Effective Facebook Advertising

We’ve previously discussed the value of incorporating social media into your dental marketing strategy in order to reach your share of the billions of users worldwide. Facebook is the most popular platform at almost 2 billion daily active users and Instagram – also under the Meta umbrella – isn’t far behind.

While it’s vital to maintain a presence on any one of the popular social media sites, paid Facebook advertising provides the means to more effectively target your ideal patients in a way that organic posts can’t. Fortunately for the savvy dental professional and their marketing team, Facebook makes it easy to create, manage, and track ads and campaigns for the most cost-effective and successful results.

How Facebook Advertising Works

If you spend any time on Facebook you’ve undoubtedly noticed a lot of ads that happen to pertain to your interests. Thanks to Meta’s well-known algorithms and targeting capabilities, it’s much easier to customize your ads and reach to have the most impact on the people you’re looking to reach. So, although it operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis like Google Ads, it costs less with more targeted clicks.

The Facebook Ads Manager tool walks you through each step necessary to run an ad campaign as well as determine its success. The main features include:

• Create an ad
• Choose an audience
• Set up a budget
• Run on multiple Meta platforms
• Test and Review
• Edit campaign as needed

Before doing anything, Facebook will help you determine your marketing objective by offering three categories of campaign goals: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Awareness is simply generating interest in your practice and can be ideal for those on a smaller budget. The consideration objective is geared to people already familiar with your business and wanting to learn more. And conversion is more direct, instructing your audience to take a specific action such as registering for a presentation or making an appointment.

Once an objective is established, Facebook will guide you on identifying your target patients by using common demographics like location, age and gender, but also their interests, income, purchasing habits, and more. A suggested audience size is between 50,000 and 100,000. You set your budget for the campaign, and it can allocate either “daily” or “lifetime” for the length it runs.

There are specific guidelines for the design of Facebook ads, but they offer a lot of flexibility in format options, including single images, video, and slideshows. You’re also presented with placement options for other Facebook locations and applications such as Marketplace, Instagram and Messenger that will further expand your reach.

Last year, Meta generated almost $115 billion in worldwide ad revenue so you can bet they’re invested in making it a user-friendly and profitable marketing tool for consumers.

How to Make Facebook Ads Work for You

Before proceeding, make sure you have a Facebook business page for your practice that includes your logo, all pertinent information, and any important keywords that may apply to your services, such as cosmetic or pediatric dentistry.

Here is an overview of three essential ways to ensure a successful Facebook ad campaign:

1. Target your ideal audience. By selecting detailed demographics like age, geography, education, income, and much more, your ads are more likely to be seen by the right prospective patients. Pediatric dentists can target families with children and periodontists can target older populations. You can even target new residents in the community who are sure to need your services.
2. Designed and personalized. Based on your ideal patient pool, you can reate a simple and eye-catching ad campaign. Facebook has guidelines about the limited text you can include on the image, but you can add your website, informative headline, and detailed add copy to the image or carousel. Don’t forget a call to action which may be a button urging readers to LEARN MORE or SIGN UP.
3. A/B Testing. Optimize your spending by determining which ads work best and when by utilizing A/B testing. The Ads Manager will explain how to change up the image, copy, or call-to-action method between ads and run a test for the best results. You’ll always get real-time results so you can recognize trends and change up campaigns accordingly.

As with any successful marketing tool, it’s always wise to diversify and mix methods since your intended audience is seldom congregated in one place. RAMP Results has more than 20 years of experience in both traditional and digital advertising and can advise based on your personal practice, region, and budget. Contact us today and get started.