How to Get More Patients With Facebook Marketing For Dentists

Our team at :Delmain has spent years testing and analyzing the best strategies for using Facebook marketing for dental practices. Here are the 2 big takeaways:

1. Your organic Facebook presence is best managed by your in-house team
2. A robust Facebook ad campaign is an incredible way to grow your practice

Both of these things can exist successfully without the other. But real growth happens when you work hand-in-hand with your online marketing agency to create a comprehensive Facebook marketing dental strategy.

What is Facebook marketing for dentists?

There are 2 ways to market your dental practice brand and services through Facebook — organically and through paid efforts. A Facebook marketing strategy for dentists is the process of combining these 2 approaches to get in front of a large, targeted audience and raise brand awareness while driving more patient bookings.

Organic Facebook marketing

Organic Facebook marketing is focused on reaching an audience through unpaid efforts. You can post to your dental practice’s Facebook page at any time for free. However, with the increasing amount of content published on Facebook, don’t expect to reach a large audience purely through organic methods.

Paid Facebook marketing

Facebook’s paid advertising options allow you to promote and increase the reach of your posts. While organic posts are only shown to your own Facebook followers, with paid ads you can target potential patients who haven’t yet liked your page, but meet the interests, needs, and demographics of your ideal patient.

Why is Facebook marketing a great opportunity for dentists?

Precise targeting

The number of users on Facebook is in the billions, but the platform has carefully developed its targeting capabilities so you can focus your ads on those who are most likely to be interested in the dental services you offer. In fact, Facebook offers the most robust ad-targeting capabilities out of all dental social media marketing options.

Increased website traffic

This platform allows you to drive your audience directly to your website. Whether you’re sending organic or paid leads to your site, these leads tend to be very high-quality because they already know your company or have been sold on your advertising message. 

Variety of ad formats

Facebook gives you the opportunity to showcase your services from all the best angles. Choose from both text and visual ad formats. You can…

• Boost any organic post by turning it into an ad
• Share stories to show what it’s like to be a patient at your office
• Make a slideshow of before and after results
• Use carousel ads with up to 10 image or videos, such as a tour of your office or interviews with your staff
• …all while linking to corresponding pages on your website.

Facebook also allows you to vet different combinations of dental Facebook ads by A/B testing the variations against each other. Best of all, you can leverage Facebook’s various objectives to create a funnel strategy that targets the right audience with the right message at the right time (more on this later!) So many options!

Positive impact on SEO

Social media is known to influence your search rankings. Google and other search engines consider the information on your Facebook page, including shares, likes, and comments to determine whether or not you are a trustworthy source.

Great return on investment

Dental Facebook marketing often costs less than traditional marketing and other social media for dentists. In fact, the average cost per click on Facebook for healthcare companies is $1.32. This is an amazing price point. Facebook also gives dentists sophisticated performance data for the ads they post. You’ll always understand your exact return on investment.

How to get the most out of your Facebook marketing

1. Optimize your business page
 & add a Facebook pixel to your website

First things first, make sure your page is optimized for SEO and conversions. Complete your profile, strategically sprinkling relevant keywords along the way. Don’t forget to add a header and profile image, include your phone and address, and add a “contact us” call-to-action button that leads to your website and drives additional traffic.

You should also add a Facebook pixel to your site. A Facebook pixel is a piece of code that will allow you to do 2 things:

• Identify and segment new audiences based on the webpage(s) they visited on your site or whether they have visited your website at all
• Create a lookalike audience to target your ads to. This audience will resemble your best patients based on age, location, and more

2. Engage with your audience through an organic strategy

While the biggest results will come from paid ads, an organic Facebook marketing strategy will support your paid efforts and is a great way to engage with current patients.

Here’s what we recommend:

• Invite friends and patients to like your page
 
• Show off your practice culture 
• Host giveaways or specials

• Post regularly
 (1x a week is a good baseline)
• Respond to comments and messages

3. Choose original images and video

Whether you’re publishing to your feed or creating an ad, use your own photos and videos as much as possible. This is beneficial for many reasons:

• Helps familiarize potential patients with your brand
• Drives better engagement
• Sets you apart
• Builds trust

Try a casual headshot, images of dentists and staff, or pictures of your staff engaging with patients. If you can, invest in professional videography to showcase your practice or highlight a certain treatment. However, you don’t need a professional videographer to make effective, free video content for Stories.

4. Target your audience

We mentioned that Facebook has the most robust targeting capabilities — we weren’t kidding. Everything from occupation to family size and interests is on the table for targeting on Facebook.

Determining how to target your ads or sponsored posts can feel overwhelming. To get started, consider your ideal patient:

• Who are they?
• Where do they work?
• Where do they live?
• Do they have a family?
• How old are they?
• Do they have insurance?
• What do they care about?

Answer these questions and you’ll have a better idea of how to target your Facebook dental ads.

Pro Facebook targeting tip for dentists:

Try targeting those who have recently moved to your area or just got a new job. These individuals are very likely to need a new dentist and are an excellent group to focus your paid ads on.

5. Write compelling ad copy

There’s no one-size-fits-all ad copy that will guarantee results. However, there is a proven approach you can reference to create the type of copy that grabs attention and compels a potential patient to book an appointment.

• Speak to an emotion, problem, benefit, or solution — What do your patients care about and why should they care about you? Personalize your copy to speak to them, specifically
• Incentivize a click — Offer them something special, whether it’s a free consultation, a new patient promo, or maybe a complimentary teeth whitening 
• Be truthful — Whatever you’re saying needs to speak to your brand and the actual experience and services you provide
• Include 2 calls-to-action — People viewing your ad will see an image first, headline second, and copy third. You want the last thing someone sees to lead them to the next step, so include your call-to-action once with a button and once in the copy

6. Try various ad types

Facebook offers several types of ads for you to experiment with. The best type of Facebook ads for dentists are:

• Photo — Use an original image as part of your ad to get your audience to stop scrolling
• Video — Grabs and holds prospective patient’s attention with moving ads
• Carousel — Show 3-5 images and/or videos, headlines, and links or CTAs
• Slideshow — Group individual practice images into a video

All these ads types are effective for raising brand awareness, driving clicks to your website, or converting a patient.

7. A/B test your Facebook ads

When you A/B test a dental Facebook ad, you are pitting one version of an ad against another to see which one gets better results. By doing this, you can focus your ongoing efforts (and budget) on the most successful of the options.

Here are few tips for a successful A/B test:

• Limit the number of changes in your test to one at a time. For example, change a photo or change the button copy, but don’t change both in the same test. Why? If you change both, you won’t know what change made the difference.
• Run an A/B test for at least 4 days. According to Facebook’s Business Center, this is enough time to produce accurate results.
• Test everything. Images, video, ad copy, calls-to-action. Slowly work through all these options until you’ve completely optimized your ads.

8. Integrate Facebook Ads into Instagram

A Facebook study recently confirmed that content that does well on Facebook is also proven to work well on Instagram. We recommend setting up an Instagram Business account where you can integrate all the Facebook ads that you’ve already spent a lot of time perfecting. 

Running these ads on both Facebook and Instagram is an excellent opportunity to A/B test your visual media, copy, cost-per-action, and your practice’s unique selling points. 

Plus, using both Facebook and Instagram together ensures you reach your target audience where they’re at. For example, if your ideal patient is someone age 18-60, Facebook Ads will help you reach your older audience while Instagram will better target younger patients. It’s a great strategy for adding an additional layer of targeting that should not be overlooked!

9. Put it all together with a Facebook ad funnel strategy

We highly recommend using a Facebook ad funnel strategy to fuel your Facebook marketing efforts. This strategy carefully targets a sequence of ads to potential patients based on how ready they are to book an appointment with you.

The Facebook ad funnel strategy works by sorting your audience into funnels and creating ads for each of those funnel stages: 

1. Awareness (top of funnel) — Turns strangers into prospects
2. Consideration (middle of funnel) — Turns prospects to leads
3. Decision (bottom of funnel) — Turns leads into patients

The reason this strategy is so effective is because most people won’t be ready to make a decision after seeing just one ad. Instead, most conversions happen once a user interacts with your practice’s brand over multiple advertising touchpoints.

A Facebook ad funnel strategy does just that — attracting patients, warming them up to your practice brand, and once they feel comfortable with you, converting them into happy patients.

We could write an entire article on this amazing advertising tactic, including what kinds of ads are best for each stage of the Facebook funnel (maybe we will one of these days!). But in the meantime, while you can certainly take a DIY approach, we recommend working with someone who understands and has experience implementing this strategy and can get the best ROI.

Bonus! 4 examples of effective Facebook Ads for dentists

Why it works

Acknowledges the problem (missing tooth), has vibrant colors, is a video, and is very simple to recreate.

Why it works

Speaks to a specific need (dental implants) while also targeting those who speak Spanish.

Why it works

Uses branding (logo) to create eye catching images on Facebook. Great if you’re limited in resources (photos, vidoes). Speaks to a specific audience — those who haven’t used their insurance benefits yet.

Why it works

A great ad that speaks to those looking to find a new dentist by offering a New Patient Special.

Interested in getting more new patients through Facebook marketing?

At :Delmain, as part of our online marketing services, we specialize in deploying the strategic Facebook funnel campaign for dentists. Our process evolves over 6 months and produces amazing results:

1. Awareness – We’ll leverage Facebook Intelligence to cast a wide net targeting those who fit your ideal patient demographic and begin building interest around your practice. 
2. Consideration – Next we move this audience into the consideration stage, re-engaging them by delivering them to your website to learn more about your practice. These visitors are captured by the Facebook Pixel which allows us to build a strong remarketing audience.
3. Action – With data from Awareness and Consideration, our team will aggressively re-engage Facebook users who previously showed genuine interest by showing on-brand advertising creative and delivering them to a conversion-forward page on your site. Finally, it’s time to convert them to a booked new patient. 

Contact us to learn more about our comprehensive approach to new patient growth through effective online marketing, including Facebook marketing.