With so many things competing for people’s attention today, it’s more important than ever that your dental advertising dollars are invested wisely.
For example, if your ads are too complicated, people will move on. Additionally, if your ads don’t make an emotional connection with the right people, the people won’t be likely to act. Finally, even high-performing ads often have one or two things about them that keep them from performing at their best.
If your ads aren’t performing as well as they could, it could be costing you thousands of dollars in lost revenue, so here are two questions to ask yourself to improve your dental advertising results.
1. Is the ad being shown to the right people?
You can create the best ad in the world, but if you’re showing your ad to the wrong people, it won’t matter. This is why I prefer Facebook ads for dentists over traditional advertising methods.
With traditional dental advertising, it’s extremely difficult to effectively target the right people. You can target people by geographic location by advertising in the phone book. You can also target people by interest and general geographic location with a local television commercial, radio ad, or magazine ad. But you can’t get much more specific than that.
With Facebook ads, you can get very specific about your target audience. For example, if you want to attract new patients to your office, you can target people who live near your office, have visited your website recently, and are not on your patient list. Although the number of these people might not be very big, the people who will see your ad will be more likely to be interested in you than an audience created by general demographic or geographic information.
You can also target what Facebook calls a “lookalike audience” of your patient list or website visitors. With a lookalike audience, Facebook uses the vast data it collects from its users to generate a list of people with similar characteristics to your patient list or website visitors. You can then limit the audience further, such as by geographic location, to get even better results.
If your ad isn’t performing as well as you want it to, it might be because it’s being shown to people who aren’t likely to act, so be sure to ask yourself who your ad is being shown to.
2. Am I trying to do too much?
Sometimes dental ads aren’t performing well because we try to do too much with an ad. It’s important to remember that dental advertising is only one part of a good dental office marketing plan. For example, if you’re looking to attract new patients, you’ll need to get their attention, build trust, and get them to take action on some type of offer.
You might be able to do that with a high-value offer targeted to the right prospects, such as a free exam offer targeted to people who have visited your website this month but aren’t current patients; however, that might not be the type of offer you want to make.
You might prefer to attract new patients by offering a deal on a premium service, such as by offering a deal on Invisalign to people who come in for a cleaning. With a high-value procedure like Invisalign, you aren’t likely going to be able to build the level of trust you need to get many people to make appointments in just one ad.
You would be much better served by creating an Invisalign dental marketing funnel. Your funnel could begin by offering a free guide answering frequently asked questions about Invisalign. After people download the guide, you could then build a relationship with them over email, such as by introducing your practice culture and team members and then showing them before-and-after pictures before asking them to make an appointment.
In this context, your ad is only trying to get people to download a free, helpful guide. It’s not trying to build enough of a relationship with them that they’ll immediately go from a complete stranger to booking a high-value procedure.
Improve your results by asking yourself these two questions.
Although there can be a number of reasons an ad isn’t performing as well as you’d like, many times an ad is underperforming for these two reasons. Sometimes, changing your target audience is all you need to improve your results. Other times, you’re asking your ad to do too much.
To learn more about these and other ways to improve the performance of your dental ads, 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.
Also, if you want to learn more about how Facebook can help you target the right people with your ads, check out my free guide: Facebook for Dentists: The Definitive Guide to Regularly Attracting New Patients to Your Dental Practice right here.
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWOW.com