Common Mistakes With Social Media Ad Campaigns Run By Dentists

What works and what doesn’t when advertising for patient bookings using Facebook and Instagram

Here at Dental Media our social media advertising team looks after the set up and management of hundreds of ad campaigns for dentists across the UK – many of them targeting Invisalign or implants. This work gives us clear insights into what is required for campaigns of this type to be successful and today we’ll share some of that information to help with your own campaigns.

With social media advertising there is a fine balance between campaigns which don’t deliver on expectations and those which are really successful – so let’s jump in and take a look at what differentiates the good from the bad and where mistakes are often made.

Assessing the competition

As with any type of marketing and advertising for dentists, you need to have a clear picture of what your competitors are doing. If you go-ahead and launch campaigns which are not as good as your competitors, it doesn’t take much insight to understand what might happen next.

With Invisalign particularly, competition is quite fierce and it’s usual to find several dentists in any town or city using social media ads to reach the local audience. So before you launch your own campaigns, be sure to check what everyone else is doing. There are online tools to help with this and any experienced marketing team will also be able to help.

Get the targeting right

This is essential if your campaigns are going to be effective and also to avoid wasting budget on random clicks. Whilst Facebook is reducing the range of targeting options available, particularly with dentistry, it is still possible to place ads in front of those people who are most likely to click and also who are likely to have a genuine interest in the service you are offering.

In your targeting assessment you need to evaluate where you want your ads to appear, for example a pre-determined radius around the practice or more specifically to particular areas. For example, you may wish to target “affluent” areas where you consider that more disposable income is available for certain types of dental treatment.

You also need to be aware of just how big the “pond” actually is and also how far you think people might travel for your services. For example, a small town with a limited urban conurbation and not too many surrounding villages, won’t yield as many enquiries as a city location. This may sound obvious but still get quite a number of enquiries where the dentist has unrealistic expectations on the number of cases these types of campaigns will generate. There are only so many folk within a particular population at any given time who will be interested in treatment. That said, even small-scale campaigns with moderate yields can still be very lucrative.

We also use re-targeting techniques where we can show new ads to people who have already shown some interest in dental services; for example where they have visited dental websites searching for specific treatments. This type of follow-up is essential to maximise the return from a particular area.

Get the offer right

We see a lot of commentary regarding dental ads which stresses the need to avoid pushing treatment prices down and avoiding a race to the bottom. This is all well and good but we are also acutely aware that a lot of people still shop based on price and are looking for an “offer”. It’s also very clear from our data that where dentists are reluctant to work on a suitable value proposition, their campaigns won’t do very well – it’s critical to understand that folk are shopping around, particularly where they are making significant investments.

So how do you generate an attractive offer without eroding the base price of treatment? The typical way to do this is to calculate the value of ancillary items that come “free” with the treatment, for example whitening, retainers, the consultation, scan etc. We regularly see dentists suggesting that these “free” items give a combined saving in excess of £2000 – and it’s this figure which is used to develop the value proposition without eroding the base treatment price too much.

All of that said, the campaigns which work best are the ones which can demonstrate the best value proposition across the broad – including savings on treatment. So please keep that in mind.

Keep the campaigns fresh

Elsewhere in our blogs we’ve discussed the concept of “ad blindness” and its well-worth revisiting here. When running social media ad campaigns, the same ad can be presented in a user’s feed several times. At a certain point, users will start to ignore the ads as they’ve seen them too many times – we see this data (frequency) in the data we receive from Facebook and Instagram.

At the point that the frequency of the ad impression gets too high, we need to ensure that the ads are changed. This is known as an “ad refresh” and will typically involve changing the text, images and potentially the offer on the ad. Similar work is also needed to keep landing pages fresh and effective. Sometimes dentists are reluctant to pay for this work but it is essential to ensure campaigns continue to run effectively.

Summarising

Social media ad campaigns for dentists can be extremely effective but they must be configured and managed competently to work as intended. Above we’ve discussed some of the key areas where mistakes are often made, but it isn’t an exhaustive list and a certain degree of expertise and experience will be needed to ensure that campaigns start well and then continue to deliver.

To see how the ads team at Dental Media can help you get up and running with your own campaigns, please call us on 01332 672548 or use the website contact form. We’ll be pleased to arrange a no-obligation discussion to evaluate your requirements and then present a project proposal.