Facebook Advertising is a great to way to promote your dental office online and get generate new patients at a reasonable cost. However, the Facebook ad platform can be very confusing for a first time user and you can waste a lot of money testing strategies that do no work. In this post we share some useful tips to help you get a jump-start on your Facebook advertising campaigns.
Create a Special Offer
Facebook is a social network where people log in to keep in touch with their friends, play games, join communities, share pictures and comment on them. Buying stuff is the last thing they have in mind. Therefore, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. This means your ad must be powerful enough to distract a user from their usual activity on Facebook. One of the best ways to make your advertising powerful is to create a discount offer. Ideally, your special offer should be unique and available for a limited time/quantity so that people are compelled to take immediate action else risk losing the discount. Special offers are the secret behind the most successful Facebook ad campaigns.
Use News-feed Ads
Facebook offer several different ad formats but the best ad format by far is definitely news-feed ads. The news-feed format is any sponsored content that appears in a user’s Facebook timeline and is therefore hard not to notice. News-feed ads work equally well on all devices and thus should be your main focus.
Refine Your Audience Targeting
In order to get the best ROI from Facebook, you must show your ad to qualified users only i.e. people who may be interested in your dental offer. Facebook allows you to target user using any of their many targeting options.
Custom Audience: Use email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to create and save audiences you’d like to show your ads to. Learn more about Custom Audiences.
Location, Age, Gender and Language: Choose the basic demographics of the audience you want to reach.
Interests: Choose specific interests that are important to your audience. These are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.
Behaviors: Select people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. These behaviors are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.
More Categories: Select people based on any Facebook or partner categories you’ve requested access to. Keep in mind that some data is only available to advertisers in the U.S.
Connections: Select your audience based on whether or not they’re connected to any of your Pages, apps or events. Anyone who has a friend connected to what you’re advertising will see their friend included in your ad. This can increase the likelihood that they’ll find your ad relevant enough to click on or engage with it.
Using these targeting criteria you have to create 3-4 different audiences that would be most likely to be interested in visiting a dentist. For e.g. a demographic you could target is moms aged 25-45 who like Delta Dental Facebook page and reside in the same zip code as your dental office. Another target audience could be males/females aged 25-55 who have recently moved into your town or zip code.
Use Before and After Images
As mentioned earlier, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. Therefore you must use images that grab the user’s attention as they are their news-feed content. Before and after images are perfect for attracting attention from prospective dental patients who may be suffering from a similar dental problem. For instance a teeth whitening ad could use a before and after treatment photo of your patient’s mile demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment. The image would captivate the attention of users who also have yellow teeth and want to whiten them. They would definitely take your offer more seriously than if there was no before after photo in the ad.
Use Facebook Re-marketing Ads
Facebook Remarketing allows you to re-target visitors who left your website without completing a conversion action (such as appointment for submission or call or brochure download). These users will be tagged with a special cookie and will be shown your ad when they log in to their Facebook account. You can use remarketing to pitch a different offer or different price point to convert visitors who did not convert with the initial offer.
Use CPC Bidding and Conversion Tracking
Facebook offers its users the option to either pay for clicks using CPC bids or pay for impressions using CPM bids. For the most part you should avoid CPM bidding until you have found an incredible offer and matching audience. You must also use Facebook conversion tracking in all your campaigns to compare results of different offers and audiences. You can then pause campaigns that results in a high cost per patient acquisition and reallocate that budget to campaigns that produce a high conversion rate.
Use Optimized Landing Pages
Landing pages are the missing piece in many under-performing Facebook campaigns. Each offer should have a different landing page that is optimized for conversions (calls or form submits). You should use different landing pages for computers and mobile devices because user behavior on the two devices is quite different. e.g. forms with several fields do not work very well on mobile devices and should be avoided on mobile landing pages.
Try to look at some competitor landing pages to get an idea of what is working and then add some of your own ideas to come up with different designs that can then be A/B tested with the offer to optimize the conversion rate of your Facebook ad campaigns.
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