If you are a dentist you presumably have an interest in how your practice or clinic markets itself in order to attract new clients and patients for cosmetic dental procedures. Obviously, the size of your practice may dictate the budget you have for marketing, but in truth, it is not so much the size of your budget that dictates marketing success, but rather, how effectively it is used.
One of the most popular means of promoting dental practices is social media, and the prime social media platform that businesses use to promote themselves is Facebook. As well as being somewhere where family and friends stay in touch and post funny videos and photos, it is also where literally millions of businesses find new customers.
In order to be one of those businesses, the first thing that your dental practice needs to have is its own page. This is basically your own little piece of real estate within the Facebook platform.
To use your page effectively you need to create useful content that you can post there. For a dental practice, these should obviously relate to subjects like oral hygiene, information about looking after teeth and gums, and news about new treatments, to give just three examples.
In addition, you can also provide information about your dental practice, and most importantly any special promotions or offers that you may currently be running.
Now that you have your page set up and you are publishing regular, and useful content, you should now turn your attention to attracting people to that page, or to your website. This is where Facebook proves to be head and shoulders above many other social platforms, thanks to its ability to target so precisely.
The reason it can do so is due to the way individuals interact on Facebook and the information that they provide as they do so. This means that Facebook has a database that includes billions of pieces of data relating its users, and you can subsequently target specific groups of people based on that information.
The sort of information we are talking about includes age, gender, marital status, employment status, and education levels. It will also include anything that an individual has liked or shown an interest in.
For example, let us say you have a promotion for a teeth whitening service that you know from market research is extremely popular amongst females aged 25 – 45. You can then go to Facebook, set up a promotion, but instead of wasting ad spend on your ad being shown to any age group and any gender, it can be shown only to those within the demographic you are targeting.
The beauty of this is that you will only be paying for an ad to be shown to precisely the group of people who are likely to be most interested in your promotion. Compare that to other forms of advertising where the targeting is at best poor, and at worst non-existent.
Another huge benefit of using Facebook as part of any marketing or advertising campaign is its ability to target ads based on geographical location. This means that whether you have a single dental practice situated in one location or several practices in various towns and cities, you can create an ad that is specific to each one of them.
This way any ads you run on Facebook will only be shown to those who live within a certain area, and again it means you are not wasting advertising resources targeting those who live too far away to consider using your services.