Dental-practice marketing has traditionally been slow, expensive, and ineffective, consisting mostly of direct mail, TV, or radio ads. That meant companies with the biggest budgets got the best results because only they could spend enough money to get great results. Over the past few years, however, Facebook turned the marketing world upside down. No longer do you need a huge marketing budget, radio-and-television-placement agencies, direct-mailing designers, and expensive printing and postage costs to connect with potential patients.
All you need is to know how Facebook for dentists works or to get help from someone who does, and you can get better results with a fraction of the marketing budget you would need to achieve the same results using traditional methods.
My team has helped dentists in my Inner Circle Mastermind transition their practice marketing from expensive and ineffective traditional marketing to predictable and cost-effective Facebook marketing. In doing so, we’ve identified a number of reasons Facebook marketing for dentists is the best way to grow your dental practice. Here are five reasons you should consider shifting some of your marketing budgets to Facebook, so you can experience the results for yourself.
1. Facebook marketing gives you the same power and access to information as big companies.
The best way to design an effective ad campaign is to identify the right audience to target. With traditional media or direct mail, large companies have traditionally had access to data that small companies did not. That access gave bigger companies with bigger budgets a significant advantage because they could spend money to design the right ads and place them on the right television or radio channels or send them to the right addresses to connect with the right people. With Facebook, every company has access to the same information, so you can target just as effectively as the big companies.
2. Facebook marketing gives you more and better data than any other advertising platform.
Not only does Facebook give you the same access to information as the big companies, the information they give you is much better than you could get with traditional advertising platforms. Facebook has extraordinarily detailed information about its users that it lets you use when identifying the people you want to target. You can build audiences based on age, location, interests, income, and other key information, and even a combination of a number of qualities.
Facebook marketing even allows you to identify and target people who have expressed interest in your ads but didn’t sign up for your offer, a process called retargeting. Retargeting is one of the most powerful ways to promote your practice because it allows you to target people who are already both familiar with you and interested in your offer. Sometimes people click on your ad, get distracted, and move on. Other times, people click on your ad and become unsure, so they click away. Retargeting allows you to put more ads in front of those people in a matter of minutes, helping you get multiple touches and remind them of their interest.
3. Facebook marketing is much more affordable than traditional media platforms.
By allowing you to target people based on very detailed qualities, you use your money far more effectively using Facebook marketing than you would by sending cards to everyone in a zip code or posting an ad on a radio or television show. In addition, Facebook’s costs are much lower, to begin with, so you can reach those targeted people for pennies in many cases.
For example, the people in my Inner Circle whom my team has supported often reach people for between 1 and 3 cents per person! That’s not a typo.
We’ve helped people get new patients for as low as just a few dollars per new patient, too! For example, we’ve helped one high-end cosmetic dentist get a number of new patients with an average ad spend per patient of only $4.00! That’s just not possible with traditional marketing!
4. Facebook marketing is much faster than traditional media platforms.
For a direct-mail campaign, you need to design a mailing and then get it proofed, printed, and delivered before anyone will be exposed to your ad. That could take days or weeks.
With radio or television ads, you need to write, record, buy the ad space, and get it played. Again, that could take a lot of time.
With Facebook marketing, within minutes, you can have an ad up and running to a highly-targeted audience with a compelling offer to get them in your chair.
5. Facebook marketing is much more flexible than traditional marketing.
If something isn’t working well with traditional advertising, it’s back to the drawing board for another expensive and time-consuming round of edits. With Facebook marketing, you can edit things out in a few clicks.
You can even split-test Facebook ads to test out alternate copy, images, offers, colors, and more, with a few clicks in Facebook’s Ad Manager or Power Editor. Facebook will then give you detailed statistics about what’s working best, and you can turn off the underperforming versions with one click. We do this all the time for our clients.
With traditional advertising, typically, you won’t even know if your ads are working for days, weeks, or more. If you want to adjust something, it’s back to the drawing board, with no knowledge of what isn’t working or why. On top of that, if you want to run a few different versions of an ad, you need to recreate the ads from scratch. With Facebook marketing, you can just swap things out with a few clicks.
Are you marketing your practice on Facebook?
If you aren’t using Facebook to market your practice, what’s stopping you? Facebook marketing is a game changer for dentists. It’s something you or your team can learn or even outsource to an experienced Facebook marketing team.
If you want to know more ways to create shareable content and grow your dental practice on Facebook, you can check out my Facebook Bootcamp program or join us in our Platinum Accelerator Program or our Platinum Mastermind, where I help dentists like you grow their dental practices so they can make more while working less.
You can also join my free Dental Boss Movement Facebook group, where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices.
