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.
During crises, people’s natural instinct is to stop marketing. While that’s a smart instinct, completely shutting down and going into hiding can cause even more damage to your practice than the crisis itself.
With the COVID-19 crisis, for example, a large percentage of the world is sheltered in their homes. Many practices are closed. Some are open only for emergencies. So, continuing your normal ad strategy of promoting high-value services like Invisalign or crowns is not money well spent.
But what about continuing to build relationships in your local community? What about being a source of joy, help, and inspiration for people stuck in their homes? Is that money well spent? Absolutely, if you do it right.
Right now, with so many businesses turning off their ads, it has resulted in more supply and less demand for Facebook ads. That means the costs for ads have come down significantly and we can make an incredible impact on our community while strengthening our practice with a very small ad budget. Here’s how.
Share community-building posts and start a fun challenge on your practice page.
During crises, we might not want to spend money promoting services we aren’t providing. But we do want to make sure we are still connecting with our communities, helping them get through being at home.
That means continuing to share videos from our homes. My team and I have made videos telling people we miss them and letting them know we can’t wait to see them when things settle down. Those videos help us stay in touch with patients and reach new ones with a caring message of positivity.
In addition, this is a great opportunity to connect with a fun at-home challenge, like a push-up or squat challenge that promotes healthy habits. It doesn’t matter if you can’t do push-ups or squats. Those are just details. Do something. Jump rope. Do jumping jacks. Do arm curls. Dance for thirty seconds. Anything that is fun and gets people moving will work.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m not great at exercise. It’s fine.
Then, post your challenge video on your practice Facebook page with a caption that reads, something to the effect of “Let’s get moving. Post your videos to our page in the comments so we can exercise together while we’re all at home. Then tag a friend to challenge them to do the same”
Get your whole team in on it, positing videos in the comments to start building momentum. This will help your post start to go viral—and you know I’m all about getting videos to go viral.
People will love this type of post and feel closer to you because of it. You’re connecting with your community. You’re getting them moving. You’re getting them off their TVs, off their sofas, for a little bit and just moving and thinking about fitness.
Share your post on your personal page to continue building momentum.
After you post it on your practice page, share it on your personal page with all of your Facebook friends.
Not only does this spread a positive message but it also helps build your Facebook audience for future advertising. Anytime someone watches the video, Facebook will register anyone who watches the video as a three-second, 25%, or 50% video view.
That means you can create a Facebook target audience of anyone who watches the videos in the future.
Increase organic engagement.
Anytime you have someone engage with your post with a comment, like, or share, that is considered “engagement” from Facebook. So getting your team members involved and everyone sharing the post to close friends will naturally increase organic reach.
You can also ask some friends who you know to participate by posting videos to your practice page and personal post. Ask them to help you spread joy. Ask team members to do the same to help you build strength for your practice for when things settle down.
All of this organic engagement will tell Facebook that your video is something people enjoy. Facebook doesn’t watch our videos. But they calculate how many people engage with our posts. The more people engage, the more Facebook will promote our posts for free. That means, calling out friends in the comment to take the challenge and call out more friends will help.
If you’re a member of a Facebook group that allows sharing posts like this, share it there, too. For example, when I taught this marketing strategy in their posts in the group so the 15,000+ people could help create organic engagement for you.
Some groups won’t allow this, so be sure to follow group rules. But in these times, I want to help as much as possible so I invited people to share their video.
Boost to your local community.
So far, everything we have done has been organic. I’d highly encourage you to invest a few dollars boosting your post to your local community. If you already have your dental practice’s Facebook target audiences set, boost your post to them. If you have your Facebook super audience set, boost it to that audience. I suggest starting with just $25.
When you boost, you want to make sure you filter so your boost is only to your local community. If you have people from outside your community who like your page or on your personal feed, your organic reach and organic engagement will be from the world. But I only want you paying to reach people in your local community to get the best return on investment.
Your challenge is to start a challenge.
Anytime we have situations like what we have now, we focus more on planting seeds for the future. Facebook costs are low now. Grow your audience and help bring a positive message to your community.
Now is the time to show up and shine brightness in your community. When the market normalizes, we will be in a much better position to come back stronger with ads letting people know we are open.
If you don't want to go at it alone, we are helping hundreds of practices during this time in our Platinum Mastermind Gold Program, and are offering 4 Weeks Free Training for you and your teams! If you have been wanting to dive into Facebook Marketing though our Facebook Bootcamp Program, now is also a great time to start preparing for when you reopen!
And be sure to join the Delivering WOW Dental Hangout Facebook group to connect with, support, and get support from other dental professionals working hard to strengthen their practices, even in tough times.
Using social media well can help you grow your dental practice with a fraction of the marketing budget you would need for traditional dental marketing. Despite that, many dental practices struggle to use social media well. They might post for a few days and quit after not seeing results. Some spend months, still with no results.
If you’ve struggled to grow your dental practice using social media, you might only need a few small tweaks to your plan. Here are four simple steps you can use to achieve massive results using social media.
1. Set a strong foundation.
Too many dental practices sign up for social media accounts without a plan, goal, or foundation in place for achieving success. Without a plan, they end up becoming frustrated fast. They quickly run out of things to say and end up losing momentum.
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 are your core values? Why should they choose your practice instead of another? What can patients expect when they come to your office? What do you do differently? Are you committed to spa-like experiences? Do you give hand and arm massages like we do in my practice? Do you provide gourmet coffees and teas? Are you involved in your community?
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 you and potential patients. For example, do you give back to your community? If so, 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 enough you will have a long list of the things your practice does differently and the reasons why those are important to you. You’ll be ready to start posting, warming up your audience to get them engaged with, talking about, and interested in your practice. Many will start looking forward to your next post, even. And you will start building a group of raving fans online.
Way too many practices skip setting the foundation and creating content that builds relationships with potential patients. They jump right into sharing posts without any plan or focus. When that happens, performance suffers.
2. Regularly create sharable content.
With the strong foundation in place, you’ll be well on your way to sharing content people engage with, liking, commenting, and even sharing your posts on their feeds. 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 you can consistently create content other people share on their timelines, everything you do on social media will become easier and more effective.
To do so, focus on telling stories about your practice and how you’re impacting your community and patients. How are you serving your community? Share videos of you talking about what you’re doing and why. What experiences are your patients having? Share video testimonials and office tours explaining all the things your patients experience and why you do it. How is your practice different?
For example, one thing that makes my practice different is we have the kids go to the toy box before their appointment. This helps us gain trust with kids and gives the kids something to hold during their appointment. Kida love going to the toybox and enjoy coming to our practice because they get a toy right away.
When we talk about this on our social media pages, we share videos of us talking out what we do and why. These posts are highly engaging. If you have a similar policy, share a video of you talking about it and why. Do a video demonstration of your toybox showing all the cool toys you have. Ask a parent or two who you think would be open to it to record a short video talking about why they love your toy box first policy.
These types of post create emotional connections in parents who love the idea or who have experienced it themselves. They might share the post with “what a great idea!” or “my child loves going to Dr. Holmes and getting her toy first.”
3. Run social campaigns.
One of the best social campaigns you can run is a giveaway. Giveaways help you give back to your fans, patients, and oftentimes other local businesses.
With my practice, we love giveaways. We sometimes give away gift cards to local shops. Other times, we give free whitening. Sometimes, we even give away a full smile makeover to someone in need. When running a social campaign, ask people to follow your page and like, comment, or share your post to be entered into the content. Then, at the end of the day, you can pick a person at random to win the prize.
Only include a short statement about your practice in such a way that makes sense with the posts. For example, if you’re giving away a gift card to a local store, you can say, “At my practice, we believe in supporting local businesses in our community. That’s why we’re giving away a gift card to XYZ coffee shop, our favorite place to grab coffee on the way to work.”
By requiring people to engage with your post to enter and making a brief but strong emotional connection in your content, your social campaigns will help you build an even bigger, engaged social following.
4. Offer people the next logical step.
With a strong foundation, shareable content, and social campaigns in place, your audience will grow and the people who follow you will get to know, like, or trust you. That is a great place to be because it means your followers will be much more likely to become patients when you ask them to take the next logical step in the relationship.
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 landing page with offer details or a quiz to help them learn whether they are a candidate. From there, you can send them through a nurture sequence of call them to make an appointment for a consultation.
Are you ready to get more patients using social media?
If you have struggled to gain traction using social media, these four steps can help you grow your followers, build trust, and promote high-value services. If you want more help, you can find detailed instructions on growing your practice using Facebook. There, you’ll find additional information on growing your following, targeting the right audiences for your ads, and growing your practice using Facebook.
If you want even more help using social media to grow your practice, sign up for the Delivering WOW Platinum Coaching Program to access forms, courses, and coaching from me and other top dental experts.
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:
In this interview with Michael Stelzner, I share why Facebook Marketing is so powerful for local businesses, including dental offices.
Why Local Businesses Need to Go Beyond Review Sites
If your new patients hang out on Facebook, that’s where you need to be. People aren’t hanging out on Yelp or Google. Most people check Facebook first thing in the morning, between daily tasks, and in the evening. That’s why Facebook marketing needs to be your focus.
Creating the right content is important. A lot of businesses post information about how great they are and share a lot of stock content, but that really doesn’t work. Local businesses need to share their story and what makes their business unique. For example, if you have a plumbing company, what are you offering that’s different from everyone else?
To compete with photos of kids, community happenings, and articles, it's important to create engaging posts that connect with people and make them want to click, including content about community impact and what you do to change patients’ lives.
We also discuss the importance of gathering patient testimonials and running video campaigns as well as the importance of knowing your target audience.
It's important to be specific with your targeting.
Even with the right content and target audience, you can’t just put up a post and hope people see it. You need to be strategic. Retarget to people who have been to your website, your existing customers, Facebook lookalikes, and so on. To get conversions, you need to make the most of Facebook’s marketing tools.
Focus your marketing on what sets your business apart from competitors.
To start, determine what makes people want to choose your business and not someplace else.
Anytime you’re marketing on Facebook or elsewhere, you begin by highlighting little features that make your business special. Figure out what makes your business unique and focus on that in your marketing messages.
Your marketing stories can target extremely specific sets of people, especially a very warm audience.
For example, in my practice, I ran a Facebook ad for teeth whitening that has provided a 5,000% ROI. Instead of simply targeting people within 10 miles of the practice, I showed the ad to women who met specific criteria. The teeth whitening ad appeared to women who are engaged, are between the ages of 24 and 55, and have interacted with the dental practice in some way.
When building a dental practice, most dentists know to hire team members like dental assistants, hygienists, other dentists, lab technicians, administrative personnel, and dental specialists like oral surgeons or orthodontists.
Those team members help take care of day-to-day operations of your practice, so you don't need to do everything yourself. They’re vital to building a practice to run without you. They also provide the capacity for you to grow your practice because you can’t grow a practice unless you have the ability to serve more people.
If you want to grow your practice exponentially, however, you need to have two other types of people involved.
1. Business specialists for dental practices
Dental school teaches us a lot about teeth, but very little about things like bookkeeping, cash‑flow management, financial accounting, traditional or online practice marketing, social‑media strategy, or content marketing.
Despite that, many dentists spend hours a day pouring through spreadsheets, bank statements, and boxes of receipts trying to figure out their finances or project into the future. Other dentists spend too much time trying to figure out what to post on social media, how to grow a relevant following, and how to turn it all into practice growth. The list goes on.
Dentists who try to do everything themselves find it impossible to grow. For better results (and better personal fulfillment) they should hand off tasks they either struggle with or dislike to business specialists who are experts in those business activities.
This helps your practice grow in two ways. First, business specialists will be much more effective than you because they spend all day, every day doing one specific task. You get the benefit of all of their experience and keep up to date on the latest trends and strategies.
Building a dental practice is a lot of work and very stressful if you try to do everything yourself. Outsourcing to specialists any activities you dislike or struggle with helps you get more personal fulfillment and reduce your odds of burning out.
If you’re struggling to fit outsourcing into your budget when just starting out, you can purchase courses or memberships for existing employees and block out time on their schedule for them to perform certain activities. For example, instead of outsourcing to a vendor, you could subscribe to WOW U and have an administrative professional learn and apply the latest practice-growth strategies including social media marketing and online reviews, avoiding cancellations, and setting fees and goals for profit taught in there for you for a set number of hours a week.
2. Business coaches
The second type of person to hire is a business coach.
In short, business coaches work with you to help you get from where you are to where you want to go. Business coaches provide a number of highly valuable services for you that virtually nobody gets from family, friends, or current team members, who are often either too close to a situation or biased.
Coaches will push you outside of your comfort zone. They’ll be trusted, independent voices. They won’t be afraid to say “no” to you. They’ll hold you accountable, and give you support and confidence in making tough decisions.
Because business coaches are trained to help you set and achieve goals, business coaches are often the best choice as a first hire to help you. If you’re just starting out, they can help you establish your vision, culture, and core values; and then build a team and systems to accomplish your goals and build a brand that stands out. If you have a well-established vision, culture, core values, team, systems, and brand, they can help you identify what activities to outsource to specialists, identify and evaluate opportunities, or make other difficult practice decisions.
Although you might not be working at the same scale as Google or Facebook, you can achieve similar benefits for your practice by hiring a business coach to guide you, keep you accountable, and give you the support you need to grow your practice.
It’s time to take action.
You can benefit from hiring a business coach and outsourcing tasks to specialists no matter where you are with building your practice. Without these people involved in your practice, you’ll work harder, longer, less effectively, and with less personal fulfillment.
If you’re looking to grow a practice that helps you work less, make more, and enjoy your life, your next step should be to connect with a business coach whose job includes helping you work with the right business specialists at the right time for your practice.
Finally, don’t let your budget keep you from moving forward. If you’re just starting out or your budget is too tight for one-on-one help, you can even start out in a group setting like WOW Ufor the latest information, monthly live coaching and strategies as well as support in a group setting.
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.
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.
Ok, so if you have been waiting for the next BIG breakthrough in dental marketing, the wait is over!!
Announcing Facebook Live.
What “Live” Is
Facebook “Live” offers the ability to create and watch live videos within Facebook as the action happens. If you keep up with the latest social apps, you know all about other livestreaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat.
Facebook Live is quite similar. 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!)
In the coming months Live will roll out to more Facebook profiles and pages, and will become available on Android. Live is currently available to some iPhone users only.
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…
Here's a broadcast that I made on my first day of using Facebook Live. After 5 hours, the video reached 1345 people, was viewed 245 times and had a ton of engagement. All WITHOUT being boosted.
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.
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. You can edit your post by going to the arrow next to your page name above the video in your newsfeed.
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 subscribe 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.
6. Finally, be creative and consistent!
Want to make better videos with your mobile device? Here's the gear I recommend
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
Photos receive 53 Percent more likes on Facebook than the average posts and 84 percent more link clicks. Some of you might be asking, What are the “rules” for posting pictures on Facebook? Obviously not patient photos, but those similar to the pictures found on a Google Search or on Pinterest.
So if you know that you don't want to violate any copyright laws, and you're just not sure how to play fair.
Here's a little known Google Secret!!
If you want to use images which appear in your Google image search, you can find images which are labeled for reuse. Here's How: Google>Images>Search Tools> Labeled for Reuse.
In addition to paid sites, there are also lots of free sites available!
To know SmartBox Web Marketing, you have to know the founder and CEO Colin Receveur, the dynamo that powers this marketing machine. Even though SmartBox was incorporated in 2001, it began inside Colin during his childhood. Colin's experience helping dentists predates search engine optimization (SEO), Google, websites and even the Internet. He worked almost every day in his father's office and spent almost every night on the family's Compaq computer (remember those?) in the early morning hours learning how to design and code websites in the Internets infancy. Though his dad is a dentist, Colin's mom was a top sales executive with a Fortune 100 healthcare organization. So it was only natural for him to want to monetize his interest in websites.
In this episode, we discuss key steps that dentists can take to drive traffic to their website, as well top ways that dentists can convert those prospects into new patients. We also discuss the benefits of tracking the ROI of marketing strategies and the benefits of retargeting. A special mention is made to Social Media and in particular Google Plus in increasing SEO.
Ready to Start Developing an AMAZING Brand? Enjoy my guest blog post with Likable Local:
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you probably know that we spend a lot of time preaching about the benefits of social media for your business. And, dear reader, you probably also know that we have a bit of a bias for social media because of our vested interest in it. So, you may wonder, what can social media REALLY do for your business.
Meet Dr. Anissa Holmes. She is a global leader in dental social media and the owner of Jamaica Cosmetic Dental Services, and an innovator in creating “Wow Experiences” for her customers. She has been voted one of the “Top 25 Women in Dentistry” in 2013 by the U.S.-based “Dental Products Report” and enjoys a Facebook following of over 43,000 fans. She now also helps dentists and small-business owners achieve massive growth through developing their culture, systems, and brand.
Most relevant to the first paragraph though, Dr. Holmes was an early adopter of social media and her story inspires what we try to do for businesses everywhere. We sat down with her recently to ask her about what social media did for her business.
What inspired you to start your journey towards social media excellence?
I started my social media journey in 2010. I recognized that social media would be an excellent tool to share my business culture and to reach thousands of potential new customers.
Many dentists talk about the power of word-of-mouth referrals. But when I was starting out, I also figured that if I posted interesting content and shared great stories, people would follow us. And they did. What happened was that social media took word of mouth to a totally different level. Now we sit back and watch our followers share our posts with all their social media communities.
In my company, we currently receive over 50 new patients per month from social media. This is huge. The most amazing thing is that when the new patients come in, they already know us. They’ve been to our website and seen before-and-after pictures of the work we’ve done for others. They feel they are already a part of our “Think Big and Have Fun” company culture. They know that we are committed to building stronger communities. They have seen video testimonials. They know that they will be “wowed”.
What differences did you see after you started the journey?
Before using social media, we used other forms of traditional marketing to help grow the business. This included Yellow Pages ads, newspaper advertising, and word of mouth. We noticed that these strategies helped our practice grow. However, because these strategies did not allow us to speak directly to our target audience, we did not get the best ROI (return on investment.) We saw a very linear trend in business growth.
Once we implemented and focused on our social media presence, we were able to multiply our growth. We learned strategies such as using custom and lookalike audiences, and started to target by demographics.
Our custom audience allowed us to upload our patient list, so posts we wanted to be seen by patients were visible in their feeds. One example of using this strategy is when we announced our latest “Wow” Service: complimentary arm and hand massages.
We used lookalike audiences to create groups that had interests similar to those of our custom audience (or patients). We targeted this lookalike audience to boost (or pay for) posts we thought might interest them. This strategy allowed us to grow our Facebook community.
Next, we started to create ads to display in the feeds of people who were not current customers and who weren’t following our page. Our first ad was boosted by demographics to “Engaged Women between the ages of 18-35” for a teeth-whitening promotion. We paid $1.00 to boost the post per day for 30 days. Needless to say, at the end of the month, we had several hundred new followers and had scheduled 20 additional whitenings that month. What a great ROI!
After testing, measuring and seeing the benefits of Social Media for our practice, we have dropped all forms of traditional media and increased our social-media budget from $50.00 to $500.00 per month. We currently have over 43,000 Facebook followers who are engaging and sharing our posts, and many are “Raving Fans”.
What do you think is the one thing most practices are missing from their social strategy?
Unfortunately, most practices don’t understand the amazing benefits of social media, so they don’t invest enough time in it. They share the wrong things, and post too infrequently. They also think too small and don’t benefit from the amazing ROI that they can achieve from allocating a portion of their marketing budget to social media.
What’s your ‘secret sauce’ to social success?
Our success has come from three areas: sharing the right posts; engaging and being responsive; and being consistent in our delivery. Our posts show us having fun. They show us building stronger communities. We share videos of patient testimonials. We share before- and-after pictures of our services. We share our culture.
When deciding to be part of the social space, it’s also very important to be responsive. This means that if someone asks a question, it should be answered in a timely manner. We have several team members who share this task, so most of our posts receive a response with 30 minutes.
A great feature that Facebook has recently implemented for private messages is one that allows you to customize and save your responses. We created responses to the most commonly asked questions. With two clicks, followers get a response to their specific question and a video of the procedure that they are enquiring about. We also include a call to action and a link to our website to create an online appointment.
How often do you post to your social channels, and why?
Our goal is to create at least one post daily. This allows us to stay top-of-mind among our followers. Because of Facebook’s algorithm, all followers do not see all of our posts. However, if there is something of particular interest that we want more followers to see, we make sure to pay to boost it.
Want to learn more about social media content for dentists? Check out the 10 Commandments of Content Creation, Dentists' 2nd Edition. Download the eBook for free by clicking below!
Is your practice on Facebook? If not, you are missing out on a great 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 over 40 new patients a month from Facebook alone. Facebook is our #1 strategy for external marketing. Why? Because it works. Facebook is where we tell 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 pictures of our dental work.
We love referrals from Facebook! These new patients walk in already connected- they know us. This builds trust and makes it easier for them to accept treatment.
Here are some other interesting stats:
–50% of 18-24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. -70% of monthly Facebook Users use it daily. -29% of Americans use Facebook during the work day.
What this means is that Facebook, through it's targeted marketing capabilities, allows us to reach our specific audiences. We can target so that posts show up in the feeds of our patients, non-patients who have similar characteristics to our patients, parents of kids who are a certain age, engaged women, etc.
I hear some dentists complain that it's not fair that you have to pay for your posts to be seen. However Facebook should be seen as a marketing strategy, and an amazing one at that! This means that you put aside a budget to have your posts seen by your intended audience based on the objectives of your campaign, and test to ensure that there is a return.
Once I tested other forms of traditional media, including yellow pages and newspaper ads, I saw that Facebook gave me the best ROI. Imagine spending $500 a month on Facebook adds, and getting a return of $8000. Well this is what happens if every one of my 40 new patients referred from Facebook spends only $200. That is a 1500% return on investment!! However, this return is actually multiplied when these new patients come to the practice and then become an internal referral source because of the “wow” service that they receive. They share their experience with their family, co-workers, and friends. And most times wind up spending more than $200 if additional treatment is needed. Not to mention the lifetime value of future visits!
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!
