{"id":12339,"date":"2025-06-05T14:55:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T14:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/?p=12339"},"modified":"2025-06-05T15:05:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T15:05:42","slug":"ads-changing-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dental-media.co.uk\/marketing\/social\/ads-changing-landscape\/","title":{"rendered":"The Changing Face of Social Media Advertising For Dentists"},"content":{"rendered":"

What you need to know before jumping in.<\/h2>\n

As a dentist reading this blog, you may already have dipped into social media ads? There\u2019s a chance that it worked well for you but also the strong possibility that it didn\u2019t. Unfortunately, social ad campaigns that don\u2019t work as well as expected are becoming more and more common, so what\u2019s going wrong? In this blog we\u2019ll take a look at what\u2019s changed, together with what you need to do to give yourself the best chances of success when advertising on Facebook and Instagram.<\/p>\n

Before looking at specifics, it\u2019s worth noting the changing way that marketing agencies are advertising their own services via social media as this gives a good clue as to what\u2019s going on. A couple of years ago, marketers were running their own basic ads that typically offered \u201ctwenty leads per month\u201d and little else. As things got harder, it quickly became 30 leads per month, then 40 and so on. Then around a year ago, marketers started to offer to work for free if they didn\u2019t meet the pre-agreed number of leads delivered.<\/p>\n

Now we not only see that, but also lead-qualification services where the agency filters the leads, essentially working for the dentist<\/a>. I\u2019m even seeing the so-called leading Invisalign marketer offering free services – that evolution is a really good indicator of how things are changing and how everyone is trying to compete, supplier and dentist.<\/p>\n

Of course what you also need to understand, particularly as the marketing companies try to avoid mentioning it, is that you need a big daily budget to make any of it happen. Unfortunately the leads from social media ads can be quite speculative, with a high proportion coming to nothing. So for the marketer to achieve the objective, lots and lots of leads have to be generated \u2013 hence the ever increasing budgets. I draw the analogy of panning for gold; while there are golden nuggets to be had, there\u2019s a lot of rubbish to be filtered through first.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s driven these significant changes in a relatively short space of time and made the social ads space trickier to navigate and get good returns?<\/p>\n

Increasing competition<\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

This is evident from both sides \u2013 supplier and dentist alike. New marketing companies are trying their hand in the dental space together with more and more dentists dipping their toes into the social ads space to see if it works. Frankly it\u2019s a bit of a mess and some areas are quite saturated already. We\u2019ll look into that later, including how to step above it and make social ads work for your own practice.<\/p>\n

Invisalign reps<\/h3>\n

That might seem a bit odd but we hear the same story from lots and lots of dental clients \u2013 basically that their Invisalign rep is very \u201cpushy\u201d when it comes to getting new patients into the practice. This is all well and good but the number of dentists now following this path is increasing all the time. A few years ago you might have seen one at most two practices in an area advertising for Invisalign patients but now it\u2019s lots more. That\u2019s not a sustainable landscape for everyone unfortunately.<\/p>\n

While Invisalign is perhaps the best example of the increased competition and soaring ad budgets, other treatments e.g. implants, are not far behind.<\/p>\n

Meta privacy controls<\/h3>\n

This is another area which has caused a big problem for advertisers and the agencies that represent them. I wrote about this in another blog a few months ago but to quickly recap, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has significantly restricted the type of user data which can be collected. This has in turn significantly affected the degree of ads targeting that can be done \u2013 prompting advertisers to cast a wider net to keep the numbers up.<\/p>\n

There are ways to counter some of these restrictions but suffice to say that it\u2019s nowhere as easy as it used to be to land ads in a targeted way in front of social media users. This has also contributed to some of the adverse effects we mentioned earlier e.g. more speculative enquiries, more pre-filtering of leads etc. Some agencies will tell you that they have ways around this (e.g. CAPI implementation) but let me assure you, that\u2019s only a partial help.<\/p>\n

How can I still succeed with dental social media ads?<\/h3>\n

The good news is that it is still possible to be successful; however there are some pre-requisites to understand. We have this conversation with all of our new clients:<\/p>\n