget and Schedule
You can choose from daily or lifetime budget for your ad campaign. You can also set it to go live at a date and time in future or right now depending upon the time your audience is most active. Instead of choosing a lifetime budget, experiment with different schedules at the start.
Select Your Audience
Select your target location, gender of the audience you want to target along with language. You can either choose a custom audience and select a location in close proximity to your clinic. You’ll also have an estimated number of page likes in this type of campaign. You will be able to judge better after you watch the estimated number of likes and then have run a campaign for around two or more months. You can also reach a new audience by reaching people out with stuff like excluding people out who already follow you or like your page.
Create Your Ad
You don’t always have to hire a professional edit. It’s also possible to run ads by your current photos or posts that are intriguing. All you have to do is change the format at times. You can select creating your ad into a video by clicking turning it into a video and setting it into an animation. You can also create an animation as per your convenience.
Facebook Ads for Dentists target audience
Getting to know your audience is one of the most crucial steps to getting your Facebook ad campaign successful. Knowing your audience will significantly cut the costs for your campaign and help you reach out to the right people cost-effectively. That’s why you have a separate page for audiences on Facebook ad Manager. You can check from the three audience types Facebook has including saved audiences, custom audiences and lookalike audiences. You can then target based on location, interest, demographic and whatnot!
Women are ideal candidates for being a prospective client and perhaps a decision maker for their family. It’s women who are mostly responsible for choosing the right dentist for their family and themselves so you should look at that gender but otherwise it’s a game of understanding and expectations.
These were the essential steps needed to kickstart your digital marketing campaign for you dentist clinic through Facebook. It doesn’t take much to start with your ad campaign on Facebook as it is much cheaper than other mediums of advertisements. If your clinic has something that stand out of the crowd, you have to try Facebook ads for dentists that are supporting a whole lot of your counterparts in quick time!