The top 10 reasons your Dental Practice should be using Facebook Ads

Growing a dental practice these days is a challenging enterprise. Not only do you have to stay abreast of all the changes taking place in the healthcare and insurance industries, but you also have to figure out ways to drive more patients through the door.

To make matters worse, it is no easy task navigating the plethora of media that’s available to promote your practice to your target audience. To stand out among the competition in a crowded marketplace and draw attention to your dental practice, you have to make an intelligent, calculated decision as to where you will spend your advertising budget: radio ads, direct mail campaigns, print coupons, magazine ads, local tv ads, paid search results, sponsored content, and social media, to name a few.

Though each and every medium serves a purpose when it comes down to pitching your service to the world out there, you’re better off focusing on those that will make the most bang for your buck. Online media offer amazing benefits for dental practices that want to attract new patients, and there are just a few medium as effective as Facebook at delivering results in the short-term.

You’re probably familiar with some of the success stories being told by healthcare professionals and small businesses of every kind that are making the most of Facebook advertising all around America. Whatever’s holding you back from achieving the kind of success that they have, just let go of it. We’ll give you a gentle push in the right direction with this article where you’ll find the top 10 reasons you should start using Facebook ads to grow your dental practice.

1. Easy to get started.

Facebook makes it easy for anyone to start running ads. It is a simple, almost intuitive process, that takes you from campaign set up to having your ad go live in just a few steps. The only prerequisite is that you have a facebook page, which is also easy to set up.

But just as you wouldn’t venture into unknown territory without a map, you better approach Facebook advertising with a solid strategy that maximizes your chances of success. Though it is easy to go about creating your first ad, there are hurdles that you need to overcome, like ad content, targeting options, ad testing, and ad scaling.

To show you that indeed it is easy to get started with Facebook Advertising, we’ve put together an article where we walk you through how to create your first facebook ad to land 7 new patients within the next week of doing so. You can read more about it here.

2. Your Audience Is On Facebook

Impressive as it is, the number of global users on Facebook (2+ billion) should matter little to you. The following statistics, though, are the ones that really deserve your attention:

• There are 214 million Facebook users in the US and 18 million more in Canada. Around 66% of people in the US and Canada have a Facebook account. Bear in mind that this percentage would climb to about 80% of people, if we only accounted those who are old enough to have a Facebook account.
• Facebook users spend an average of 40 minutes on the site every day, and they are increasingly using their mobile phones to engage in the platform.
• Even though a vast majority of Americans believe oral health is extremely important to their overall health, only 58% see a dentist as often as they would like.

This means there is a lot of potential for your dental practice to find new patients on facebook.

3. Targeting Options

Facebook is every marketer’s dream come true. The reason we say that is because not only does it contain the majority of the population but it also gives you the ability to target your audience based on different criteria such as: age, gender, location, education, interests and behaviors.

This allows you to choose your ideal client using a combination of all the available criteria, something that is almost impossible to do in other media. Facebook advertising is remarkable in that it goes beyond demographics and adds another layer of information about the consumer, in the form of interests and behaviors.

You can actually narrow down the scope of your targeting campaign by going after people who have liked your page or have shown some interest in topics related to your business. This way, you’re much more likely to succeed in attracting highly qualified leads to your dental practice.

4. Facebook's Organic Reach Has Changed

If you already have an active Facebook Page, where you regularly post articles and updates for all your followers to see, and think that this is all you have to do to reach them, think again.

Facebook is constantly changing the way it displays content on users’ newsfeeds, making it more difficult for companies to reach their follower base. 52% more difficult to be precise, according to MarketingLand. So if you managed to build a large follower base, your posts wouldn’t reach them all and would need facebook ads to do that. 

Then again, there’s the matter of reaching out to all the people that are not following your Facebook Page just yet. How do you do that? Running Facebook ads. That’s how.

In the end, your marketing strategy with respect to Facebook should encompass both facebook ads and regular post updates to your facebook page. With the former, you make sure you grow your audience fast, while the latter keeps your follower base engaged and up to date on what’s happening at your dental practice.

5. Facebook Ads Are Scalable

Facebook allows you to start on a shoestring budget and scale it up to your heart’s content. You can go overboard when starting out, but we suggest you rather adopt a more cautious approach.

For campaigns budgeted in USD, Facebook establishes a minimum budget of $1 a day, in case the publisher opts to be charged per impression, and $5 a day, if it gets charged per clicks, likes, video views or post engagements. 

When your ad has been running for a few days, and after you have closely monitored its performance, to see whether it’s according to planned, you can increase your daily ad budget in small increments up to the point where it meets your expectations both in terms of cost and leads generated.

6. Facebook's Users Engagement

The rise of mobile gadgets such as smartphones and tablets has been instrumental to Facebook becoming the dominant player in the social media space. In no small part, Facebook owes its amazing growth rate to the similarly impressive market penetration of mobile technologies around the globe.

To give credit where it is due, Facebook capitalized early on in the mobile wave and built an ecosystem designed to engage its users as much as possible. As a result, Facebook users show stronger engagement rates. On average, people check Facebook 8 times a day, higher than any other social media platforms. 

This is good news for you, because your target audience are much more likely to engage with your ads on Facebook than anywhere else. It increases your dental practice’s brand awareness and improves your chances of success.

7. Cost Advantage

Google is still the elephant in the room when it comes down to online advertising, but Facebook is quickly gaining ground. Ad cost in Google, though, has gone through the roof, with keywords in the insurance, loans, and mortgage industries going for as high as $55 per click.

Facebook offers a lower cost-per-click (CPC), though you can only figure it out until after your ad is running. However, when you are creating your Ad Set, Facebook provides an estimated range for both reach and conversions. In the figure below, a campaign with a daily budget of $20 is estimated to generate anywhere between 7 and 46 conversions, which translates to a CPC of anywhere between $0,43 and $2,86. Much lower than the $5,58 you’d have to pay Google on average if you’d target keywords in the dentist niche in the same location. 

Facebook’s algorithm optimizes your campaign over time, which means you can lower your CPC. This is because as Facebook gathers more data about the people that have engaged with your ads, it is able to serve your ads to people that behave in similar ways and thus the likelihood of them clicking on your ad is higher and your CPC decreases. A win-win for everyone involved.

8. Facebook Ads Performance Is Easy To Measure

One of the biggest advantages that online marketing has over traditional marketing is the ability to establish whether your campaign is a success or not almost from the get go. You know your Facebook campaign is off to a good start the day after it goes live, as opposed to weeks or months later for an offline marketing campaign.

This is because your campaign’s data is immediately available to you, in your Facebook Ad Manager’s dashboard. There, you find relevant information about your ads’ performance, including the number of impressions, the number of clicks and your CPC. Armed with this knowledge, you can suspend underperforming campaigns, keep the winners and scale up those that look promising. 

9. Facebook Ads Offer Great ROI

We’ve already mentioned the cost of running facebook ads is lower than most other forms of advertising, and that’s even without factoring in their reach, and their effectiveness at engaging your target audience and generating leads.

Whenever you make an investment decision, you should always consider the return you’ll get. In the case of facebook ads, ask yourself, how much are you willing to invest any given month just so you make 6, 10 or 20 additional patients? You run the numbers and do the math. 

In the end, the revenue generated as a result of those new patients brought in to your dental practice will far exceed the costs associated with your investment in facebook advertising. It works both in the short-term and in the long-term, and you always come out ahead.

10. Facebook Ads Work

This is probably the most important reason of the lot, the one that we’ve left for last because it’s sort of supported by those that precede it. Though in all fairness, if there was just this one reason and none of the previous nine, it would still be worth your time and your money to run facebook ads.

People of all sorts and businesses of all kinds are having tremendous success with their facebook ads. They are selling online courses, live events, software, travel packages, toys, clothing, electronic gadgets, monthly memberships, survival kits, and a myriad more things. They are engaging with prospective real estate clients, restaurant diners, dental patients, car buyers, and yoga practitioners to name just a few. 

And they are all doing it because facebook advertising flat out works. If that wasn’t the case, then they’d certainly would have taken their advertising budget elsewhere. Wouldn’t you agree?

Your Takeaway

Granted, a successful facebook advertising strategy involves more than just creating an ad and hoping for the best once it goes live. There is a learning curve and it requires dedication and attention to detail.

Chances are if you don’t really know what you are doing, you might just waste your time, your money and discard right off the bat this incredible opportunity because you didn’t have the time to figure it out yourself. And no one would blame you because everyone knows you’re busy running your dental practice, looking after your patients, doing what you love the most. 

So how about you let someone help you become even more successful? There are digital marketing agencies out there that are willing to lend you a hand and do the heavy lifting for you.

Here at Dentixtry, we know our way around facebook ads and are ready to discuss with you how you can leverage facebook advertising to attract more patients to your dental practice in a matter of days. For a limited time we are even offering a two-week 100% risk-free trial marketing campaign, that will allow you to see for yourself how powerful facebook advertising can be. With that, you can later make an informed decision as to whether this is the right fit for you. To learn more about it, go to Dentixtry.com.