Facebook Ads have massively gained in popularity in recent years, and for good reason! When set up correctly they can be a powerful strategy to attract new patients to your Dental Practice.

The ultimate goal with any marketing strategy is to find your “targeting sweet spots” – those groups comprised of people who are genuinely interested in your services.

Ingredients of a successful Facebook Ads for Dentists Campaign

It’s important to get the right ingredients when running a Facebook Ads for Dentists campaign:

Targeting the right audience

Once your targeting audiences are created, you can use them for future boosts from your practice’s page or for ad campaigns,

There are 3 Main Facebook Targeting Audiences Types:

  • Custom Audiences– Audiences of your patients, your email subscribers, people who have visited your website, watched your videos, or engaged with your page
  • Lookalike Audiences – Audiences that Facebook creates to match its users to your custom audiences
  • Saved Audiences– More customised audiences. Allows you to combine audiences, narrow down audiences or add additional targeting features such as net income, job description, marital status, distance from your practice, etc.

When diving into Facebook ads, the best way to look at your options is to break up your audiences into warm and cold targeting groups. Warm audiences are those who already know of you and have had some type of positive engagement with your brand. The more often you can target a warm audience, the better. It means you will likely spend less money to convert the potential new patient into a new patient!

Before we go any further, this would probably be a good time to talk about the 5 levels of awareness to every market:

  1. Level One – Unaware. An example to target this level would be ‘Teeth Whitening’
  2. Level Two – Emphasis. You need to emphasise on your ‘Teeth Whitening’, this could be ‘Teeth Whitening Fast’
  3. Level Three – Mechanisms. Start adding in Mechanisms, ‘Teeth Whitening Fast with our New Kit’, the new kit is the mechanism
  4. Level Four – Emphasise the Mechanism. ‘Teeth Whitening Fast with our new patented Whitening Kit’ (it’s patented so only you have it)
  5. Level Five – Identify the Mechanism. The market won’t believe any new claims, with any new mechanisms you have to identify them based on the pains of your target market: “Are you tired of feeling self-conscious every time you smile?”

Ok, that should give you a good overview of awareness levels of your target audience, on to the next key ingredient – The Ads themselves.

Facebook Ads For Dentists – The Ads!

There are essentially 4 parts that make up a Facebook Ad:

  1. The Targeting (see above)
  2. The Headline
  3. The Copy
  4. The Creative

Getting your Ad right is going to be critical for your success when running a Facebook Ads for Dentists campaign.

  1. The headline – needs to attract attention and generate curiosity.
  2. The copy – test test test when it comes to copy, write out a dozen or so different angles and test them all until you find the winning formula, use a customer testimonial in there about how your product solved the pain they were having.
  3. The creative – this can be an image or we have also found a 30 second video can work extremely well, in the first five seconds call out a pain that your prospective patient has “ready to have a smile you’re proud of” for example. It’s worth checking on current Ad sizes for images as Facebook like to change these regularly, it’s also worth noting that if you have more than 20% text on your image you will probably see a reduction in delivery.

Monitoring and testing

Once you are all set up and running, it’s extremely important that you consistently monitor and test your ads to achieve the best results. You do this in Facebook Ads manager.

You can determine the parameters for reviewing your ad performance based on the campaign goals you outline.

You can look at the cost per result, engagement, link clicks, impressions, and much more.

If your ads are underperforming you might want to move some of your ad spend to the ads that are strong performers or move some ad spend to a different audience you would like to test.

In order to run an effective Facebook ads campaign you will need to monitor and test different ads to achieve your campaign goal.

If this all sounds a bit daunting, or you simply don’t have time to do this for your Dental practice – we can help!

It certainly does take strategy and some know-how! Get in touch via our Contact page or book a FREE 45 minute Strategy Session where we can discuss your current situation and see how best to move forwards.