As dentists, we’re visionaries, and if having an automated dental practice is something you’ve dreamed of for your practice, you might be surprised to learn it’s not very difficult to put in place.
If you want to create an automated dental practice, you only need a few pieces in place. After all, a vision alone won’t help you achieve your goal. You also must take action and hold yourself accountable as you pursue your goal. Here are the three pieces to put in place if you want to work toward building an automated dental practice.
Facebook Marketing For Dentists
Dental Facebook Posts: How to Increase Engagement to Increase Your Reach
Facebook for dentists is the best social media site to help you reach potential patients for your practice. Although Facebook doesn’t charge you to have a dental Facebook page or to post on your Facebook page, its algorithm limits the reach of posts unless one of two things happens:
- You pay Facebook to promote the post as a standalone dental Facebook ad or a boosted dental Facebook post, or
- Facebook sees people engaging with a post.
With paid posts, Facebook will generally share it with as many people as you pay to reach. That’s a great option for many dentists. My team and I have received up to 5,000% return on ads we’ve placed for my practice and other dentists we serve through our dental marketing done-for-you services.
To reach more people organically, your post needs to get them to engage with it by liking or otherwise reacting to it, commenting on it, or sharing it on their timeline.
Just like your goal might be to attract as many people as possible to your page and keep them there or get them to your site or your dental marketing funnel, Facebook wants users to stay on its site as long as possible. Thus, it wants to make their experience there as pleasant as possible and reduces the organic reach of business posts until it believes people like it. One of the ways it determines that is through engagement. The more people interact with your post, the more people Facebook will show it to organically.
The Best Dental Facebook Posts for Organic Reach
The best dental Facebook posts to help you increase organic reach are those that capture people’s attention while doing one or more of the following things:
- Sharing your practice story
- Sharing your core values
- Showing what makes your practice unique
- Evoking a positive emotion in people on a personal level
For example, in my practice, we stock our office with gourmet coffees and teas, lend iPads and noise-canceling headphones to patients, participate in community events, host charity drives, and regularly run contests and competitions. When we post about those activities—especially with great photos—we take or videos we make, our posts get dozens and even hundreds of likes, comments, and shares, and our posts reach thousands of people.
Other examples of good posts include those that:
- are about a kids’ club program logo you have or a picture of a happy kids’ club member
- celebrate with a great team member
- show off group perks you give your team members such as the loaded e-readers we give to ours
- feature events you host at your office
- highlight a team-building event like a night out or baby shower
- celebrate local events
- show you donating dental services to less fortunate people
- share patient testimonials
For my practice, we posted about community impact being one of our core values and included an image of us smiling with the winner of our free smile makeover giveaway competition, which we call Project Smiles. That post got dozens of engagements and reached 5,000 people organically because it got people’s attention and gave them something to connect with emotionally.
Another Project Smiles post reached over 10,000 people organically before we added an additional 45,000 people to our reach with a small paid boost.
Both of those posts had great imagery, shared some of our practice’s story, core values, and what makes us different than other dental practices. They were about building stronger communities and showed how we were making a difference. Thus, we were able to evoke a positive emotion in people and earn their engagement.
The more people engaged, the more people we reached, which helped us:
- capture more people’s attention in a positive way
- share our practice story with more people
- get our practice name seen in more feeds
- get people to know, like, and trust us
- convert people to patients
- get in front of current patients who might need a subtle reminder to schedule another patient
When your dental Facebook page is set up professionally and optimized to build relationships with people, this engagement can help you skyrocket your ability to convert strangers to patients.
The Worst Dental Facebook Posts for Organic Reach
Just like certain types of dental Facebook posts can encourage and increase engagement, other types can restrict engagement for the same reasons. If you’re on Facebook as a user, what posts capture your attention? What posts are you most likely to engage with?
Most users won’t be interested in stock content, boring posts, or negative imagery such as the picture of an in-progress wisdom-tooth extraction I saw on another dentist’s timeline! Those posts can be simple and easy to find, but they’re unlikely to earn any engagement or reach.
When planning your post to maximize engagement, get into the mindset of a Facebook user. Would you be interested in that post if it were in your feed? If your answer is no, don’t post it.
Instead, ask how you can change the post to be more interesting to and evoke emotion in people on Facebook.
Are Your Dental Facebook Posts Not Earning Engagement and Reach?
If you struggle to get people to engage with your dental Facebook posts, it might be that they don’t evoke emotions within people to earn their engagement.
If you want more help with dental Facebook marketing, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program.
You can also join thousands of other dentists helping each other in my Free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook Group!
Facebook Ads for Dentists: How to Lower Your Ad Costs While Increasing Conversions
Facebook revolutionized dental marketing by both lowering costs and improving results. The most powerful part of Facebook and Facebook ads for dentists is your ability to direct your ad to the right people and away from the wrong people using audience targeting.
Before Facebook came along, dentists spent thousands of dollars a month on traditional media ads that would hits thousands of people, but the ads would be relevant to only a small percentage of the people who would see them, and thus ineffective for the dentists. Even worse, because of the limited ad space on traditional media, dentists spent thousands of dollars a month to get even ten new patients a month.
Facebook ads for dentists changes all of that by giving you unlimited control of the audience you want your ad to be presented to. This does two things. First, it lowers your advertising costs because it allows you to target very specific groups of people that other companies don’t want to target. That means less competition for you and more Facebook ads to sell for Facebook. Second, it improves your results, because your Facebook ads are only shown to people you know to be part of a relevant audience.
Advertising copy is important. Your offer is important. And your images or videos are important. But the real power of Facebook ads for dentists is your ability to get your posts in front of the right people.
In fact, it’s so powerful that when my team works with dentists to help them with their Facebook ads, we set up and save the right audiences before we set up the first ads for our dental marketing clients. That allows us to get great results for the dentists and dental practices that hire us to help them with their Facebook ads, because we can select the best audience for each specific Facebook ad campaign or boosted post right from the start.
Here are seven high-impact target audiences that will help you get better results with your Facebook ad campaigns.
Using Facebook Ads to Target Your Current Patient List
Your current patient list is a great target audience for Facebook because they already know, like, and trust you. They can be a high-impact audience for end-of-year “use it or lose it” dental insurance reminder posts, add-on services, or one-time specials for premium services.
Using Facebook Ads to Target Your Email List Newsletter Subscribers
People who subscribe to your newsletter or have signed up to receive a free guide or checklist are a great group of people to target with ads, because they are already familiar with you and have taken action to get on your email list. Thus, they’ll be more likely to take action on your offer again. They can be especially good for targeting people with another high-value download that directs them to a dental marketing funnel.
Using Facebook Ads to Target People Who Visit Your Website
Whether it’s any page or specific pages, people who visit your website are a great group of people to target, because they’ve already been directed to you by something they did. Sometimes, your site will have come up on a web search. Other times, they may have found you in a dental insurance directory or from a friend. Whatever it is, they’ve been connected with you before, and Facebook ads can be a great way to connect with them again.
I recommend you create a custom audience for each specific service page on your site, so you can make sure to present the most relevant Facebook ads and get even better results. For example, if you start developing articles on each of your service areas, you can target the people who have shown an interest in that service by going to that page on your website.
Using Facebook Ads to Target People Who Watch Your Facebook Videos
Videos are a powerful way to connect with people. They allow people to get to know you and your practice. They can hear your voice, look into your eyes, see your enthusiasm, and get a feel for your practice. If you’re doing Facebook Lives or uploading videos, you can create a list of people who have watched a certain percentage of those videos. These people have given you their attention for an extended period of time and will be more likely to take action on a future Facebook ad. I recommend setting up audiences of people who have viewed at least twenty-five percent and at least fifty percent of your videos. This gives you a choice to target only very engaged people who have watched more than half of your videos and a larger but still-engaged audience who have watched more than twenty-five percent.
Using Facebook Ads to Target New People Who Share Important Characteristics with Existing Groups
In the Facebook world, this is called setting up lookalike audiences. Essentially, the way this works is you give Facebook a list of people and ask them to create an additional audience that shares characteristics like living in the same area, making the same purchasing decisions, have similar incomes, like similar Facebook pages, etc. These audiences are powerful, because they are similar to people who already know, like, or trust you in some important way. You can ask Facebook to get people similar to your patient list, website visitors, email newsletter, and more. Lookalike audiences are a powerful way to connect with new people.
Using Facebook Ads to Target People Who Have Relevant Interests on Facebook
A simple way to increase the relevance of audiences targeted at people who aren’t already patents, on your email list, your Facebook fan, or connected in some way to one of those groups of people is to target people by a combination of demographics, interests, or behaviors. There are unlimited combinations of demographics, interests, and behaviors you can target, depending on your dental practice specialty or goal for your Facebook ad. For example, you can target women who live within five miles of your practice and make over $50,000 per year if you want to promote teeth whitening. You can also target parents of kids between ten and sixteen years old who live within five miles of your practice if you want to promote orthodontics. The possibilities are endless.
Using Facebook Ads to Target People Who Like Your Facebook Page Plus Their Family and Friends
Facebook’s algorithm only shows your dental Facebook page posts to a small percentage of your Facebook fans organically; however, you can use Facebook ads to target more fans as well as their family and friends. Because your dental Facebook page fans already took action to like your page, they’re a warm audience, and your costs will be low. Additionally, when their family and friends see your Facebook ad, Facebook adds a note to the top of the post that lets them know which of their Facebook friends like your page. That mini-endorsement helps you and your Facebook ad make a stronger connection and encourages them to take action.
BONUS: Excluding People for Even Better Results
A great way to improve the results of Facebook ads for dentists and dental practices is through exclusion. With exclusion, you tell Facebook to not show your ad to certain people. For example, if you’re using a Facebook ad to send people to a blog post where you talk about the advantages of dental implants and make an offer, you don’t want to show the same ad to the people who have taken you up on the offer, because they’ve already opted in. This way, you don’t spend money targeting people who already opted in and you avoid annoying those people with the same ad.
Whom Do You Need to Reach with Your Facebook Ads?
One of the best ways to improve the results of your Facebook ad campaigns is to make sure you’re targeting the right people for your posts. These target audiences are just some of the groups the dentists and dental offices my team serves use to decrease their lead costs while increasing their impact. The opportunities are truly unlimited.
If you wanna grow faster and interested in learning more about our programs Platinum Accelerator or Platinum Mastermind, click here.
You can also join thousands of other dentists helping each other in my Free Dental Boss Movement Facebook Group!
3 Ways to Get More People into Your Dental Marketing Funnel
Dental Marketing has never been as simple or effective as it is today when we can use automated funnels and highly-targeted marketing to attract more patients to our dental practices, instead of the inefficient and expensive marketing options we were stuck with years ago.
The opportunity that dental marketing funnels provide is so much better than anything we’ve seen before, that I highly recommend them to all of my dental coaching and Inner Circle clients, as well as my Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind members, and have even added done-for-you funnel services to our service mix.
As effective as they can be, however, even the best-planned automated sequence won’t help you grow your practice if you aren’t attracting enough of the right people into the funnel.
Here are three ways to attract more of the right people into your dental marketing funnel, so your automated sequence can guide them to your call to action.
1. Create and promote high-value opt-in content
In my post about how to set up your first dental marketing funnel, I shared that creating a piece of high-value opt-in content was the second step in setting up your funnel. This is because high-value opt-in content like guides, checklists, ebooks, explainer videos, or answers to frequently asked questions have been proven to attract people to your funnel, giving them useful information in exchange for their opting into your automated funnel.
Although it’s important to create high-value opt-in content while you build your funnel, that doesn’t mean you can forget about opt-in content after you create it. To attract more people into your funnel, consider creating multiple pieces of high-value opt-in content for each funnel. For example, you might have a short checklist, pre-recorded video, and a pre-recorded audio interview that align with the goal of your funnel.
Having multiple pieces of high-value opt-in content allows you to attract more people into your funnel because different people have different learning styles. Some people prefer video. Others prefer audio. Others will only consume written content. Also, creating multiple pieces of content on related, but slightly different topics helps you connect with people using multiple messages.
2. Create and recreate multiple Facebook Live events.
Promoting replays of live events is a great way to leverage your time to attract people into your funnel without having to spend additional time doing multiple Facebook Live events. If you’re not attracting as many people to your funnel as you want, consider creating multiple Facebook Live events to lead people into your funnel. The more Facebook Live events you do, the more comfortable you’ll get with them, and the more effective you will be at leading people to download your opt-in content to get them into your funnel. Thus, consider recreating the same Facebook Live events as you get more comfortable with live video and sending people to your opt-in. You can also experiment with hosting Facebook Live events at different times of the day to see if one time is more effective than another.
Finally, as with the opt-in content, you could host Facebook Live events on slightly different topics until you find one that works better than others. By creating and recreating multiple Facebook Live events, you’ll have more touches with people live, better content as you become more comfortable with live video, and multiple video replays to boost on Facebook and promote to your email list.
3. Promote your opt-in content to your patient email list.
If the goal of your funnel is to sell a specific service, rather than to attract new patients to your practice, your existing patient list can be a great place to go to get more people into your funnel.
Because your current patients already know, like, and trust you, they can be much more open to opting in to your funnel for additional services than others who don’t know how great you and your practice are!
Thus, emailing them to let them know about your great new opt-in content or event with a link to your squeeze page can be highly effective at attracting people into your funnel!
Are you ready to fill your funnel?
Because an effective automated funnel cuts your intake time down to nearly nothing, getting people into an automated dental marketing funnel is one of the best uses of your marketing time.
If you’re having trouble getting people into your funnel, these three tips should help you get more people to opt in. If you need more help, check out the team of expert coaches, training, and resources we offer in our signature Delivering WOW Platinum Mastermind Program. You can also join thousands of other dentists helping each other in my Free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook Group!
Facebook Case study…. 36 shares and 53 new potential likes. Ad spend…$3.88!
So Krissy from Dr. Winn ‘s office and I had a quick chat last week about what really works to drive people to take action to come in as new patients.
Dr. Winn is a member of FBMastery.. and decided to delegate learning of Facebook to a member of his TEAM!
Look at the RESULTS!
-36 SHARES!
-33 Comments
-53 Likes (who she later invited to like their page)
-969 Post Clicks
Guess how much she spent???
$3.88!!!!
Here's the lesson:
Every time you create a post, you have to think “Is this something that would evoke emotion? Is it something that people will SHARE?”
AND
Once your post starts to get lots of likes, FB recognizes that it is a post users want to see.
So…
They push the post into more new feeds for FREE, which will help to make your post go VIRAL…
So…
Of the 4891 people who were reached from this $3.88 ad, 2144 were paid and 2747 were organic (non-paid)!
Again 36 shares and the potential for 53 new people to like the page.
And…
To get to know you to come in as new patients.
Creating A Cost Effective Marketing Strategy That Works with Dr. Anissa Holmes
Marketing is an essential part to the success of your business.
And although it can be a relatively large expense, it often yields poor results (or worse, can be a complete waste of money).
For that reason, new marketing trends are often met with skepticism.
…Especially when it comes to online marketing.
In this Podcast I share and interview that I did with my good friend, Jonathan VanHorne, on his “Start Your Dental Practice” Podcast.
What I share is NOT about hype. It's about PROVEN RESULTS.
On today's show I share some extremely valuable Facebook insight.
If you want to learn more, you can download your own copy of the Facebook Success Blueprint. Get that here.
Here are a few things you’ll discover in today’s episode:
- The advantage that Facebook offers that you do not get with other online marketing tools
- The minor detail within Facebook ads that greatly impacts engagement
- A common mistake made when boosting Facebook posts that keeps you from growing your audience
- The three types of Facebook campaigns that will give you the best results (one of these is NEW to Facebook and you’ll want to start using IMMEDIATELY)
- How online advertising is different for a dental practice than it is for an online marketer (and why you should ignore some of the advice they give)
- Why you’ll get far better results managing your business Facebook page internally vs. outsourcing it to another company
- The MAJOR advantage to implementing Facebook into your marketing strategy now (and what you’ll miss out on if you put it off)
- A Facebook strategy course that you can take advantage of at a very special rate