If you’re searching for a dental marketing plan that works, you came to the right place. Dental marketing has come a long way since the days when phone book ads were the way to go.
Today, a good dental marketing plan includes both offline and online marketing strategies. But many dental practices struggle to choose dental marketing plans that work with so many options. Here are three proven dental marketing strategies that work today.
1. Serve your patients well.
Many times, dental practices that put together a dental marketing plan focus solely on marketing to new clients. While that’s natural, a practice’s best and fastest path to higher profits is often by serving patients well.
One way to serve patients well is to implement a monthly newsletter to stay top of mind. Include in your newsletter what you have done that month to serve your community. Include a featured service. Highlight continuing education, new services, and exciting team members and practice accomplishments. Your newsletter demonstrates your commitment to the community and serving patients well in a way that gives patients a gentle reminder to schedule their next appointment.
In addition to a newsletter, look for ways to add excitement to your practice. For example, you can start a kid's club. We implemented one in my practice and kids love it. Each kid gets a t-shirt. When they come in, they get a printed kids’ newsletter that we produce every three months or so that includes a special deal at a local business, which we arrange with other businesses. We also include a few dental tips for kids. The kids love it and feel very special.
Finally, make sure your patients feel like VIPs when they’re in your practice. One thing we do in my practice is bring out warm peppermint scented towels on a silver platter at the end of the treatment, so people can wipe their hands, or even freshen up their face. Patients love it.
There are lots of things that you can do for existing patients to make them feel like VIPs. By doing so, you generate loyalty and raving fans that will start referring you to their family, friends, and coworkers.
2. Build community engagement.
Another dental marketing strategy that works is to invest in getting your community to talk about you. This is an area I'm really excited about because it works so well while improving your local community. I’ve helped a number of practices implement these campaigns in their community, too, and it works incredibly well.
One of the best things about community engagement campaigns is their simplicity. For example, one community engagement campaign that works well is a clothing drive. In my practice, one successful campaign we conducted was a post-Christmas clothing drive. We encouraged people to clear out their drawers and drop off clothes at our office. We then randomly selected someone to win a gift card toward services in our practice who dropped off clothes.
Other examples of community engagement campaigns include having a free kid's dental day or doing coloring contests for kids. You can promote and implement these types of campaigns easily by sharing on social media and even build an email marketing list by having people submit their email to be able to download the coloring sheet.
Finally, one of the most impactful and successful campaigns you can do is to conduct a Project Smile competition, where you ask people to nominate someone for a chance to receive a new smile. Project Smile campaigns are extremely powerful, very fulfilling, and it's really great for your team health and culture.
3. Create a consistent presence and strategy.
The third strategy that works is to be simple and consistent with your marketing. Way too many practices market in piecemeal. They have one look, feel, and messaging on their website but their marketing campaigns look completely different. Others only market online but not offline. Others market only offline.
As simple as it sounds, the most successful practices maintain a clear, consistent, presence and marketing strategy both online and offline. They market online but don’t forget about serving their patients and investing in their community. They have a professional, modern website but also brochures that patients can pick up. They market to patients but also other businesses, dropping off brochures at pediatricians and other medical providers in their area. They go out of their way to thank people who refer patients to the practice and strike deals with local businesses to give their customers or employees special treatment or a special deal.
If your marketing plan doesn’t seem to work very well, it might be that you are investing too much time and attention on only one type of marketing. A simple, consistent, balanced approach to dental marketing helps maintain a more consistent, professional message throughout your potential patient pool.
Do you need a dental marketing plan that works?
With so many dental marketing plans available, it’s easy to get stuck spending money on marketing that doesn’t work. If you’ve struggled to build momentum with your marketing, three strategies can help.
When you’re looking for information, what’s the first thing you do? You pull out your phone or pull up a web browser and go straight to Google. Well, guess what? Your potential patients do exactly the same thing when they’re looking for dental information or to find a new dentist.
Google is the number one search engine, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the default we all turn to when we need information. That’s why I’m going to tell you how you can turn all of those Google searches into an amazing marketing tool for your business, and it’s only going to take you about five minutes to set up using Google My Business. Here’s how.
Update and customize your Google My Business page.
You might already have a Google My Business page set up for your practice, but many practices are not making the most of their pages. If you’ve never taken the time to customize your business page, you definitely want to do that. Start by updating your business hours, adding an online scheduling link, and verifying your location so people can pop it right into their GPS or navigation app and find you.
But if you want to really get the most out of Google My Business, you’ll want to take things one step further and add some real, live video testimonials to your page. That way, when potential patients land there, they’ll be able to see your happy patients talking about their amazing experiences in your office.
If you don’t already have video testimonials, the next step will be to start collecting them. If you do, here’s how you can easily collect even more.
Ask patients about their experience at the end of each visit.
If you’re already a part of the Dental Boss Movement, you know I’m a big believer in the importance of asking your patients about their experience at the end of each visit. This is really important information to have, in general, because it helps you and your team focus on consistently providing an exceptional experience every single time.
And when you are focusing on delivering that WOW factor with every single patient, it’s a good bet that your patient will say, “Yeah, this was a great visit.” Utilize any constructive feedback to improve.
Ask your happy patients to record a short video testimonial.
When a patient raves about their experience, ask them to record a short testimonial on the spot. Keep it simple. You can say, “Well, you know, we’d really love it if you’d let us record a quick video with you to talk about how things went today.”
Emphasize that there are a lot of people who are afraid to go to the dentist, and hearing from real people like them might just change someone’s life. More often than you might expect, patients will spare two or three minutes to film it quickly.
Upload the video to your Facebook and Google My Business pages.
Once you record that video, start sharing it on social media. Get it uploaded to your Facebook page, maybe repurpose it for an ad. You can target the people who watch it with a special ad campaign.
Also, take that same video and upload it directly to Google so anytime someone lands on your listing, that video review pops up. You don’t need to edit it at all. Just use the same video. It is very reassuring for potential patients to see a real patient talking about the incredible experience they had at your practice.
Even better, if you get into the habit of uploading videos to your Google My Business page regularly, your listing will really stand out from others. Very few people realize that Google even offers this option. So while other practices might have an ordinary listing with practice hours and maybe a map, you’ll have a page that really establishes you as an authority.
Add other videos to your Google My Business page so patients get to know you better.
You can add all kinds of videos to your page so don’t stop with only testimonials. Anytime you’re running a community campaign, if you’re helping raise funds for a local charity, or if you go live on your Facebook page to talk about dental care, you can download that video and re-upload it directly to your Google My Business page. You can download any video you record live on Facebook with just a couple of clicks. Uploading them directly to your Google My Business page gets you double the exposure and traffic without any additional work.
What's especially great is that you can then add buttons to your page, so people can schedule an appointment or call the practice with a single click. That’s very helpful when someone’s on mobile.
Are you using Google My Business to grow your dental practice?
If you build out your Google My Business page the right way and make it easy for patients to find your practice when they search on Google, you can start to see a regular flow of patients come from Google searches.
If you want more help, check out my marketing and practice growth challenge where we help you put together and execute a plan to get more patients and build a WOW dental practice. 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. Join us in the Dental Boss Movement Facebook group.
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 want help, join me for the Marketing and Practice Growth challenge, where you’ll learn exactly how to get your practice up and running the right way. 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 want help, join my growth and marketing challenge where I’ll walk you through exactly what you need to do, step by step.
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.
Would you like to learn how you can get more traffic from Google and grow your practice? If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, join me on this episode of the podcast for an insightful discussion with Brett Allen, the CEO and Co-Founder of Marketing 32.
Marketing 32 is a Google Marketing Agency for Dentists and Dental Specialists. The team at Marketing 32 are also the creators of “Google Made Easy for Dentists” which is a step-by-step program that is transforming the industry by helping dentist do their own SEO and Google Ads.
Brett and I have a very interesting talk about how dentists can leverage digital marketing to attract more patients and explode the growth of their practices. So, if you're struggling to fill up your appointment schedule or you just want to expand your practice and accelerate its growth, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for!
On the podcast we discussed…
Why you should use multiple traffic sources to help grow your practice
How to leverage relationships and get people in your community to talk about you
Strategies for using Google Marketing to reach new potential patients
The difference between search-based marketing and display & retargeting marketing
How you can use funnels to educate and convert patients
Tips for choosing the best keywords for your ads
If you want to learn more about Brett and Marketing 32, you can visit their website.
Brett and his team have also created a Google Ad training course for dentists, where you can learn how to leverage the power of Google Ads to help grow your practice. To find out more about this amazing course, go to marketing32.com/go
Here is a short video trailer of the podcast episode where Brett explains how to use Google Marketing to grow your practice.
I’ve got a wonderful guest on the podcast who is also a key member of my inner circle, and that’s none other than Dr. Erin Issac. Dr. Erin Isaac is a Pediatric Dentist in Winning Smiles Pediatric Dental Care in Pittsburgh.
Winning Smiles Pediatric Dental Care is a welcoming, relaxing and fun space for children, helping to make the experience a lot less nerve-wracking. Their mission is to provide kids with high-quality dental education and treatment needed to grow into happy, healthy adults.
Dr. Erin attended the prestigious Ivy League, University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, in Philadelphia. To further her knowledge of dentistry for kids, Dr. Erin continued her education with a rigorous residency program at the nationally ranked Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, where she earned a certificate in pediatric dentistry.
Besides making kids smile, Dr. Erin enjoying playing sports, spending time with family and friends, cooking, photography, fashion modeling and empowering young girls to be whatever they want to be and traveling the globe.
On the podcast we discussed…
What inspired Erin to become a Pediatric Dentist
Empowering women and young people to go after the job they want
The importance of doing a job that you really love
How Erin chased her dream of being a model alongside her career in dentistry
Why you shouldn’t be afraid to share your story with others
The problem with comparing yourself to others
How sharing your story and being your ‘true self’ can actually help to bring more patients into your practice
Overcoming challenges and motivating yourself to keep moving forward
Understanding that it’s okay to reach out to people for help or support
The benefits of having a mentor, coach or being part of a supportive group
How to increase your team’s accountability and boost productivity
If you want to find out more about Erin’s practice, head to the Winning Smiles Paediatric Dental Care website or follow Erin on Instagram @dr_erin.
To watch a video trailer of the episode where Erin talks about how sharing her story helped to attract more patients to her practice, hit play below:
The power of marketing funnels for growing your practice is nothing short of revolutionary. Not only do they help you automate time-consuming conversations you or your team would normally need to do in-person or on the phone, but they can also help you test and refine marketing efforts without having to invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. In short, dental marketing funnels help you make more money in less time while taking more control over the direction of your practice.
For these reasons and more, every dental office should implement funnels into their dental marketing plan. Here are three types of marketing funnels to add to your dental marketing plan to help you skyrocket your profits and patient numbers.
1. Dental Marketing Funnels Designed to Sell Additional Existing Services to Current Patients.
One of the easiest ways to increase your profitability is through offering additional services to current patients. This is because you’ve already broken down the four biggest barriers to business with them, including getting them to know, like, trust, and have already paid you money either directly or through their insurance plan. With those four barriers broken down, you don’t have to worry as much about getting their attention and convincing them that you’re trustworthy and likable enough to do business with you.
The only barriers you’ll have to break down through your funnel is the barriers they have with additional services that can benefit them.
To implement this type of funnel, follow this process for building a dental marketing funnel. Once you have that funnel set up, with a high-value piece of opt-in content, you can reach out to your current patients in whatever way you typically get the most engagement to get them to go to your squeeze page and opt in.
In many cases, this will be by email or a Facebook ad or event targeted to your patient list, but it doesn’t have to be. If your patients respond best to text messages or Facebook Messenger bots, send messages there letting them know you have a great free piece of information about the service you’d like to promote with a link to your squeeze page.
2. Dental Marketing Funnels Designed to Introduce New Services to Current Patients.
Another great way to grow your dental practice is to add new, high-profit services to your procedure mix and offer it to your current patients. Dental marketing funnels are a great way to gauge interest in new procedures and even pre-book appointments without investing thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours building a traditional marketing plan.
Not only are funnels more effective and affordable than traditional marketing, they can be tweaked and evaluated instantaneously with sophisticated statistics to let you know what’s working and what’s not working. It can even save you time and money by helping you test the appetite for specific procedures before investing significant time or money incorporating them into your practice.
To implement this type of funnel, all you need to do to is build your funnel for the procedure you’re considering adding and send your patients to squeeze page to opt-in, just like with the first funnel strategy for selling additional existing services.
3. Dental Marketing Funnels Designed to Attract New Patients
If your practice already has a robust procedure offering and high-revenue patients, a funnel to attract new patients into your practice might be the right next move.
One way to design this funnel is to present an offer, like a half-priced whitening procedure to anyone who comes in for a cleaning, and then introduce your practice to them in the funnel to build a relationship with them and show them why they should choose you as their dentist. By using a funnel to build a relationship with them instead of just letting them download a coupon, you can help reduce the risk that people who take advantage of the offer will come in just for the one service and move on.
Another way to design this funnel is to promote a specific procedure like dental implants or Invisalign. With these types of funnels you can attract patients for a high-value service and nurture the relationship in the funnel and by serving them well when you perform the procedure.
By far, the best and most effective dental marketing strategy you can use to help turn strangers into patients is a well-designed funnel. For those who are new to dental marketing: funnels allow you to automate the process you or your team would normally do in-person or on the phone to accomplish a particular goal. Many times, the goal is to acquire a new patient. Other times, it can be to sell a particular procedure. The funnel acts to automate the process of achieving the goal, thus freeing up your and your team’s time to make money serving existing patients while your funnel works in the background. Because funnels serve a dual role of freeing up your and your team’s time while efficiently and effectively achieving goals in the background, creating dental-marketing funnels is one of my favorite dental-marketing tactics I teach my dental coaching clients. Here’s how you can build your first dental marketing funnel this week:
1. Set a goal for your funnel.
For this example, we’re going to use Invisalign as the procedure we’re looking to promote with a funnel. The goal for this funnel will be to get more people to come to you for Invisalign treatment.
2. Create targeted, high-value opt-in content.
Create a short piece of content that will help and attract your ideal funnel target. The more connected this checklist or guide is to the goal, the better, because the goal is to get people who fit your goal into the funnel and exclude everyone else. For example, doing a drawing for a free iPad would attract everyone, and you’ll end up with a list of people that have no connection to the goal. On the other hand, offering a checklist for people to find out if they’re a candidate for Invisalign or a guide that answers the most frequently asked questions about Invisalign would attract people who are considering Invisalign and not attract anyone else. In this case, we’ll use the checklist to find out if someone’s a candidate for Invisalign as the content.
3. Schedule a Facebook Live event to attract people into your funnel.
For this example, I suggest scheduling a Facebook Live Q&A Session about Invisalign because it’s a simple event that requires very little preparation. All you need to do is show up and answer the questions you normally answer from people in your chair. This Facebook Live is designed to get the attention of people who have considered Invisalign but who haven’t followed through to get Invisalign treatments.
Promote your upcoming Live Event for the two days before the event, letting people know you’ll be doing a live Q&A session right on Facebook answering any and all questions they have about Invisalign. Promote the event to your Facebook fans, patients, and any other relevant audiences. Send an email to your patient list letting them know about the upcoming Live Event and, if you have a Facebook Chat Bot set up (you can do this through Many Chat or Chat Fuel), let them know there as well. During the live Q&A session, give people a call to action to go to a separate page to sign up for the checklist to find out if they’re a candidate for Invisalign. I suggest using ClickFunnels for this.
On the thank-you page, which is the page they will see once they sign up, create a button that takes them to a page on your website, where you have before and after pics of Invisalign patients. Deliver the checklist through an introductory email.
Make sure to put a Facebook pixel on the opt-in page and thank-you page so if they don’t opt in, you show them a different ad that reminds them to take up the PDF and get the promotion.
4. Promote the event replay to get more people into your funnel.
After you record the live Q&A session, spend an additional $50 on Facebook ads for the video, targeting your patients, past website visitors, people who have engaged with your page, or a Facebook-matched lookalike audience. This will put your video in their feeds. After two days, invest more money continuing to run the ads that are performing well. Stop the ads that aren’t performing well. For example, if the website visitors ad is performing well, but the lookalike audience isn’t, stop the ad targeted to the lookalike audience and invest more into targeting past website visitors.
5. Create a relationship-building email sequence with a call to action.
In this case, I suggest a five-day nurture email sequence, as follows.
Day 1: When they sign up, immediately send them the checklist with the following email:
Subject: Here’s Your Invisalign Checklist
Content (to personalize): Thanks for signing up for the Invisalign Checklist! Invisalign provides patients with an opportunity to [insert the benefit you want to promote].To tell you a little more about our practice, [insert a brief description about what makes your practice special].
We also want to give you a thank-you gift for taking action, which is an offer to save [insert a discount] off of your Invisalign Treatment, good any time in the next six weeks!
We can’t wait to meet you!
Day 2: Subject: How Invisalign Changed [Suzi’s] Life
Content: Share a story of a happy Invisalign patient. Even better: add a testimonial video if you can.
Day 3: Subject: Why we serve
Content: Share a short story of why your practice serves people, why you went into dentistry, or what makes your practice unique.
Day 4: Subject: Our Guarantee to You as a VIP Patient
Content: Be bold. Make a guarantee for them. For my practice, we let people know we guarantee on-time appointments, peace of mind, and WOW experiences.
Day 5: Subject We’ve Got Something Special for YOU!
Content: Recap who you are, why you serve, the benefits of Invisalign, how Invisalign changed [Suzi’s] life and give them call to action to come in for Invisalign. Reiterate the discount.
6. Review, revise, and repeat the process.
As with anything, you will find places to improve your funnel. Pay attention to what can be improved, make the improvements, and repeat the process. For example, you might swap out testimonial videos, change the thank-you gift, or re-record the live Q&A. Improve what you can, then continue running the promotion to get people to opt in to your email sequence.
Take the first-funnel challenge!
A marketing funnel is an essential tool that every dental practice needs to have to convert potential clients into paying customers — but it doesn’t end there! You need a steady stream of potential patients to go through the funnel and become leads.
TAKE ACTION TODAY:
If you haven’t created your first funnel, I challenge you to follow these steps to have your first funnel working for you in the next week. If you need help, you can work from a template like one of the funnel templates we provide in our Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.
Are you intimidated by technology? Don’t worry! ClickFunnels makes it easy. You can learn step-by-step instructions, or you can outsource it to our experienced team. I’d be happy to talk with you about how my team can work with you.
You can also check out our upcoming Marketing & Practice Growth Challenge that walks you through the step-by-step process on launching your first or next successful marketing campaign. Click here to learn more and see what other practices had to say — and if you want to save your spot, use the code CHALLENGE at checkout for 20% off!
Every patient of your practice went through the same four steps before becoming your patient. First, they became aware of you. Second, they became interested in you or something you offered. Third, they decided to interact with you. Fourth, they took action to become your patient.
Typically, this happens either through personal relationships and referrals or through traditional advertising.
When it happens organically through personal relationships and referrals, patients get to know you because of a relationship with you, a team member, friend, or other patient. That relationship causes them to become interested in you or your services, decide to become your patient, and take action to make an appointment and come to your office. Organic practice growth through personal relationships and referrals, while important, only expands your practice to the extent of your ability to build personal relationships with people who refer others or become patients. And we all know our time is limited, which means our time to build relationships is limited.
When it happens through traditional advertising, people get to know you through a paid advertisement on radio, TV, direct mail, phone book, or other traditional way. Generally, these people become interested after repeatedly seeing advertisements or looking for referrals or reading reviews of your practice. They make a decision based on additional interactions with you, often either through more advertising or by calling your office to ask questions about your service or business practices. Finally, after all those advertisements and interactions, they either become a patient or they forget about you.
Traditional practice building is expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective.
If you only attracted new patients with whom you have a personal or referral relationship, your practice would grow very slowly. It would also grow with little patient-demographic control because the common thread across your patients is who they know, not who they are and what services they want.
If everyone beyond a personal and referral relationship required traditional marketing and personal attention, you would spend a lot of time and money attracting people into your patient-acquisition process.
Advertising to people in traditional ways like radio, TV, phone books, direct mail, and newspapers is expensive and inefficient. Even if prospects respond to an ad, you then have to take time away from serving patients to answer questions, follow up, and build relationships with a number of people, many of whom will never become patients. You could pay a team member to do some or all of the intake, but that would be an additional out-of-pocket cost without knowing the return.
Funnels solve all three problems.
Building your practice through funnels is the best way to experience real practice growth. Funnels solve the time and cost problems with traditional practice building because they get better prospects to you by more effectively targeting prospects, automating and optimizing much of the interest, decision-making, and action-taking process, and do so at a fraction of the cost. In other words, funnels are both better and more efficient.
The term funnel evokes the visual of a funnel used to pour liquid into a container. If you picture this tool, the general population of prospects is represented by the space outside of the funnel. The top of the funnel represents the process of attracting as many ideal prospects as possible. A little lower into the funnel is the generally smaller number of prospects who become interested. The middle of the funnel contains the even smaller number of people who decide to engage with you. Finally, the smallest part of the funnel represents the people who take action by accepting your offer to become a patient (or to take advantage of a more specific promotion offered).
How to design a high-performing funnel for your dental office.
Funnels can be created for any number of purposes. For example, you can use a funnel to get people into your office for a specific high-value procedure. You can also use a funnel to build an email list of people to contact if you need to fill a last-minute cancellation. No matter what your goal, you can design a funnel to attract prospects to you and turn them into action takers.
No matter what your goal, here’s what you need to do to build a basic funnel:
1. Attention: An online ad to get the attention of your ideal prospect for the goal of your funnel
Most of the time, this is a Facebook ad that offers something of value to a prospect in order to get them to pay attention. Facebook ads are currently the best and most efficient use of your ad spend because they’re very inexpensive and have the most sophisticated targeting capabilities in the market. That means you can target your ad to a group of your ideal prospects for less money than you would spend on less-targeted ads.
For example, you can target existing patients. You can target people who Facebook knows to be like your existing patients or like people who interact with your Facebook page, which is known as a lookalike audience. The options are almost endless.
For example, you may want to promote teeth whitening to a lookalike audience of your patients with the goal of getting new long-term patients by offering 50% off teeth whitening when someone books a cleaning by a certain date. We did this with someone in my Inner Circle Mastermind, who saw great engagement.
Your ad has one goal: to get a prospect to notice you and click on a link in the ad, which will automatically send them to the next part of your funnel, which is your squeeze page or landing page.
2. Your squeeze page or landing page
A squeeze page or landing page is a single page on a website designed to collect contact information from a prospect, otherwise called “opting in” to your offer. It then triggers the next step of your funnel.
This is often done with squeeze-page software like ClickFunnels, which makes it easy to set up landing pages to collect information and trigger the next part of your funnel, delivering on your ad’s promise.
3. Delivering on your ad’s promise for people who opt in on your landing page
When people opt in on your landing page, the next step is to deliver on your ad’s promise. Depending on your funnel’s goal, the next step might be to automatically email the prospect a checklist or guide, a link to a video you recorded, a sequence of messages answering common questions about a procedure, a promised coupon, or even an appointment scheduler.
Using simple-but-sophisticated software like ClickFunnels makes this easy, but no matter what software you use, once someone opts into your squeeze page or landing page by giving you their contact information, the next step is to deliver on your ad’s promise.
4. Reconnecting with (or retargeting) people who don’t opt in on your landing page
When people click on the link in your ad but don’t opt-in on your landing page, chances are they were initially interested in your offer but either lost interest or got distracted. This is natural because it often takes multiple touches to attract people’s attention and get them to accept an offer. In fact, the typical landing page only collects information between ten and twenty percent of the time.
Because of that, the best practice is to use another ad to target the people who click on the first ad but don’t opt in on the landing page. This second ad is often a reminder to take advantage of the offer that appeared in the first ad.
This is called “retargeting” and is simple to set up with Facebook and software like ClickFunnels. Essentially, the way this works is you place on your landing page a small piece of code that Facebook provides. The code gets read by Facebook and tells you who landed on your squeeze page but not your confirmation or thank-you page.
You then target that group of people with a new ad. The new ad acts similarly to the initial ad, asking them to click a link to land on your squeeze page, where you ask them to opt in again.
5. Ask your prospects to take action.
Once someone opts in and you deliver on your ad’s promise for a guide, coupon, or other piece of value, your funnel software will email them to complete the patient-acquisition process.
For a simple goal such as getting people to come in for a cleaning and teeth whitening, you could ask them to take action in the email where you deliver the coupon. For more complicated or higher-ticket items such as dental implants, before asking them to make an appointment, you might send them a number of emails introducing them to your practice, answering frequently asked questions, and delivering a video where you compare the differences between a bridge and implants.
6. Retarget those who opt in but don’t take action to become patients.
The best funnels are the ones that build on themselves based on the actions of your prospects. One way to make sure your funnel works for you is to export a list of people who made it to the end of your funnel but didn’t take action, and send them a different sequence of emails to build a deeper relationship with them and Retarget them with Facebook ads to stay top of mind and encourage them to take action.
Do you have funnels working for you?
The most effective and efficient way to build your dental practice is to design a funnel and have it working for you 24/7. It’s the best way to fill your schedule with ideal patients whom you choose, rather than relying on personal or referral relationships or expensive, inefficient, and time-consuming traditional advertising followed by a manual patient-intake process.
