To have an all-encompassing online marketing strategy, it’s important for dental practices to be actively present on social media. While many dentists rightfully focus on organic (free) growth, some also inquire about paid social ads.
Social advertising is becoming increasingly popular as it helps you target a specific audience and get noticed by a wider network. But, before you simply decide to run a social media ad to get everyone in your town to follow your page, you will want to identify goals and purpose of your ads. Is it to:
- Get more followers?
- Drive more traffic to your dental website?
- Have potential patients call your practice?
Once you identify your call-to-action, you will want to specify your target audience. With social ads on Facebook, you are able to target on a whole new level – you can specify audiences based on their interests, job title, demographic data, relationship status, and more(!). You can also target people who have already visited your website – which is also known as “remarketing.”
After you define goals and target audience, brainstorm a concise message that will capture attention in someone’s newsfeed. Are you providing a shocking dental tip? Amazing new patient special? Whatever it is, be sure to test your messages to see which types of offers your audience responds to most.
You’ll also want to think through the complete experience and identify what people will do once they see your ad. TIP: Don’t just send people to your dental practice’s homepage. Make it easy for visitors (patients and potential patients) to find what they’re looking for and link to a specific page that is related to the ad. Because your dental practice is paying for people to take a specific action after viewing your ads, it’s important to make the experience as seamless as possible.
Just with any other dental marketing campaign, make sure you track success and analyze your posts by understanding key performance metrics such as impressions, reach, and engagement which can be found in the social media page’s analytics dashboard.
Tip: ask your website provider how to implement pixels (code) to your dental practice’s website so a visitor’s actions are communicated to social ad platforms. By doing this, you’ll be able to see the performance of ad campaigns directly on the social network. Then, in Google Analytics, you may also learn how much traffic is going to your website from your social media profile. Between these two data sets, you can measure the impact of social media on your practice.
To learn more about managing your practice on social media, click here to download your free copy of the whitepaper Running a Practice in the Age of Social Media today or fill out the the form below.
