How much money are you spending on marketing for your practice? You don’t have to spend as much as you might think to grow your practice.
You can connect with your community and it doesn’t have to be a hefty cost. The goal is to have your patients rave about what you’re known for. This allows your ideal patients to learn about you.
You also want to get to a place where other local businesses in your community are referring patients to you. Here are a few low-cost strategies that you can start implementing into your practice today to help get you there.
1. Create a marketing plan.
First, create a marketing plan in which you address these important questions. How are you going to get patients in? How are you going to get patients to refer to you in your community? What are you going to do in terms of external marketing, such as building out your website or creating business cards?
By writing out the answers to these questions, you will become much more focused and avoid wasting time and money with piecemeal marketing. Way too many practices jump from Facebook to Google to mail drops to local sponsorships because they have heard they could all work to get patients in. While that’s true, without an overall plan, you could end up with inconsistent messaging and marketing efforts that ends up costing you more than you need to.
The key is to create a plan that is organized and clear about how you will get patients in, how you will get patients to become part of your marketing team, and how you will get your brand in front of others in the community in a consistent, low-cost, high-impact manner.
2. Build rapport in our community as fast as possible with the lowest cost.
One way we can implement a marketing strategy at the lowest cost and build rapport within the community is using social media. And the best, most efficient social media sites for marketing tend to be Facebook and Instagram.
Social media gives you the perfect chance to show your community what you are all about, including your values and standards. Set up Facebook and Instagram accounts for your practice and get ready to build real relationships all around your community.
Post about the areas of dentistry you are most passionate about. That will show your community how knowledgeable you are. Give video tours of your practice. That will give a personal touch. Talk about your values and standards. That will show people you are different.
Create a schedule and social media plan to post content that engages your patients and communities. You can do this by having designated days where you share a tool in your office, a daily fun fact about dentistry, an employee appreciation post, and question and answer day, and more. And don’t worry about fancy cameras or microphones. A simple smartphone is all you need.
3. Add a small budget to boosting social media posts.
Most of the time, when businesses post on their social media accounts, they don’t invest even a small amount of money to get more eyeballs and engagement on the post. To get the most engagement, you have to boost your posts. Even a budget of a few dollars can get your post seen by thousands of people in your community. And if you’re posting high-engagement content like video tours and Facebook lives about your values, the more local eyeballs the better.
Even better, when boosting your posts, you can pick exactly who you want to see them. You can target based on location so that you are reaching your community specifically. And you can add even more filters so you can target the exact type of patient you want to attract. Few other marketing options can get that granular — even the ones that cost thousands of dollars. With Facebook and Instagram boosting, you can get extremely specific for just a few dollars.
Are you ready to implement low-cost dental marketing strategies in your practice?
You don’t have to spend a ton of money to get the word out about your practice. Remember, the most important thing is to ensure your patients are more than satisfied and you are utilizing social media accounts to the fullest. With just a few dollars, you can get highly engaging content to the exact people you want to reach using Facebook and Instagram.
If you’re looking for training or coaching for your team to accelerate your growth, click here to learn more.
For more help, become a part of a community full of Dental Bosses like yourself by joining The Dental Boss Movement today.
As dentists, we’re visionaries, and if having an automated dental practice is something you’ve dreamed of for your practice, you might be surprised to learn it’s not very difficult to put in place.
If you want to create an automated dental practice, you only need a few pieces in place. After all, a vision alone won’t help you achieve your goal. You also must take action and hold yourself accountable as you pursue your goal. Here are the three pieces to put in place if you want to work toward building an automated dental practice.
Buy a whiteboard to automate setting and hitting goals for your dental practice.
Of all the strategies I teach dentists to grow their practices, using a whiteboard is one of my favorites. It’s simple. It’s effective. There’s no tech to learn. Best of all, it’s very lost cost, often less than $10.
I know whiteboards don’t sound very sexy or exciting, but this tool can change everything in your practice. With it, you can publicize relevant key performance indicators and see at a glance whether you’re on track to hit our targets. Even better, everyone in your office can see progress in real-time and is held accountable without any uncomfortable conversations.
The public nature of the whiteboard helps people avoid falling behind and encourages others on the team to support each other so the group hits all goals. That means you don’t have to go around talking about production or letting people know they’re behind. As long as the whiteboard is updated everyone on the team can work together to set and achieve important practice productivity goals.
Automate communication among team members.
With your goals on track, the next step to automating your dental practice is automating communications among your team members. In my practice, automating communication means using a project management tool called Asana. It’s a free online tool where we can record and manage information, share resources, and easily assign tasks to team members.
With Asana, we can even automate weekly check-ins so every team member can give a quick update on their tasks and progress. We can assign specific to-dos from inside Asana and automatically update everyone who needs to know. And then we can quickly review people’s to-dos, see what’s still open, and figure out why something hasn’t been done. Even better, if someone on the team needs my specific feedback on a task, they can just tag me in Asana in the same way they would tag a friend on Facebook. I don’t need to set up a meeting or even be in the office to review and respond to their question.
Automate your dental practice marketing.
Automating your marketing is an extremely powerful part of automating your dental practice because it will drive new patients into your practice on an ongoing basis. What’s so amazing about automated marketing is that once you’ve set it up, it essentially runs itself—it requires very little time or money on your part.
Automating your dental practice marketing is simple. You just need to do two things. First, set up dental marketing funnels to and Facebook ads to key audiences that drive traffic to your funnels. In my practice, we’ve built out multiple marketing funnels. They’re easy to set up and require no work from you after the setup. Through funnels, we send people to quizzes to prequalify them. At the end of the quiz, we offer patients the opportunity to come in and talk to us or leave their email so we can communicate with them. With these in place, high-value dental practice leads hit our inbox on a regular basis.
Do you want to build an automated dental practice?
Automating your dental practice doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple whiteboard can help you set and more easily achieve practice goals. Asana can make team member communication easy. And automated dental practice marketing can keep patients coming in on a regular basis. With those three pieces in place, your job as practice owner will become much, much easier. Even better, your team will be set up for success. They'll be able to continue to perform without you needing to be there and get involved in everything.
If you want more help with your practice, join our community of Dental Bosses just like you, in the Dental Boss Movement Facebook group if you want support and training as you grow your dental practice. More than 1,000 Dental Bosses are already in there learning and growing together.
And if you’re looking for training or coaching for your team to accelerate your growth, click here to learn more.
If you’re just starting your dental practice, how long do you think it will take you to fill your chairs? One month? Two? Six? What if I told you that you could book out your start-up dental practice on a budget of less than $1,000?
Starting up a dental practice is an expensive project. Between equipment, supplies, team members, and your office space and build-out, many start-up practice owners become stretched financially.
So, how does anybody have enough money to get a start-up dental practice off the ground? If you follow these steps, you only need a little bit of money left. You just need to be willing to step outside your comfort zone and use Facebook to do things differently. Here’s all you need to do.
1. Start early and go live on Facebook.
If you want results—patients in your chairs, a profitable practice, people in your community talking about you and referring patients to you—you’re going to have to get out there and do things that might be a little bit scary at first.
The best way to start building your audience is to start early and go live on Facebook. Set up a Facebook page for your dental practice. This is new for many dentists, but it’s important. Most dentists aren’t very comfortable going live on Facebook. I wasn’t when I got started, but I knew it was important. So don’t wait until you build your audience. I still get nervous when I go live, but I’m much more comfortable now than when I began. But I knew you and other dentists needed to hear my message in order to build a better, more fulfilling practice.
I also know that your future patients need to hear your heart for changing lives through your practice. There’s a mom with kids who hate going to the dentist. There’s a mom who hates going to the dentist for herself! And you’re the person who can change that—but that can only happen if your patients know about you. Your community needs you, and they’re all on Facebook.
2. Speak from the heart.
Facebook provides you with an absolutely incredible opportunity to share your heart with thousands of people in your community. I’ve seen hundreds of start-ups tap into the power of Facebook to get new patients extremely quickly. So what do they do? They speak from the heart.
Go live, and share your excitement about your practice. Tell them your vision for your practice. Talk about why you went to dental school. Tell people why you’re launching your start-up, what your practice will look like when it’s open, and how your patients will feel when they come into your practice.
It won’t be perfect—and that’s okay. This video will show your community that you’re a real person, and that you’re building a practice to serve your community. Plus, once you’ve done your first Facebook Live video, you’ll never have to do your first Facebook Live video again.
3. Go live regularly.
After your first video, continue to build that momentum by going live once a week to talk about dental topics and updates on your practice. When you do this, you’ll position yourself as an expert while you’re building your video views and audience engagement.
The more videos you make, the more people will start to comment and share, and you’ll be able to use Facebook’s amazing tools to retarget those people later on for high-value services like implants and Invisalign.
If you have trouble thinking of what to talk about every time you go live, here are some ideas to get you started:
How can I have a cavity if my tooth doesn’t hurt?
Why do I need a crown—can’t I just have another filling done?
The options to replace a missing tooth: denture vs. bridge vs. implant.
Why do I need a root canal, and what does it mean to have a root canal?
Why do my gums bleed? What is periodontal disease, and how can I treat it?
There are whitening options for every mouth.
Why do we get our teeth cleaned at the dentist vs. just brushing at home?
That’s nearly two months of Tooth Talk Topics, which will give you plenty of time to come up with more ideas on your own. And, you can ask the people who watch your videos to let you know in the comments what other topics they’d like you to cover.
4. Start running community engagement campaigns.
One you have begun to set yourself up as a trustworthy and reliable expert, you’re ready to start running what’s called community engagement campaigns.
Simply put, community engagement campaigns are promotions you host on Facebook to build relationships with people in your community. This gives you an opportunity to network in your area while attracting only potential patients to your promotion. For example, you could run a gift card giveaway with prizes donated by other local businesses. You could run a smile makeover competition to coincide with your grand opening. You could give away a $1,000 gift card or free tooth whitening for life, a 30-day floss challenge—the possibilities are truly endless.
Make sure the promotion involves local businesses or services in your office. If you give away an iPad or Amazon gift card, anyone around the world will sign up. Local businesses or in-office service focuses on potential patients in your area. Community engagement promotions help get positive attention on your practice and often fill up your schedule before you even open your doors. They are incredibly effective.
5. Set up custom Facebook audiences for future promotions.
Once you have started filling your chairs, be sure to set up Facebook ad targeting audiences for your dental practice. Setting up these audiences allows you to spend a few dollars promoting your videos to warm, engaged audiences.
It’s not hard to do, and with the right training, you can make sure that your videos are getting out in front of exactly the right people—the people who are going to start filling those chairs in your practice in the present and the future, and telling their friends to come, too.
Are you ready to fill your schedule even before you open the doors to your practice?
If you like the idea of getting all your spots booked out before you open the door, jump on Facebook, go live, and run community engagement campaigns. It’ll get people talking about you online and offline and help your phone start ringing with patients excited to get in your chair.
If you’re looking for training or coaching for your team to accelerate your growth, click here to learn more.
And if you want to join a community of Dental Bosses just like you, I have a Facebook group where more than 1,000 Dental Bosses are already learning and growing. Join us in the Dental Boss Movement Facebook group if you want support and training as you grow your dental practice.
Social media marketing has transformed dental practices in an almost unprecedented fashion. My team and I have spent years studying, testing, and analyzing the best strategies for using social media for dental practices.
At first, we used Facebook to build an audience of over 50,000 raving fans for my dental practice and turn those leads into dozens of new patients every month, all by utilizing the best dental social media marketing techniques available on Facebook to share our story and build great connections with our Facebook fans and others who had never heard of us.
After testing and refining those strategies, we started helping other dentists and dental practices utilize dental social media marketing strategies to grow their practices, too.
We found the most powerful social media site for dental social media marketing to be Facebook.
Facebook gives the most robust ad-targeting capabilities out of all dental social media marketing options.
Dental Facebook marketing costs less than traditional marketing and other social media for dentists.
Facebook makes available to everyone the same tools that only big companies used to be able to afford.
Facebook allows you to act fast to fill last-minute cancellations or promote an event or special offer, getting organic and paid posts up in minutes.
Facebook gives dentists sophisticated performance data for all Facebook ads they post so you can know your exact return on investment.
Facebook allows you to change different variations of the same dental Facebook ad to split test ads against each other.
And more…
Because of how powerful Facebook can be to build a dental practice, my team and I now use the same strategies we used to grow my practice to help other dentists and dental practices as part of our dental-marketing services. The strategies we use for our dental-marketing clients are the same strategies I share in this guide to Facebook for dentists and can help dental practices of all shapes, sizes, locations, and specialties. They can help you create a dental Facebook marketing and organic presence that is effective, efficient, and predictable—no matter what your practice looks like.
Don’t worry if you’ve tried using Facebook to promote your dental practice before, don’t understand how Facebook can help grow a dental practice, don’t think you have the time for dental Facebook marketing, or think Facebook is expensive. You’re not alone. Many dentists feel this way about using Facebook for dentists. I assure you, each of those objections isn’t true, and I’ll show you exactly what to do to help you get reliable, affordable, and consistent using Facebook to grow your dental practice.
Whether your dental practice has been open for decades, is still months from opening, or anything in between, you can use dental Facebook marketing to grow your practice and get patients in your chair for a fraction of what you’d have to spend on traditional dental-marketing techniques.
The Best Dental Facebook-Marketing Techniques to Build Your Practice
This definitive guide to dental Facebook marketing will walk you through the three things my team and I do to build dental Facebook-marketing campaigns for dentists around the world to help you do the same for your dental practice.
First, I’ll share the most important things you can do to build a dental Facebook page. The best dental Facebook pages have a few things in common. We’ll share what makes the best dental Facebook pages so great, and how you can do the same! If your dental office Facebook page is bland and ineffective, this section will help you give it life and get it ready to build fans and convert them to new patients. If you’re a dentist looking to build an individual presence on Facebook, this section will give you tips to build a great dentist Facebook page to build your individual reputation and following.
Second, I’ll share the best strategies for creating great dental Facebook posts. Creating social media posts for dentists is one of the favorite things my team does. I’ll share the best strategies for creating dental Facebook posts that will help you build a group of raving Facebook fans!
Third, I’ll help you plan and prepare the most effective Facebook ads. Facebook advertising for dentists allows you to reach people with unprecedented precision to help you get better and faster results at a fraction of what dentists and dental practices typically spend on dental ads in traditional media and other advertising. I’ll teach you how the best Facebook ads for dentists perform and how you can get the most effective Facebook dental ads strategies working for you.
If you’re ready to have the best social media marketing strategies for dentists working on your behalf to build the best dental Facebook page possible for your practice, the best dental Facebook posts building engagement and raving fans, and the most efficient and effective dental Facebook ads directing people to your special offers and dental marketing funnels, then follow the steps I outline in the rest of this definitive guide to dental Facebook marketing!
How to Build the Best Dental Facebook Pages
Every dentist or dental practice needs a dental Facebook page to act as their home base on Facebook and give them a platform to grow and connect with their patients, prospects, and Facebook fans. Here’s everything you need to know to build and optimize a Facebook page for your practice even if you haven’t opened the doors yet.
How to Build the Best Dental Facebook Page for Your Practice
If you haven’t set up a dental Facebook page for your practice or a dentist Facebook page if you’re a one-person shop, setting up a dental Facebook page for free is a simple five-step process. If you’re just getting started, don’t worry. The best dental Facebook pages all got started by following the same five steps.
To set up the best dental Facebook page for your practice, you first need to go to the Facebook page creation page. Most dental offices will select the “Local Business or Place” option on that page. After choosing the right option for your dental practice, enter your business category and practice contact information. Common options for business categories for dentists include “Dentist & Dental Office,” “General Dentist,” “Cosmetic Dentist,” and “Pediatric Dentist.”
After you set up your dentist Facebook page or dental office Facebook page, whichever is appropriate for your practice, you will next need to upload an appropriate Facebook page profile picture and cover photo. I suggest using a high-resolution, professional close-up of you for a profile if you’re building a dentist Facebook page, or of your logo if you’re building a dental practice Facebook page. Make sure your images are the ideal size for Facebook pages, which change from time to time. Any quality graphic designer or dental-marketing company will know the right size for a Facebook profile picture and cover image.
The best dental Facebook pages also have robust, custom profiles. Specifically, when first setting up your dental Facebook page, Facebook will ask you to enter a short description of your practice. Enter a couple of sentences to tell people what your practice is all about. Let them know why your practice is different. You will also be asked to enter hours of operation, team members, and links to your website. Fill out all the demographic and contact information possible.
You can also customize a button under your Facebook cover photo. By default, this is usually set to read “send message” and lets people message you on Facebook. You can change it to a number of things. For dentists, I usually suggest editing the button to allow people to schedule an appointment, but if you’re building dental-marketing funnels, you can also change it to send people to your dental marketing funnel or to learn more about your practice. You can also include links to your website or a dental marketing funnel in your about section.
How to Optimize a Dental Facebook Page
If you just set up your new dental practice Facebook page through the instructions on this page and the additional dental Facebook page setup tips, your Facebook and the additional dental Facebook page tips, congratulations! You’re ready to begin posting and promoting your page.
If you already have a dental Facebook page, make sure your profile includes all the elements on this page and the additional tips for effectively using Facebook for dentists.
Specifically, to optimize an existing dental Facebook page, make sure:
Your dental Facebook page has complete practice contact information.
Your page has accurate hours of operation.
Your profile picture and cover images are professional, hi-res images that convey your practice culture.
Your about section includes complete and accurate statements about what makes your dental practice different.
You add trusted team members to your dental office Facebook page list of team members.
Your button under your dental Facebook page cover photo directs people to engage with your dental practice how you want them to, such as to send you a message or schedule an appointment.
With these things in place, your dental office Facebook page will be ready for posts and promotion so you can build a loyal audience and attract new patients to your office.
How to Grow Your Dental Office Facebook Page Following
Once your dental office Facebook page is set up and optimized, you’re ready to build your Facebook following and convert strangers into patients. The first thing you can do to start building your dental office Facebook page following is invite your Facebook friends to like your page. To invite your Facebook page to like your dental Facebook page, click the gray button with three dots on it under your Facebook page cover photo, to the left of your blue “Learn More,” “Schedule an Appointment,” or “Send Message” button. Next, click “Invite Friends,” and click the “Invite” button next to all friends you want to invite.
This is a quick and easy way to get your first one hundred or more Facebook fans. Although many of these people won’t be patients, they will be family and friends who know, like, and trust you; and your invitation to like your page might help you get some of them to become patients. Even if it doesn’t encourage them to become your patients, they will be likely to like, comment on, or share your posts when they appear in their timeline, thus increasing the odds of your posts going viral! You can also ask patients to like your dental office Facebook page when they come in.
With family, friends, and patients liking your page, you will be well on your way to growing your impact and reach through creating the best Facebook posts on your dental Facebook page and placing the best dental Facebook ads for specific promotions and additional reach.
In addition to asking friends, family, and patients to like your page, a great way to get people excited about your practice on Facebook is to create a contest where you hold a random drawing to give away a free treatment to one person who likes your page and then likes, comments, and shares a specific post within a certain timeframe. You could even ask your family, friends, and dental Facebook page fans to nominate someone else to receive the free service.
In my practice, we regularly give back through something we call Project Smile. We do everything on Facebook to reward people who follow our Facebook page and don’t even tell our patients. The way Project Smile works is we announce we will give away a free smile makeover and ask people to share our announcement post on their Facebook timelines.
The post we ask them to share asks people to nominate someone who deserves a free smile makeover with an image of their smile, so we can see if they’re a candidate. We narrow down the list, invite the finalists for a cleaning to take a closer look at their mouths, and then choose a winner for the full smile makeover. Our Facebook fans love following and sharing our Project Smile posts and often see what other services we provide and come to us for an appointment.
Between invitations, contests, and community- or giving-based promotions, your dental office Facebook page can build a large audience of raving fans for your dental practice.
In the next section, I’ll teach you how to draft the best dental practice Facebook posts to build raving fans and loyal patients from Facebook.
How to Create the Best Dental Facebook Posts
Many dentists get overwhelmed by the idea of coming up with content to post to their dental office Facebook page. The reality is, creating the best dental Facebook posts for your dental practice doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, if you follow two simple rules, your dentist Facebook page can be full of high-impact posts that position you to build deeper relationships with existing fans and patients while attracting new patients into your chair.
How to Know What to Post About on Your Dental Office Facebook Page
The most important part about creating the best dental Facebook posts is to make sure your posts are interesting and engaging. Interesting and engaging posts by a page with likes from family, friends, and patients make it more likely that people will like, comment on, and share your posts. This is important because the more likes, comments, and shares your Facebook posts get, the more Facebook will show it to other people, and the more chance it has to go viral. Also, people are more likely to like, comment on, or share your dental Facebook post when they see others have liked, commented on, or shared the post, especially others they’re friends with on Facebook.
To make sure your posts are interesting and engaging to encourage people to like, comment on, or share them, it’s important that most of your posts aren’t promotional offers or even dental tips. Although some promotional offers and dental tips are fine, the vast majority of your posts should be about three things:
Facebook posts showing people your dental practice vision and story to let them know why your dental practice is so great
Community-oriented Facebook posts, such as events you’re participating in or hosting at your practice and other local businesses
Facebook posts highlighting great things about your team members and patients (with their permission, of course)
Testimonials from happy patients
These four types of posts help you get people’s attention on Facebook, make connections with the right people to grow your dental practice, and encourage people to like, comment on, and share in order to get better reach for your Facebook posts. They also make the promotions and dental tips types of posts get more attention, because Facebook will view your page as one with posts people want to see. Finally, they make it much easier to regularly come up with great fresh content for your page so your dental Facebook page isn’t inactive or full of promotional posts.
Creating Dental Facebook Posts About Your Practice Story and Vision
The best dental Facebook posts tell your practice’s vision and story so you can let people know why being your patient will be worthwhile. These posts show people the things you’re building toward (your vision) and the things you’re already doing and have done (your story). These posts humanize your practice and build connections.
In my practice, our vision is to have the best dental practice in the country that treats all our patients like the VIPs they are and delivers WOW experiences to everyone from the moment they walk in until they leave. For example, we provide complimentary gourmet coffees and teas, iPads and noise-canceling headphones to use during an appointment, and hand-and-arm massages by our trained staff to make sure our patients leave feeling more like they just visited a luxury spa than a dentist. We also commit to being active in our community and giving back to important causes.
These things are core parts of who we are as a practice, and we want everyone to know it, so we post pictures of our coffees and teas, our patients receiving their relaxing massages (with their permission, of course), of community events, and charitable initiatives. By regularly posting about who we are as a practice, we get many likes, comments, and shares on our posts and build deep relationships with our Facebook fans because they get to know who we are as a practice and will want their dental-office experience to be like our patients’ experiences!
Posts about events, companies, and people in your community are a great way to become known as a practice that’s active and involved in things that matter to your patient pool.
In my practice, we participate in charity runs, host food drives, and have events at our practice. We also form strategic alliances with different local businesses each month to offer special deals to their employees. If you do this, you can create a post announcing how excited you are to team up with the business.
Creating Facebook Posts Highlighting Team Members and Patients
Creating Facebook posts that encourage, congratulate, and promote your patients and team members are a great way to highlight people who often go unnoticed. Your team and patients are doing great things in your office and community. Let people know how excited and proud you are about them (with their permission, of course). These posts build deep relationships and get lots of likes, comments, and shares, too!
Posting Patient Testimonials to Your Dental Office Facebook Page
Testimonials from happy patients make great posts. You’ve earned those testimonials either through online reviews or testimonials given specifically to post to your dentist Facebook page. Like online reviews, patient testimonials allow other people to boast about why your dental practice is so great, which makes it more likely that people will view it as more trustworthy than if you tell people why your practice is so great.
The Best Types of Dental Facebook Posts on Your Dental Office Facebook Page
Once you know what the best dental Facebook posts are about, the next step is to make those posts interesting, varied, and engaging by posting them in different types of posts. Generally, you can and should post a variety of text, image, and video Facebook posts to get more attention and engagement without seeming repetitive and monotonous.
Most dentists are comfortable with text posts, but less are comfortable with video and image Facebook posts, so here’s how you can utilize videos and images on your dental Facebook page.
Creating Video Facebook Posts for Your Dental Facebook Page
Video is powerful on Facebook for three important reasons. First, video gets people’s attention, especially if their page is set to auto-play. Second, video makes better connections with people once you get their attention because it invites them into your practice, lets people make virtual eye contact with you, and allows them to hear your voice and see your expressions. Finally, Facebook loves video and will show your post to more people if it has a video.
Video posts on Facebook for dentists doesn’t have to be complicated or overproduced. In fact, a good cell-phone camera can be even better than a heavily-produced video because it seems more real and not like a stuffy company.
Great uses for video on Facebook posts include Facebook Live video office tours, short recorded video patient testimonials, Facebook Live video Q&A sessions for your patients and the community to ask you what’s important to them, Facebook Live or recorded videos of community events, recorded video highlights, and explainer videos with tips about dental insurance, teeth care, new procedures, and more!
Creating Image-Based Facebook Posts for Your Dental Facebook Page
High-quality image posts get people’s attention on Facebook and encourage more engagement than text posts. Some of our favorite ways to use images for my practice and our dental marketing clients include to show high-quality images of what makes your practice great, like a picture of the iPads we let our patients use and our gourmet-coffee-and-tea station.
Other ways to use image posts with dental Facebook marketing include posting images announcing community events, celebrating patient accomplishments, showing off how great your team is, and highlighting new procedures and equipment.
Like dental Facebook video marketing, dental Facebook marketing with images doesn’t need a professional setup. My two rules for creating the best image-based Facebook posts are that a well-lit image you take with a quality cell phone is the best type of picture, and if you can use a picture you take of real patients, team members, and doctors, that is generally better than using a stock image. You can make great impacts with high-quality stock images, but nothing connects with people on Facebook like well-lit, authentic pictures of real people and your real office.
The Best Facebook Ads for Dentists
The real power of Facebook for dentists is your ability to post highly targeted Facebook ads. Facebook knows more about their users than almost any company in the world. They know their income, net worth, location, interests, behavior, family status, age, and more.
For advertisers like dentists and dental practices, this information is highly valuable, because it allows you to target the right people with your ads and only pay to reach people who are likely to take action on your ad.
Here are three important steps for successful Facebook ads for dentists.
Improving Your Dental Facebook Ads By Improving Your Message
Before placing dental Facebook ads, be sure each post has an objective. Otherwise, you won’t know who to target or what to say, and the people who see your dental Facebook ad are unlikely to take action. Here are eight common goals for dental Facebook ads:
1. Building awareness of your dental practice’s culture 2. Showing people what makes your practice different from other practices 3. Talking about your services and how you can help people 4. Highlighting testimonials of happy patients 5. Attracting people into a dental marketing sales funnel 6. Filling spots left open by last-minute cancellations 7. Promoting a specific procedure you want to highlight 8. Introducing a new dentist or team member
Once you know the purpose of your dental Facebook ad, you will have a better understanding of whom to target and what to say to get people to take action to help you achieve your goal.
Improving Your Dental Facebook Ads By Improving Your Targeting
Once you know the goal for your dental Facebook ad, make sure you target each of your dental Facebook ads to the people who are most likely to resonate with it and take action. Here are a few examples of how to match your dental Facebook ad targeting to your goals:
If you want to build awareness of your dental practice culture, you might not want to target current patients, because they will know your culture, but you might target an audience Facebook can generate that is similar to your patient population. This is called targeting lookalike audiences.
If you want to fill spots left open by last-minute cancellations, your current patient population is likely going to be your best bet at achieving your goal, perhaps by offering a free upgraded service or discount to the first person who takes action.
If you want to advertise dental savings plans, you might consider targeting retired people who no longer have dental insurance.
If you want to promote a new service, targeting current patients will be more likely to lead to people taking action.
If you want to get people into a dental marketing sales funnel, you can target people who have been to your website (called “retargeting” in the Facebook marketing world) with an ad that gives them a call to action to download a free guide or come in for a consult based on the pages they viewed on your site.
Improving Your Dental Facebook Ads By Choosing the Best Images, Videos, and Copy
Certain words drive people to take action more than others, especially across audiences. The same is true with images and videos. Once you know what you want to accomplish and who you want to target, test different versions of your copy, images, and video. You can do this by creating a split test in Facebook’s ad manager.
Split-testing dental Facebook ads is one of the most powerful ways to lower your advertising costs and getting better results, because it’s not always possible to know what words, image, or video will resonate at any given time.
Split-testing Facebook ads is also easier than you think. In its basic form, to split-test a dental Facebook ad, all you need to do is create an ad, duplicate the ad, replace the text, image, or video, and submit. Here are detailed instructions on how to create a split test in Facebook.
When my team runs dental Facebook advertising campaigns for our dental-marketing clients, we always split-test the dental Facebook ads we set up. By doing so, we lower costs and get better results. To achieve these results, we set up the split-test with a small budget of $3 to $10 per day until we learn which version of the dental Facebook ads is performing the best. Once we choose the winner or winners, we shut off the underperforming ads and let the winners run with an appropriate budget.
Are You Ready to Have the Best Dental Office Facebook Marketing Working for You?
Social media marketing for dentists can be the most powerful way to grow your dental practice, or it can be a complete waste of time or money. By far, the best way to get the highest return on your time and money is Facebook for dentists.
My team has helped hundreds of dentists increase profits, attract new patients, improve social media presence, and lower their advertising costs using Facebook.
If you’re comfortable doing it yourself or having your team do it with (or for) you, I’ve created a full Facebook Mastery course as part of Platinum Mastermind, my online learning center with full step-by-step instructions on everything you need to run and grow your dental practice.
The Training in Platinum Mastermind covers:
Facebook for Dentists
Facebook Marketing for Dental Offices
Email Marketing for Dentists
Online Reviews for Dentists
Dental Office SEO
Facebook Messenger Bots Marketing
How to create a 12-Month Marketing Plan
How to create an In-House Dental Plan
How to set up Strategic Alliances
How to recruit and train a R-O-C-K-S-T-A-R Team
How to get your TEAM aligned to your vision
How to create consistent systems and KPI’s
How to get your patients to say “YES”
How to reverse engineer your production goals
How to set your fees based on margins
How to save on dental supplies
How to decrease overhead
How to create a practice that can run without you
And more!
If you want to know more ways to create shareable content and grow your dental practice on Facebook, you can check out our Signature Marketing Program program or join us in our Platinum Mastermind, where I help dentists like you grow their dental practices so they can make more while working less.
Are you spending a fortune on slow, inexpensive, and ineffective marketing for your dental practice? If so, Facebook marketing might be your solution.
Using Facebook to market a dental practice can help you stop mailing flyers and overpaying for TV and radio spots that don’t bring the right people in the door. Instead, you will be able to get a steady flow of patients with a fraction of the marketing budget.
Facebook has turned the marketing world upside down. You don’t have to have a huge budget or spend a lot of money on overpriced designers anymore. Here are five tips to help you use Facebook marketing to grow your practice.
1. Make sure you’re targeting the right people.
The level of control you have over who sees your ads on Facebook is unprecedented. You can build audiences based on age, location, interests, income, and other key information, and even a combination of a number of qualities.
Unlike traditional dental advertising, you no longer have to spend a lot of money and hope to get the right results. Instead, you’ll spend less money and get your ads directly in front of exactly the right people.
Even better, targeting the right people is really easy to do. I walk dental bosses through it during my growth and marketing challenges and they all catch on right away.
2. Take advantage of retargeting.
We all know the phrase that it takes multiple touchpoints to build any relationship. It’s no different in dentistry. Retargeting is using Facebook ads to create multiple touchpoints with people.
With Facebook retargeting, you identify people who looked at your ad but didn’t sign up. Then, you send special content directly to those people.
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. All you need to do is create content that addresses common objections to moving forward.
For example, sometimes people click on your ad, get distracted, and move on. They just need you to pop up again so that they can reconnect. However, other people might click and then think, “I don’t want to go to the dentist, it’s scary and it might hurt.” A retargeting ad that speaks to pain-free dentistry and shows how calm the process can be could help you convert that person to a patient.
3. Take control of your Facebook budget.
What’s so amazing about marketing on Facebook is that you can decide exactly how much to spend. You’re already saving money by using Facebook marketing to target a very specific group of people and because Facebook charges far less than other forms of advertising.
But you can also set a fixed budget so you can calculate exactly how much you’re spending on each lead — and exactly how much you’re spending to get a new patient in the door.
In fact, a lot of the dental bosses who go through my training reach leads for 1-3 cents each. In other words, for every dollar they put into Facebook advertising, they’re reaching between 30 and 100 potential new patients. We’ve seen cases where dentists put in as little as $4 to get new patients booked for high-end cosmetic dentistry procedures, too. You can’t get that kind of ROI with traditional marketing.
4. Move quickly.
Facebook marketing is much faster than traditional media platforms.Takedirect-mail campaigns, for example. You need to design a mailing, hire someone to write it, and get it proofed, printed, and delivered before anyone even sees it. That could take weeks.
Radio and TV are the same. You need to write, record, edit, buy the ad space, and get it played. All of that takes weeks — and then you have to wait even longer to see how people respond to your ad.
With Facebook marketing, you can have an ad up and running to a highly-targeted audience with a compelling offer within minutes. And you can have new patients in the chair within days, long before traditional campaigns were even designed.
5. Embrace the flexibility that Facebook marketing offers you.
With traditional marketing, after you’ve waited weeks to get your ad in front of people, it takes even more time to gauge the response. And if something isn’t working, you need to go back to the drawing board for another expensive and time-consuming round of edits.
With Facebook, you can see right away whether a campaign is working the way you want. If it’s not, you can edit and improve it with a few clicks.
You can even test multiple versions of Facebook ads at the same time. Split-testing, as this is called, helps you test alternate copy, images, offers, colors, target audiences and more. Facebook allows you to split your budget to test multiple versions of an ad and then tell you which ads are performing the best. Once you find the winners, direct your budget to those ads and enjoy even better results.
Are you using Facebook to grow your dental practice?
If you’re still marketing your dental practice like it’s 1999, you’re likely spending way too much money and getting lackluster results. Save some money and improve your results by using Facebook to market your dental practice.
If you’re looking for training or coaching for your team to accelerate your growth, click here to learn more.
And if you want to join a community of Dental Bosses just like you, I have a Facebook group where over 1000 Dental Bosses are already learning and growing together. Join us in the Dental Boss Movement Facebook group if you want support and training as you grow your dental practice.
If you’re ready to get new patients using social media but don’t know how, these four simple tips can help. Before social media, marketing a dental practice was slow, expensive, and inefficient. A single ad would take days to create and weeks to reach your audience. If you needed to make a change, you’d have to start over, spending days more creating the ad and weeks more waiting for the new ad to reach people.
With social media you can move much faster and more efficiently. You can create an ad that reaches people within minutes. And if you need to create a change, you can do it in minutes, too.
Even better, the cost to reach people using social media marketing is much more cost-effective than in traditional platforms. With my practice, I get more patients using a $500 per month social media budget than I was getting spending thousands on traditional marketing methods.
If you want to use social media in your dental marketing plan, these four tips can help. Tip four, alone, is a gamechanger.
1. Set a strong foundation.
Too many dental practices sign up for social media accounts and immediately start blasting marketing messages to the world. They move forward without a plan, goal, or foundation in place. That’s a surefire way to get frustrated. Within days, they run out of things to say, begin to think social media doesn’t work, and give up.
To avoid this, plan a few ideas for how you will create content that dental patients are likely to connect with. What is your practice story? What is your practice known for? What can patients expect when they come to your office and what do you do differently? Do you give hand and arm massages like we do in my practice? Do you provide gourmet coffees and teas?
Write down the answers to all of those questions. Be as specific as you can. Then, for each question, write down why that item is important to potential patients.
For example, if you give back to your community, write down all the ways you give back. Then, write down why you give back. Did you grow up in the area? Do you want to make a special impact on the neighborhood? Or, do you want to help advance a cause or solve a local problem? Write those down. Soon you will have a long list of content about what your practice does differently than others and the reasons why those are important to you.
The answers to those questions give you a strong database of content that builds relationships with potential patients.
2. Regularly create sharable content.
Take a look at your social media accounts. How much engagement do you get? Do a lot of people like or love your posts? Do they comment or share? If not, begin to focus on making emotional connections with your social media following.
Ask yourself why someone would want to share your content. If you only post about dental care, nobody will share that. But what if you post about how you impact your community or all the amazing things your patients are doing in their business and personal lives? How much more likely will people be to share those posts?
You can also share video testimonials and office tours explaining all the things your patients experience and why you do it. Think of all the things that make your practice unique. For example, one thing that makes my practice different is that we have the kids go to the toy box before their appointment. This allows us to make friends first. Kids and parents love it! When we share about this on Facebook we get strong engagements from parents who know the difference this small change can make to their kids’ dental experience.
3. Run community engagement campaigns.
One of the best social campaigns you can run is what I call community engagement campaigns.
Examples of community engagement campaigns include Project Smile Makeover competitions and gift card giveaways donated from local businesses in your community. They also include things like Tooth Talk Thursdays, and even crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for local charities.
Community engagement campaigns work well because people will want to share them. When done well, hundreds or even thousands of people in your community will see them.
4. Always offer people the next logical step.
With a strong foundation, shareable content, and community engagement campaigns in place, you will be ready to achieve incredible growth and connection. You will grow your followers and build trust and familiarity with people in your community. That level of following and trust will position you to convert social media fans to patients at a much greater clip than before.
With social media, however, it’s critical to actively offer people the next logical step to moving forward if you want to convert followers to patients. People will rarely take the next step without you asking them to do so.
While there are several ways to call people to action, one of the best ways to do so while achieving a high return on your investment is to place targeted ads for high-dollar services, such as dental implants. Your ads can direct people to a dental marketing funnel, to schedule an appointment online, or even to take an online quiz to qualify for a free consultation.
Are you ready to get more patients using social media?
Now that you've gained clarity about how to use social media in your dental marketing plan, it's time to take action.
If you’re looking for training or coaching for your team to accelerate your growth, click here to learn more.
Have you ever wondered if there is a “golden hour” to post on Facebook? In other words, is there a specific time of the day when your posts will get the most engagement?
I get asked this question a lot, and I really wanted to address it in this podcast episode. However, like last week, this episode is a recording of one of my Facebook Live videos, so it’s a little different (but just as good!).
I wanted to share my knowledge with you and provide some useful tips to help you find the best time to post on Facebook for your practice to get the best possible results.
On the podcast I discuss:
Using Insights to track activity on your Facebook page
How to identify the best time of day to publish your posts
Tips for pre-scheduling Facebook posts
Promoting a time-sensitive event or post using Facebook’s Distribution Schedule
Boosting your posts using Ads Manager
Why you should plan your Facebook posts in advance
Working with your team to create a productive posting schedule
Keep up with the Delivering WOW podcast by following us on Facebook.
If you want to find out how to get 30+ new patients per month through the power of Facebook Marketing, head over to my Facebook Bootcamp and join the Bootcamp today!
To watch the video of this recording where you can see my screen as I'm talking you through the best time to post on Facebook, hit play below:
Facebook for dentists is the best social media site to help you reach potential patients for your practice. Although Facebook doesn’t charge you to have a dental Facebook page or to post on your Facebook page, its algorithm limits the reach of posts unless one of two things happens:
You pay Facebook to promote the post as a standalone dental Facebook ad or a boosted dental Facebook post, or
Facebook sees people engaging with a post.
With paid posts, Facebook will generally share it with as many people as you pay to reach. That’s a great option for many dentists. My team and I have received up to 5,000% return on ads we’ve placed for my practice and other dentists we serve through our dental marketing done-for-you services.
To reach more people organically, your post needs to get them to engage with it by liking or otherwise reacting to it, commenting on it, or sharing it on their timeline.
Just like your goal might be to attract as many people as possible to your page and keep them there or get them to your site or your dental marketing funnel, Facebook wants users to stay on its site as long as possible. Thus, it wants to make their experience there as pleasant as possible and reduces the organic reach of business posts until it believes people like it. One of the ways it determines that is through engagement. The more people interact with your post, the more people Facebook will show it to organically.
The Best Dental Facebook Posts for Organic Reach
The best dental Facebook posts to help you increase organic reach are those that capture people’s attention while doing one or more of the following things:
Sharing your practice story
Sharing your core values
Showing what makes your practice unique
Evoking a positive emotion in people on a personal level
For example, in my practice, we stock our office with gourmet coffees and teas, lend iPads and noise-canceling headphones to patients, participate in community events, host charity drives, and regularly run contests and competitions. When we post about those activities—especially with great photos—we take or videos we make, our posts get dozens and even hundreds of likes, comments, and shares, and our posts reach thousands of people.
Other examples of good posts include those that:
are about a kids’ club program logo you have or a picture of a happy kids’ club member
celebrate with a great team member
show off group perks you give your team members such as the loaded e-readers we give to ours
feature events you host at your office
highlight a team-building event like a night out or baby shower
celebrate local events
show you donating dental services to less fortunate people
share patient testimonials
For my practice, we posted about community impact being one of our core values and included an image of us smiling with the winner of our free smile makeover giveaway competition, which we call Project Smiles. That post got dozens of engagements and reached 5,000 people organically because it got people’s attention and gave them something to connect with emotionally.
Another Project Smiles post reached over 10,000 people organically before we added an additional 45,000 people to our reach with a small paid boost.
Both of those posts had great imagery, shared some of our practice’s story, core values, and what makes us different than other dental practices. They were about building stronger communities and showed how we were making a difference. Thus, we were able to evoke a positive emotion in people and earn their engagement.
The more people engaged, the more people we reached, which helped us:
capture more people’s attention in a positive way
share our practice story with more people
get our practice name seen in more feeds
get people to know, like, and trust us
convert people to patients
get in front of current patients who might need a subtle reminder to schedule another patient
When your dental Facebook page is set up professionally and optimized to build relationships with people, this engagement can help you skyrocket your ability to convert strangers to patients.
The Worst Dental Facebook Posts for Organic Reach
Just like certain types of dental Facebook posts can encourage and increase engagement, other types can restrict engagement for the same reasons. If you’re on Facebook as a user, what posts capture your attention? What posts are you most likely to engage with?
Most users won’t be interested in stock content, boring posts, or negative imagery such as the picture of an in-progress wisdom-tooth extraction I saw on another dentist’s timeline! Those posts can be simple and easy to find, but they’re unlikely to earn any engagement or reach.
When planning your post to maximize engagement, get into the mindset of a Facebook user. Would you be interested in that post if it were in your feed? If your answer is no, don’t post it.
Instead, ask how you can change the post to be more interesting to and evoke emotion in people on Facebook.
Are Your Dental Facebook Posts Not Earning Engagement and Reach?
If you struggle to get people to engage with your dental Facebook posts, it might be that they don’t evoke emotions within people to earn their engagement.
If you want more help with dental Facebook marketing, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.
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.
Any time you decide to start running paid ads, you want to make sure that you are getting results! However, before you do, you have to know what types of messages drive people to take ACTION and how to find people who are likely to convert.
I share top strategies and tips, and take you behind the scenes of my Facebook Campaign that's giving a 5000% ROI.
I also share top strategies for increasing engagement, how to get your posts to go viral, and how to use little-known features of Facebook to boost your results!
Facebook has once again changed it's algorithm…which determines what people see in their news feeds. Facebook has stated that they will start to give priority to posts from friends and family, and place them at the top of news feeds. They've also stated that they want to make sure that users are getting informative and entertaining content..
You might be wondering how this impacts the dental industry…Well here's the low-down…
Gone are the days when you can post non-engaging, stock content on your Facebook page and expect it to be seen.
Now it takes creating SHARABLE content…AND…Embracing Facebook ADS….
I'm super excited about the algorithm changes because the PAID ADVERTISING platform has gotten really good…
Now you can create ads which can be seen in the news feeds of people who have visited your website, or specific pages of your website…
You can do Facebook Live streaming about a particular service that you provide, and retarget the same people that watched your video with Facebook ads that drive them to take action and come in for that service…
Even better, you can create video ads now for as low as $.01 to get your message in front of your ideal new patient…
You just can't do that with other forms of paid advertising…
This is truly an exciting time to market your practice….and get your message in front of your ideal new patient…which drives them to take action, schedule an appointment, and start treatment!!!
In my practice, we have been able to change thousands of lives of patients who first connected with us on Facebook…
They saw our message, and knew that we could help them…
In this video I share my a-ha moment of discovering the POWER of Facebook, as well as share 3 Super Strategies for Succeeding with the new Facebook Algorithm!
Many dentists want to know, do Facebook likes matter. Is focusing on growing your Facebook community worth your time and investment? Well, after building a phenomenal dental practice that has over 50,000 Facebook followers and consistently getting a 1500% ROI on Facebook, I have to say it absolutely matters!
So why are Facebook fans so important? Well, there are several reasons. The first, and perhaps one of the most important, is that once you grow a large community of loyal fans, you increase your chances that your Facebook page will be seen. It's all about numbers!
The more fans that you have talking about you, sharing your posts and liking your content, the more your posts will go viral. Facebook allows you to build a tribe of raving fans!
By the way, building your Facebook likes will build social proof. Once people come to your page and they see that you have thousands of fans, they think, “Ok, this practice is doing something right.” and then they want to know more! Also, the more fans you have, the more your posts get shared on Facebook, which helps to build your community, and ultimately your new patients.
In this lesson, here’s what you'll get:
In this lesson, I’ll share with you three incredibly simple, but extremely valuable, Facebook fan attracting tips. Implement these strategies and you will start to see more fans today. It's that simple!
Strategy #1: The Facebook Page Plugin
The Facebook page plugin lets you easily embed and promote any Facebook page on your website. Just like on Facebook, your visitors can like and share your Facebook page without leaving your site. To keep it simple, when visitors are browsing your website, there should always be an objective. There should always be an action that you want your visitors to take. One of these actions should be for them to like your Facebook page. Your website visitors will see a small box which includes your Facebook cover photo, a list of their friends who like your Facebook page, and a button to like your page. They also have the ability to watch the featured video attached to your Facebook page.
Here’s why you should add a Facebook Page Plugin to your website:
Visitors to your website are warm, which means that they have chosen to find out more about you. This means that they are likely to follow your Facebook Page too.
A Facebook Page Plugin is one of the most effective ways to grow your fan community. It is super easy to implement (takes less than 5 minutes!) and will allow first-time visitors to your site to keep in touch with what is going on in your practice.
Strategy #2: Target Friends of Fans with Facebook “Like Ads”
A very easy, inexpensive way to get more likes is by targeting friends of your current Facebook fans. The reason this strategy works is that friends of your current fans will likely have similar demographics to your current fans. They live in similar communities, have similar interests, and are likely to make similar decisions when it comes to which restaurant to explore or which dentist to visit.
Here’s why “Like Ads” work:
Like ads are the simplest to set up and are super cheap. These promotions can be boosted right from your page without having to go to the ads manager and take seconds to set up. When you attract friends of your existing fans, you are more likely to attract a “quality” fan.
Strategy #3: Target Your Existing Patients
This strategy is huge! A very easy way to boost your likes, and fast, is to target your existing patients. This means that your posts get seen in the news feeds of people who already know, like, and trust you. Once you create an engaging post that talks about great things that are going on behind the scenes in your practice, they will very likely react to the post and like your page. You do this easily by creating a custom audience within Facebook Ads Manager.
Here’s why you should target your existing patients:
Your existing patients are going to be the cheerleaders on your Facebook page, no matter if you are just getting started or when you grow thousands of fans. They will like and share your posts, and provide social proof that your practice is the best as well as share stories with their friends of why they should become a patient of your practice.
Strategy #4: Target People Who Have Similar Characteristics To Your Current Patients
This strategy is taking growing your fan base one step higher! Once you have created your custom audience of your existing patients, the next step is to create an audience that has similar characteristics to your existing patients. You do this by creating a lookalike audience. So basically you say “Facebook, create a list for me of people who have similar characteristics to my current patients. This is easily set up in Facebook Manager-Tools-Audiences-Create Audience-Lookalike Audience.
Here’s why you should create a lookalike audience to your current patients:
Lookalike audiences, created by Facebook, are those people who are most like your existing patients. This one is a no-brainer! This means that your posts are seen in the news feeds of people who are not current patients, but because of their likes, interests, or demographics are likely to become patients.
Strategy #5: Create a Website Custom Audience
Website Custom Audiences (also known WCA) allow you to create Facebook ads to target people who have previously visited your website.
Why is this so amazing??
Website Custom Audiences is one more way to reach an incredibly warm audience. People that have already been to your website are already exposed to your brand. Once they see your posts showing up in their feeds, they are very likely to become a fan and keep engaging with you. Website Custom Audiences allows you to target your visitors organically. Custom audiences allow you to target your patient list, but now you can reach people who may not be a patient nor a current Facebook fan but they have visited your website.
Another very cool feature is that you can focus on those who visited a particular page or a section of your site. You can also concentrate on those who visited pages that included a particular keyword in the URL.
This customization potential for such ads is incredible.
Strategy #6: Increase Your Engagement
Here’s how engagement will help you attract more fans:
One of the most common reasons why people struggle to grow their Facebook fan base is that they don't have any engagement on their page.
If you don’t have engagement your posts won’t be seen in the news feed that is where all the action is on Facebook! You want to make sure that people are liking, reacting, commenting and sharing your content, and you must be responsive. You never want people to ask a question, and no one is there to respond.
When you get your fans to comment and share your content, their friends will also want to jump on the bandwagon. Lots of people like to follow the crowd, and when their Facebook friends are sharing your posts, they want to know why and will want to be part. (These shares also mean that you don’t have to pay for the engagement, it just happens naturally). If you want to increase your fan base, increase your engagement!
Strategy #7: Be Consistent
The final step to increasing your fans on Facebook is to be consistent. Far too many dentists post way to infrequently to see any real results. You must create a consistent schedule for posts, and make sure that they are posts worth sharing. I recommend posting at least once daily, especially while you are growing your fan base.
Tips to help with consistency are to share the posting tasks with a member of your team using the Facebook Pages app, schedule your posts within Facebook itself, or use a scheduling automation software like Meet Edgar.
And the excitement with Live Video continues every day…
Facebook has just announced 3 BIG new features which they will be rolling out to Facebook Live, their live-streaming platform built into Facebook.
The platform will soon let you do two-person remote broadcasts, pre-schedule your streams and create a virtual waiting room for viewers and broadcast with MSQRD's face masks.
OK so what does this mean for Dentists?
This means that dental practices will be able to pre-schedule the time that they are going live, so that the users can hang out and wait for a broadcast to start. This will allow Facebook to send users a notification before the stream starts so they can be waiting when you go live.
The other new features will allow you to invite a friend to your broadcast and use filters, such as those available in Snapchat, to go live with a mask on.
Another big announcement was made yesterday, as it relates to live streaming, this one with YouTube:
“Today, we are announcing a new chapter in bringing the power of live video to creators everywhere. Soon, we’ll be putting the power of YouTube live streaming in the palm of your hands.
YouTube mobile live streaming will be bakes right into the core YouTube app. You won't need to open anything else, just hit the big red capture button right there in the corner, take or select a photo to use as a thumbnail, and you can broadcast live to your fans and chat in near real time.”
2016 is the year of LIVE video. Dental practices who are early adopters will have the advantage.
Woohoo.. We have made it to Episode 30…And this is a GOOD one!
In this Episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast, I take the time to answer the most commonly asked questions that I get from dentists….
1.) Where Should I Begin When Starting To Market My Practice.
2.) Why Do You Feel That All Dentists Need to Use Facebook to Market Their Practices?
3.) Why is Facebook Marketing NOT Working for Me to Get New Patients?
4.) How Do I know How Much To Spend on Marketing.
Here I discuss which forms of marketing work as well as where to start. I discuss which forms of Marketing give the best ROI, and well as how to calculate ROI. I discuss the role of targeted marketing, and how it can help you to reach your ideal audience and grow your new patient list.
A lot of time is given to common mistakes that dentists make with Facebook, as well as how that impacts their new patient numbers. A special focus is given to how to determine your marketing budget.
Is your practice on social media? If not, you are missing out on an excellent opportunity to grow your practice. The average American spends 40 minutes per day on Facebook.
This is HUGE!
Facebook has made a significant impact on my practice. We currently receive more than 40 new patients a month from Facebook alone. Facebook is our #1 strategy for external marketing. Why? Because it works. Facebook is where we share our practice story, our culture. People see us having fun and see us impacting so many lives in our community. From Facebook, followers go to our website, they see pictures of our dentists and our team as well as see beautiful before and after photos of our dental work.
We love referrals from Facebook! These new patients walk in already connected — they know us. They feel like we are their personal friends. People buy from people that they like and trust, and acquiring new patients from Facebook builds that confidence.
We currently have an active Facebook page with more than 50,000 Fans, which we have grown one like at a time. We post updates there that show off our culture and spread our brand message. We are known as the fun, friendly office that provides an amazing experience, beautiful dentistry, and gives back to the community.
It’s crucial when you are creating your social strategy that you realize that you will not get 1,000 Fans overnight. It starts one Fan at a time. It also starts by creating killer posts that evoke emotion.
Sometimes you may hear dentists say, “Oh Facebook doesn’t work, or Instagram doesn’t work,” and so you assume those are not worth your time….
But maybe it’s not working because their posts are not engaging….
Maybe they stopped too soon….
Maybe they think they have to do it all themselves…
Or maybe they don't know what they don't know. That Facebook has the #1 Ads platform in the world, and that once they learn (or have their team learn) how to mix engaging content with ad strategy, their practice will IGNITE…
ARE YOU READY TO MASTER FACEBOOK TO IGNITE YOUR PRACTICE?
“2016 is the YEAR of Live Video, and the Year to get Active on Facebook!” Michael Stelzner- Social Media Marketing World 2016!
I have said this from early 2016, and it was stated very clearly at Social Media Marketing World, the largest Social Media Marketing Conference in the world. This is the year to get your practice on Facebook, as there are some massive advancements happening that can allow you to connect with your future patients in a powerful way.
Social media has become an effective way to attract quality new patients to your practice. The key to successful social media marketing is a combination of excellent content and a proven strategy. In this episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast, Dr. Holmes is interviewed by Gary Takacs of the Thriving Dentist Show. In this interview Gary and Anissa discuss; Why social media is the new media, why dentists need to include social media in their marketing activities, the specific strategies dentists need to use to successfully attract new patients via social media and the new FaceBook rollouts and features that will impact the dental profession.
“Anissa is THE recognized expert in social media marketing and you will LOVE her passion for social media and helping fellow dentists master social media marketing!” – Gary Takacs
Every once in a while, there is a major change that effects how businesses reach their customers. And guess what? Facebook has just changed the game.
Facebook has just rolled out Facebook Live, and this new feature is going to change the game for dentists as they are trying to market their practices.
So what is Facebook Live?
Facebook “Live” offers the ability to create and watch live videos within Facebook as the action happens. While you’re recording the live video, your fans are able to comment and interact with you. Once you are streaming, your fans are able to comment on your video, and you are able to respond while on the stream. Your fans can also subscribe to get notifications of when you come on LIVE.
But here's how Facebook Live is a game-changer! Once the livestream is complete, the video will post on your practice's Facebook page just like your regular videos. This means that your fans can continue to engage with your video and ask questions even after the live stream is complete. You can also boost your replay with ads. And here is the kicker. Your fans can SHARE your video. (Talk about going VIRAL!)
Here's How I see Dentists Using Facebook Live:
•Q and A Sessions about Dental Services
•Live Office Tours
•Demonstration of New Equipment and/or Technology
•Announcement of Promotions
•Chat with the Dentist/Hygienist
•Patient Financing Chats with the Front Office
•etc…
On my FIRST day of using Facebook Live, here were my stats: After 5 hours, the video replay reached 1345 people, was viewed 245 times and had a ton of engagement. All WITHOUT being boosted.
Two days after going live, I created an ad for a later stream replay to be seen in the newsfeeds of friends of my current Facebook fans. I set my ad budget at $10.00. Here are the results: 8966 Views, 47 likes, 11 comments, and 11 shares.
With every stream that you do, your subscriber numbers will increase, your videos will be shared, and there will be a ton of new likes to your page as well as plenty of engagement. And guess what happens when you get more engagement? Facebook sees your page as relevant, and more of your posts get seen organically in your fan's feeds.
Here's How You Start a Live Stream
To Create a Live Stream, Click Publish From Your Mobile Device.
The next step is to tap the Live Icon.
The final step is to choose an eye-catching headline (including emojis), and tap Go Live!
Once you complete your stream, you can always edit the video title, add in video tags which help with search, and create a call to action.
Here are some of the latest features that are rolling out:
·Live reactions. This makes it easy for your viewers to express their feelings in real time during a live broadcast. Viewers can select Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry, and the reactions animate right on top of the video. Live Reactions appear in real time and disappear quickly so broadcasters and other viewers can get a sense of how people are feeling at different points during the live video – it’s like hearing the crowd applaud and cheer.
·Filters and Doodles- you will be able to draw on the screen in different colors to personalize your broadcast.
·Dedicated Place for Discovery- The Messenger icon will be moved and replaced with the Videos icon. This will allow people to find and search for videos by topic.
·Invite Friends- when viewers are watching the videos they will be able to invite their friends to watch the stream live.
·Replay comments as they happen. As you are streaming, viewers’ questions will be available for the replay in the order that they were asked. This will allow for a natural flow of the stream.
·Live Broadcast Audience. This will allow you to track the total number of unique people who watched the video while it was live
·Viewers During Live Broadcast. You can see a visual representation of the number of viewers during each moment of the broadcast. This will allow you to see how long it would take to build momentum and how long you should broadcast.
Here's How to Make the Most Out Of Facebook Live:
1.Let your fans know when you are going live. A great example is letting your fans know that you will discuss dental implants on Friday at 12:00 p.m.
2. Write an eye-catching description before going live. This will let your fans know what your broadcast is all about. This is also what your subscribers will see when they get your notifications.
3.OK, so this one is huge! Ask your viewers to subscribe. During your stream tell your fans to tap on the subsribe button to get notifications the next time you go live
4.People feel more connected when you acknowledge them. Call your fans by name and answer their questions when you are live.
5.Broadcast for longer periods of time to reach more fans. The longer you broadcast, the more likely fans are to discover and share your video with their friends on Facebook.
This WEEK is ALL about VIDEO, and the importance of using video to grow your brand. Are you using Video to grow your brand? If not, you are missing out on a fabulous opportunity to connect with your audience. This includes your patients, and your soon to be patients. As dentists and businesses owners, you have to do video! The great thing about video is that it allows you to connect with the most people. They are able to see and hear your message and feel your passion.
I often talk about being an early adopter. Video is the next BIG thing. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat are all telling us that this is where we need to be.
Facebook has Facebook Live video streaming, where you can be notified when someone you follow comes on live, with a replay which can be shared. Instagram has just rolled out 60 second video ads, Twitter has Periscope which broadcasts video— both live and replays — directly into Tweets. Snapchat features video both in video chats and stories.
Right now this “Video” space is wide open because many people are afraid of it. However, this will change. You want to get in early.
Video is also the best way to get your patients to market your practice for you. Written testimonials are great, but when your soon to be patients see your real patients sharing real stories of their transformations in your practice, your new patient numbers will skyrocket.
I am kicking off a 7 day Challenge. Here's how it works:
·I challenge you to use a smartphone in your practice to take a video patient testimonial, kick off a promotion, or share your culture.
·Next, upload the video directly into your practice's Facebook page.
·Share the link to your video in the Delivering WOW Hangout, my FREE Facebook group so we can all love on you!
·Finally, test the results of the clicks, likes, shares, and reactions versus your photo posts.
You have 7 days to post. Do you say you want results, or are you taking ACTION to get results? Ready, set go!!!
Want to make better videos with your mobile device? Here's the gear I recommend
