As dentists, we’re visionaries, and if having an automated dental practice is something you’ve dreamed of for your practice, you might be surprised to learn it’s not very difficult to put in place.If you want to create an automated dental practice, you only need a few pieces in place. After all, a vision alone won’t help you achieve your goal. You also must take action and hold yourself accountable as you pursue your goal. Here are the three pieces to put in place if you want to work toward building an automated dental practice.
Buy a whiteboard to automate setting and hitting goals for your dental practice.
Of all the strategies I teach dentists to grow their practices, using a whiteboard is one of my favorites. It’s simple. It’s effective. There’s no tech to learn. Best of all, it’s very lost cost, often less than $10.I know whiteboards don’t sound very sexy or exciting, but this tool can change everything in your practice. With it, you can publicize relevant key performance indicators and see at a glance whether you’re on track to hit our targets. Even better, everyone in your office can see progress in real-time and is held accountable without any uncomfortable conversations.The public nature of the whiteboard helps people avoid falling behind and encourages others on the team to support each other so the group hits all goals. That means you don’t have to go around talking about production or letting people know they’re behind. As long as the whiteboard is updated everyone on the team can work together to set and achieve important practice productivity goals.
Automate communication among team members.
With your goals on track, the next step to automating your dental practice is automating communications among your team members. In my practice, automating communication means using a project management tool called Asana. It’s a free online tool where we can record and manage information, share resources, and easily assign tasks to team members.With Asana, we can even automate weekly check-ins so every team member can give a quick update on their tasks and progress. We can assign specific to-dos from inside Asana and automatically update everyone who needs to know. And then we can quickly review people’s to-dos, see what’s still open, and figure out why something hasn’t been done. Even better, if someone on the team needs my specific feedback on a task, they can just tag me in Asana in the same way they would tag a friend on Facebook. I don’t need to set up a meeting or even be in the office to review and respond to their question.
Automate your dental practice marketing.
Automating your marketing is an extremely powerful part of automating your dental practice because it will drive new patients into your practice on an ongoing basis. What’s so amazing about automated marketing is that once you’ve set it up, it essentially runs itself—it requires very little time or money on your part.Automating your dental practice marketing is simple. You just need to do two things. First, set up dental marketing funnels to and Facebook ads to key audiences that drive traffic to your funnels. In my practice, we’ve built out multiple marketing funnels. They’re easy to set up and require no work from you after the setup. Through funnels, we send people to quizzes to prequalify them. At the end of the quiz, we offer patients the opportunity to come in and talk to us or leave their email so we can communicate with them. With these in place, high-value dental practice leads hit our inbox on a regular basis.
Do you want to build an automated dental practice?
Automating your dental practice doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple whiteboard can help you set and more easily achieve practice goals. Asana can make team member communication easy. And automated dental practice marketing can keep patients coming in on a regular basis. With those three pieces in place, your job as practice owner will become much, much easier. Even better, your team will be set up for success. They'll be able to continue to perform without you needing to be there and get involved in everything.If you want more help with your practice, join our community of Dental Bosses just like you, in the Dental Boss Movement Facebook group if you want support and training as you grow your dental practice. More than 1,000 Dental Bosses are already in there learning and growing together. Join us today!
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.
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.
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.
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!
