Are you successfully reaching your dental practice audience through Facebook? Chances are, your posts aren’t reaching as many people as they used to. Many business owners are scratching their heads about how to retrieve the reach they once had.
Because of recent updates to Facebook, the usual posts on your page will only reach an average of 2 to 6% of your fan base — leaving you feeling like you’re spinning your wheels as you struggle to reach your audience. While it’s critical to continue posting on your Facebook page, you also need to add a different method, if you aren’t doing so already — Facebook advertising.
Focused Advertising
The beauty of advertising on Facebook is that you can reach a very specific audience from the 700 million people who visit Facebook each day — the one that is most likely to use your dental services.
You can choose your audience based on location, age, interests, and more. When you’re running a dental practice, those elements can help you narrow down to the people who actually want to see your message.
In addition, Facebook ads exist in the stream of information where your potential patients are already looking. Since an ad will show up in the midst of information people actually want to see, it’s more likely people will notice your ad and take action.
Choose an Objective
What are your goals in advertising? Do you want to promote an event? Are you going for maximum visibility? Trying to send people to your website? Facebook will help you choose an objective, which provides you with the best-suited options for your campaign.
Test different objectives to see what performs better for you. Your audience may respond better to a special offer than they do to a request to like your page, but you won’t know until you test it.
Choose Your Audience
As a dental practice, you are likely looking for a specific audience in a specific geographical location. Facebook allows you to select your audience based on a variety of factors like location, age, gender, generation, behavior, and more.
You can even choose your audience based on interests — people who are already interested in your competitor will likely be interested in you. Narrow your focus further based on pages they’ve liked, apps they’ve used, their likes and interests, and behaviors like purchase history.
In Facebook, use the Connections option to target people who already like your page and their friends.
Additionally, the Custom Audiences option allows you to upload a list of email addresses, Facebook user IDs, and phone numbers of people you already have a business relationship with. You can then create targeted ads to people who are likely to buy again. Maybe you’re offering a new service they don’t know about, or you can target them to become newsletter subscribers, which will help keep them coming back to your dental practice again and again.
You can also set up a custom audience pulled from people who have visited your website or who are in your company’s contact database.
Facebook will save any audience that responds well to your ads so you can continue to target that audience as time goes on.
Manage Your Budget
Set your budget in a basic way (per day or per the lifetime of the ad) or by using the advanced options.
In the advanced options, choose specific times for your ad to run or set a standard or accelerated delivery.
Budget management has three tiers: The first tier is the campaign. This is the objective Facebook guided you to in your first step (driving sales to your website, increasing the number of likes, etc.).
The second tier is the ad set. Set a budget and schedule for each of your ad sets, and organize those sets by the audiences you’re targeting.
The third tier is the ads — if you’re testing, you’ll have multiple versions of your ad. This allows the distribution of money and data to be even.
Creating Your Facebook Ad
Depending on what you selected at Choose an Objective, Facebook will suggest an ad type and will provide templates as well as millions of stock photos for you to choose from — for free. You can choose up to six pictures to test in your campaign.
You’ll also want to use the extremely effective call-to-action buttons.
Create compelling copy for two or three sections: the headline, the text, and your news feed link description. Be catchy, but truthful — otherwise, you’ll get a lot of clicks that don’t convert.
Report on the Performance
The Facebook ad manager and your marketing software help you see the results of your efforts by reporting on key metrics like engagement, clicks, website actions, and more. You can keep track of how many customers you’re gaining from your efforts.
Test, Test, and Test Again
It’s worth it to continue to test your advertising efforts. As you track your performance, you’ll uncover methods and approaches that work for your specific audience. Contact DentalMarketing.net to learn more methods for reaching your target audience, like direct mail postcards that correspond with your Facebook ads.