With so many pressures facing dentists today, getting the best return for your marketing time and budget can feel overwhelming. Because of that, new and improved ways to market a dental practice don’t just help dentists make more money; they can make their lives better.
That’s what happened with me when I started using Facebook to market my dental practice after using traditional marketing tactics and getting traditional results for years. For example, I received 1,500% and 5,000% returns using Facebook, far exceeding the results I could expect from traditional marketing. I continue to get great returns using Facebook and dental marketing funnels on a regular basis today. After building a team to help other dentists do the same, we began seeing more great returns for other dentists, too, such as Dr. Ashley Joves, who used a simple funnel and Facebook to get 1,000 Facebook fans, grow a patient waiting list of almost 300 people, and have 50 people schedule appointments before she even opened the doors.
These results are unheard of with traditional dental marketing. As a result, I recommend Facebook for dentists and funnel marketing for all dentists looking to make their marketing more effective.
Simply put, these online marketing strategies are more powerful, affordable, and effective than traditional marketing.
If you’re looking to work them into your marketing plan, you have two choices. First, you can do it yourself, using independent research or guided advice, direction, and support from places like Delivering Wow U or my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group to help you shorten the learning curve and learn from others. Getting advice, direction, and support can help you overcome common myths that hold dentists back.
Second, you can outsource it to a dental marketing company to help you as my team helped Dr. Joves and others with their Facebook and funnel marketing.
No matter what route you take, it’s important to understand three things the best dental marketing companies do to get results for their clients.
1. Deliver the Right Message
Your marketing will only be as effective as your ability to connect with people. The first step to doing that is to create the right message for the goal you have for your marketing.
For example, if your goal is to attract new patients, the most effective messaging centers around why someone who isn’t a patient would want to be. This might include messaging that showcases your practice vision culture, celebrates team members and patients, and makes emotional connections. This messaging helps you build trust and show people what makes your practice different than others.
If you’re looking to get existing patients to come to you for additional services, you won’t have to build as much trust because you’ve already done so. Thus, your messaging might focus more on the benefits of the specific service to them, rather than what makes you the right person to do it.
Because of this, before beginning any marketing plan for your practice, it’s critical that you get your messaging in order.
2. Target the Right People
Once you know the message you will deliver with your marketing, you’ll focus on presenting each message to the right people who will be more likely to be receptive to it, as the best dental marketing companies do.
For example, if your goal for a marketing campaign is to attract new patients to your practice through a new-patient offer, like the best marketing companies, you would include audiences that are more likely to become patients and exclude current patients. In general terms, this would include people who have interacted with your practice before and live in the area. This might include Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, and website visitors who are not yet patients.
If your goal is to offer a new service to existing patients, your audience would obviously be current patients.
No matter what method you use to connect with people, you will get a much better return on investment if you match your audience with your messaging for each advertising campaign.
3. Use the Right Tools
After you create the right messages and identify the right audience to achieve your marketing goal, the final step to your best results is to use the best tool to connect your messaging with the target audience.
Whether you do it yourself or utilize a dental marketing company, the right tools can make the difference between a profitable campaign and a waste of time and money.
This is another reason online marketing with Facebook so effective. Facebook, through its Facebook ads manager, gives you an unprecedented ability to connect an ad to the right people in minutes.
For example, you can upload your patient list to Facebook’s ad manager to display ads for a new service to current patients. You can attract new patients by creating an audience of people who have visited your website in the past ninety days but who haven’t made an appointment, or by targeting newsletter subscribers who aren’t on your patient list.
You can even ask Facebook to create a “lookalike” audience of people based on these audiences to create better “cold” audiences. Lookalike audiences utilize Facebook’s vast data and business partners to find people with similar characteristics to existing audiences to get better results than by targeting people based on manually generated criteria.
This provides a significant advantage over phone books, television, radio, or direct mail, which take much longer, cost much more, and offer more limited targeting capabilities compared to Facebook.
The Secret to Your Marketing Success
With so many competing demands on your time and marketing money, it can be hard to know what will work. The best dental practices and dental marketing companies do these three things to get better results, at a lower cost, in less time.
If you want to learn more about how to do this for your practice, sign up for your 14-day trial to Delivering Wow U. You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices.
Finally, for more free info on using Facebook for dentists, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWOW.com