With over 2 billion active users, Facebook offers an extremely wide and diverse audience reach for growing your dental practice.
Facebook provides full customization and control when targeting your audience which makes this platform challenging but also rewarding. Facebook Ads interface is available to any dental practice and can implement an advertising campaign in minutes. Facebook ad campaigns are the perfect digital marketing tactic for dental practices to see a great return on investment.
You can monitor all of your facebook ad campaign, creative, A/B tests, messaging, audience targeting, and other relevant metrics for tracking your ad performance in one place. Facebook ad campaigns gives you control and detail of your digital marketing.
Before opening up the ad editor, plan your overarching social marketing strategy. This strategy needs to be closely aligned with your specific dental practice’s objectives.
Take the time to evaluate all of the critical competitive advantages your practice has over other dental practices in your area. Do you specialize in providing services to a specific demographic of customers?
Excellent. This needs to influence your dental marketing approach. Essentially, you need to clearly articulate the who, the what and the why before even creating your Facebook Ads account.
A dental practice invests heavily in customer service and implants services.
Create ad content that addresses your quality of patient care and promote a special offer on implant procedures, directing patients to lead generation form on website.
As we mentioned in the strategy section, it is imperative that you choose a direct objective (or objectives) and target a specific audience. A sure-fire way to set yourself up for failure in social media marketing is by diving into the weeds of a campaign before actually setting your goals. Ask yourself how many dental patients you ideally want to reach on this platform, and why? How would you define a dental patients conversion from this ad campaign?
Brand awareness - shows ads to facebook use that will remember your practice in the future
Reach- will show ads to the most amount of people as possible within budget
Traffic- will show ads to people that will most likely to click your link
Engagement - will show ads to people that will most likely like, comment, share, or watch video App installs- will show ads to people that will most likely to download your app
Video Views - to get the most video views
Lead Generation- Fill out lead from on Facebook platform Messages- get more people to send messages to your business
Conversions- (Requires you to install code on your website) over time the ad will optimize to show to people that will completes a conversion event
When you are targeting your desired audience you have to refine the 2.45 billion users on Facebook/ Instagram to an appropriate size audience for your dental practice.
Use website data (in a legal manner) to help you identify the ideal customer profile that you want to target with your ads. Perhaps you will realize that your objective is to acquire more customers in a new target demographic for your dental business.
Make sure that you are intentional with your goals and specific with your definition of your campaign's intended audience and whether or not your objective is tied to a specific patient action - such as clicking through to your site and completing a request for more information about a special offer.
Location - Make sure you are only advertising in your market. Your budget will dry up quickly from irrelevant clicks if you forget this important step! 10- 15 miles of your practice is a good place to start.
Ages - Desired age group you will like to target
Genders - Desired Gender you will like to target
Languages - Make sure you are able to speak the language you are targeting (also make separate ad creative and ad set when targeting multiple languages.
In this section, you can target people that Facebook believes to be interested based on user behavior on Facebook. These are audience are not facts but a good way to narrow or expand your audience for your dental clinic!
With the Facebook ads manager, you are able to make advertisements for both Facebook and Instagram on the same interface. Also, you have the opportunity to advertise on the messenger platform and website associated with Facebook, we recommend automatic placements if you are unfamiliar with these placements.
largest, but also the most expensive spot on Facebook to place your ad
beware that mobile ads are a strong awareness-building tactic with high click-through-rates
vertical video and images ads for mobile-only
these are also mobile-only, but this could be a more dynamic way for you to tell your brand story and target a younger demographic with video
There are many ad formats but we recommend tackling single image or video ads before taking on some of the more demanding formats. Once you master the image and video ad, start testing with instant experiences and collection formats.
Create multiple dental facebook ads to maximize results. By creating multiple ad elements like headline, description, images or videos, Facebook can pick which one is performing best and you can shift your budget to the best performing ad set and ads.
Upload media or you can choose an existing post. We recommend creating an ad specific to your objective rather than just a general post from your page.Make sure to include compelling ad copy that is relevant to your audience.
It is important to match your ad copy to your landing page. If your ad copy talks about dental services or dental clinic specials, make sure the landing page offer is the for the same reason they clicked on your facebook ad in the first place!
Like most good things, Facebook advertising comes at a cost. Now that you have defined your dental strategy, objective, target audience and ad placement, ad format and created ads, it is time to set your budget.
The first time you launch a campaign, you want to update what ad will perform the best. For example, you should test 10 ads at $10 dollars a day each for about a week to understand what ad will perform the best. After that week, you can pause all the ads that are not performing and continue to increase spend between $20 to $50 dollars a day for your campaign depending on your audience size.
The important metric to consider here is "Cost Per Acquisition" or CPA. Once you've gotten your new account set up on the platform. We recommend that you do not launch your first campaign during a holiday season (November - December), as average CPCs increase significantly across industries during this retail-intensive time of year and you will need to take on an unreasonably high budget.
Rest assured that once you get into the platform, you will be able to take advantage of features such as Facebook's Custom Ad Schedule to control your budget and ensure you only run ads at specific times of the day.
When it comes to monitoring your newly launched Facebook advertising campaign, you must focus on ad optimization. The number one priority in digital marketing is to ensure that your ads are optimized for conversions (i.e. depending on the KPI you decided on back in the "establishing your objective and targeting your audience" step.
Don’t get discouraged if your ads don't perform well at first. Online marketing is a marathon. The Facebook Ad interface will help you identify what's not working and give you unlimited opportunities to optimize your ad by adjusting headlines, descriptions and testing out more engaging visuals.
Now that you completed your campaign, you need to start to run a lot of different tests, trying out different dentist Facebook ads features to boost your campaign success. Learn from your mistakes, and repeat the tactics that you find to be most effective. Before you know it, you will be ready to take your online marketing strategy and knowledge from Facebook to even more social media platforms.
Get the latest insights & articles on all things dental growth, delivered straight to your inbox.
(twice per month)
Zach Westerhoff is a dental marketing expert. Join Zach and over 5,000 dentists to learn how to scale your dental business like a tech startup. Zach managed digital marketing teams & campaigns for large SaaS companies and retail giants. As co-founder of teethtalk ads, his goal is to help dentists advertise their practice to patients looking for treatment.
Built for every dental team no matter the size, teethtalk ads boosts local visibility while driving procedure-ready patients.
Join Waitlist
