5 Reasons to use Facebook Ads for a dental practice

Why should you use Facebook ads for a dental practice?

Facebook is, by far, the most widely used social media platform in the world. At the end of 2018, Facebook saw over 2.3 billion monthly active users! Advertisers are spending more time and money on their Facebook advertisements. You should too! If you run both Facebook and Google advertisements, you cover 2 of the most widely used social and search platforms on the internet. The potential to reach far wider audiences is huge. If you can effectively reach these audiences, you will see your conversions grow.  

Done correctly, using Facebook Ads for a dental practice can really help your marketing take off.

It’s the Biggest Online Hangout

The average person spends 28% of their time online using social media platforms. With 2.3 billion people spending 28% of their time online on Facebook, the potential audiences you can reach are enormous! Online advertising is all about finding out where your intended audience spends their time online. For certain businesses, this can be quite difficult.

If you need to attract audiences from certain industries, with certain likes or values, you need to do some research into their online habits. For dentists, the intended audiences tend to be far broader. Often, they are defined primarily by their proximity to the practice. Facebook adverts give you the opportunity to easily reach multiple defined audiences in one central hub.

Action Plan

Using Facebook ads for a dental practice is essential due to Facebook’s massive user base, with over 2.3 billion monthly active users. By leveraging Facebook ads, you can reach a vast audience and effectively target potential patients based on their demographics, interests, and location. With the majority of people spending a significant amount of their online time on social media platforms like Facebook, it’s the perfect place to promote your dental services and increase conversions.

Targeting Exact Audiences

One of Facebook’s most advantageous features is its ability to target exact audiences. Facebook holds thousands of data points about each of its users. These include location, employment and relationship status, likes and dislikes and far more! These data points can be used in your advertising strategy to narrowly define the exact kind of audience you want to see your adverts.

If you offer luxury cosmetic dentistry in London, you can tell Facebook to show your adverts only to people with high-paying careers, who live close to your practice and who like the finer things in life. If you offer paediatric dentistry, you can tell Facebook to only show your advert to new parents or children and teenagers close to your practice. This means you don’t need to waste time and money showing your adverts to audiences who have no intention of ever converting!

Action Plan

Facebook’s precise audience targeting feature allows dental practices to tailor their ads to specific demographics, interests, and locations. This ensures that ads are shown only to relevant individuals, maximizing the chances of conversion. Whether promoting luxury cosmetic dentistry or pediatric services, Facebook’s data-rich platform enables practices to reach their ideal audience effectively and efficiently, saving both time and resources.

Remarketing to Warm Audiences

Remarketing is another of Facebook’s most useful features for advertisers. Remarketing is the process of showing adverts to what are known as warm audiences.

Cold audiences are those who have never heard of your business before, who are not aware of your brand or your services and products. Hot audiences are those who have subscribed, engaged regularly with your business or have even made a purchase. Warm audiences are those who are aware of your business, perhaps they have watched one of your videos, seen an advert or visited the website briefly.

Remarketing to warm audiences allows you to show adverts to audiences that you know are already interested. They may need a product or service similar to yours and are shopping around, they may have developed an interest in your brand in particular. You can tell Facebook to only show an advert on orthodontics to audiences who have already visited your orthodontics page, read one of your blogs on braces, watched a video, browsed your website and read up on the treatments you offer etc.

Coupled with Facebook’s ability to target narrowly defined audiences such as teenagers and their parents within a certain radius, you can make sure only the exact people to whom you want to re-market will see your adverts.

Action Point

Facebook’s remarketing feature enables dental practices to reconnect with warm audiences who have previously interacted with their brand. By targeting these audiences with tailored ads, such as orthodontic services for those who have shown interest in braces, practices can nurture leads and increase conversion rates. Leveraging remarketing on Facebook ensures that ad spend is allocated efficiently, focusing on audiences already primed for engagement and conversion.

The Decline of Organic Traffic.

Once upon a time, businesses could reach a decent-sized audience simply through organic reach. Simply put, organic reach is how far your social media posts can reach without you paying for them to be shown to specific audiences. You rely solely on the quality of the content and the engagement rate of your followers to make sure it is shared and seen as widely as possible.

Unfortunately, Facebook has been taking steps in recent years to reduce the ability of businesses to reach audiences this way. Facebook is a business, and they want you to pay for that privilege. Facebook’s algorithms have made it far harder than 10 years ago for your organic posts to reach much further than your immediate followers. And even then, most of your followers might not see the post on their wall either!

The most efficient way to reach audiences, therefore, is to pay for adverts. This ensures that your posts not only get the widest reach possible, but that they reach only the audiences you want them to.

Analytics

Facebook’s bread and butter is analysing their users’ data. In the same way that Facebook has countless data points on each user, they also have in-depth analytics for their own platform. Facebook’s analytics (or Insights) allow advertisers to examine just how well (or poorly) their adverts are performing.

More importantly, it allows you to determine what features of your advert are performing well or poorly. The analytics portal allows you to investigate things such as audience engagement rates, click-through rates, cost per click, conversions and much more! By using this portal, it becomes far easier to amend your adverts so as to truly maximise their impact and, in so doing, minimise their cost.

Action Point

With the decline of organic traffic on social media platforms like Facebook, businesses must rely more on paid advertising to reach their desired audience. Facebook’s algorithms prioritize paid content, making it harder for organic posts to gain significant visibility. Utilizing analytics provided by Facebook allows businesses to optimize their ad campaigns, track performance metrics, and adjust strategies to maximize impact and minimize costs. Paid advertising ensures wider reach and targeted audience engagement, essential for effective marketing in the digital age.

Facebook Ads for a dental practice: Conclusion

In summary, Facebook offers one of the (if not the) best platforms online to advertise your business. Facebook’s ability to target the exact audience you want, coupled with its remarketing functionality, allows advertisers full control over where their adverts are shown. Being able to stop your adverts being shown to irrelevant or uninterested audiences keeps the cost per click down and conversions high. Facebook’s relatively simple user-interface, its low cost and ability to analyse the performance of your adverts makes it a perfect platform to effectively market your practice.

Check out our other articles, webinars and podcasts in the Samera Learning Centre

Reviewed By:

Arun Mehra

Samera CEO

Arun, CEO of Samera, is an experienced accountant and dental practice owner. He specialises in accountancy, financial directorship, squat practices and practice management.