Dental Marketing Direct

Digital Marketing for Dental Offices

Facebook Marketing

7 Tips to Get More Dental Patients with Facebook Ads

by Leave a Comment

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.

facebook ads logo

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.

103 Post & Status Ideas for Your Dental Facebook Page

by Leave a Comment

Facebook is a great marketing tool for dentists. However, having a facebook page and loading it with generic content and status updates won’t get you anywhere. You need to invest in high quality engaging content to attract likes and new patients. If you have run out of content to post on your dental facebook page, fasten your seat belts because we are giving away 100+ unique ideas to engage facebook users.

Facebook Post Ideas for Dentists

Promotional

  1. New Treatment Procedure
  2. Discounts
  3. Payment Plans
  4. Price List
  5. Before & After Images
  6. Equipment Showcase
  7. Testimonial Videos
  8. Success Story from Customers

PR

  1. Educational Qualification
  2. Industry Event Participation
  3. Training Workshop Attendance
  4. Press & Media Coverage
  5. Charitable Contributions
  6. Community Involvement
  7. Local Sponsorships
  8. Staff Member Profiles
  9. Awards
  10. Achievements
  11. Certifications
  12. Behind-the-scenes photos
  13. Take a trip down memory lane

Announcements

  1. Job Openings
  2. Office Announcements
  3. New Hires
  4. Equipment Upgrades
  5. Office Policy Updates

Funny

  1. Dental Memies
  2. Dental Jokes
  3. Dental Comics

Informational

  1. Articles
  2. Activities
  3. Dentist Quotes
  4. Dental Tips
  5. Treatment Video
  6. Compare and contrast two procedures
  7. Info-graphics
  8. Research Statistics
  9. Share a Helpful Resource
  10. Offer a free e-book

Interactive

  1. Quizzes
  2. Riddles
  3. Polls
  4. Surveys
  5. Games (e.g. here)
  6. Give-away Competitions
  7. Fill in the Blanks (e.g. here)
  8. Photo Caption Contest (e.g. here and here)
  9. Hold a Smile Photo contest
  10. Hold a Q&A session
  11. Post a ‘truth or fiction’ Question (e.g. here)
  12. Patient of the Year/Month/Day/Week
  13. Introduce High Profile Patient
  14. Celebrate a Dental Specific Day (e.g. National Toothache Day, National Tooth Fairy Day)

Important Days

  1. Anniversaries
  2. Staff Birthdays
  3. Christmas Eve
  4. Christmas Day
  5. Boxing Day
  6. New Years Eve
  7. New Year’s Day
  8. Memorial Day
  9. Luther King Day
  10. Independence Day
  11. Labor Day
  12. Thanksgiving Day
  13. Columbus Day
  14. Veterans Day
  15. St. Patrick’s Day
  16. Super Bowl Sunday
  17. Halloween
  18. Valentine’s Day
  19. Good Friday
  20. Palm Sunday
  21. Easter
  22. International Women’s Day
  23. April Fools’ Day
  24. Earth Day
  25. Children’s Day
  26. May Day
  27. Mother’s Day
  28. Father’s Day
  29. Black Friday
  30. Parent’s Day

Seasons

  1. Summer
  2. Autumn
  3. Winter
  4. Spring

Day of the Week

  1. Weekend
  2. Saturday
  3. Sunday
  4. Monday

Months

  1. January
  2. February
  3. March
  4. April
  5. May
  6. June
  7. July
  8. August
  9. September
  10. October
  11. November
  12. December

The Truth About Social Media Marketing for Dentists

by Leave a Comment

Dental Patients from Social NetworksSocial media marketing is a the most challenging way to get dental patients online. Many dentists who jump on the social media bandwagon, trying to find new patients learn this fact the hard way. They invest in a great page/profile, post a few updates, run some ads and then wonder why nobody is listening to what they have to sell. Well let me break it down for you –  nobody logs on to twitter, facebook, youtube or any other social network site to buy stuff. Social media is like this big party where everybody is invited to have fun, gossip around, stalk others and maybe relax after a busy workday. I mean you could setup shop on a table in the corner of the ballroom but dont be surprised if everybody ignores you. Social media marketing is all about joining in the fun, making new friends, sharing stories, discussing problems and then maybe giving out a business card to people who need help. However, before you get the opportunity to give away your business card to interested individuals, you need to start a conversation. 

There are many ways of getting people talking to you but some are more effective than others. You just have to ensure that you offer something of value that will distract people enough to take you seriously. Below I discuss 5 ways how your dental office can draw people’s attention on the various social media networks.

Social Proof

Facebook Marketing for DentistsWhether it’s facebook, twitter or youtube, the first thing people notice when visiting any page or profile is the number of likes, followers, subscribers  and comments activity you have. This is second nature to all social media users because we quickly want to assess the social value of the page or profile. You need to get a high number of likes, followers, subscribers and comment activity to grab people’s attention. The greater the followers count and activity level of your page, the easier it will be to attract more patients.
This is why it can be incredibly difficult to get a new page or profile going. Why would anyone like a page that nobody has liked before or commented on? Therefore, you should invite all your friends, family, relatives and patients to like or follow your dental office page when it is first launched. You can even offer a small discount or free whitening in return. You can also advertise your page to generate likes. But the point is that you need social proof to get new dental patients from social media.

Create Useful Engaging Content

Now that you have a decent number of likes and followers, you need to leverage that following to promote your dental office in their friends and social network. This is where you need to produce content that will grab the attention of your fans and followers and compel them to engage with your page and profile. Let’s be honest, nobody on social media will participate in anything that is boring so you have to make extra effort to make your content fun, original and interesting specially since dentistry is such a dry subject. But you can still post some jokes, memes, quizzes, surveys, studies, animations, videos, success stories and social experiments about dental related topics.

When your fans and followers like the content you produce, they will share it with their friends and social circle and thus take your office name further. The content will want people to visit your page and for more cool stuff you have to share.

Discount Offers

Discount offers specially limited lime offers work very well in a social media setting. The main reason for it is limited time – people believe they stand to lose something if they don’t act and this leads then to claim the offer. For e.g. If somebody who has not visited the dentist for over 6 months, sees an offer for a $49 exam + xray, they would be happy to give it a shot.

However, you do not want to overdo this stuff because then people will be turned off by the number of offers you are sending out every month. Your promotions to content ratio should be very low around 1 promotional post for every 20 educational/informational/fun posts.

Reviews and Testimonials

This is again connected to social proof because most people do not want to risk going to a new dental office. Reviews and testimonials help people convince people that your dental office is the real deal and that you have several satisfied patients who recommend your services. This conviction then helps patients make the decision to contact you for professional help or claim one of your discount offers. Without some positive reviews you will have a hard time convincing people on social media to visit your dental office.

Before and After Photos

These photos act as proof that your services work and are powerful in grabbing attention of prospective patients. They help prospective patients see the transformation in black and white. Social media loves these kind of photos since a many the users suffer from the same or similar dental problems. and these before and after photos offer people something they can relate to. Seeing someone else overcome the same dental problem that you are suffering from is a very effective in attracting new patients.