With so much chatter about social media, is it really all that it’s cracked up to be?
We are constantly hearing how we need to be on Facebook, we need to be on Instagram, but is that really going to help drive new patients and grow your practice?
In this episode, we take a deep look at Facebook & Instagram, things to consider when selecting advertising, and how to make your Facebook/Instagram Ads successful. We also share 3 case studies of what is working right now with Facebook Ads and how you can use that to grow your practice.
Join us!
Full Transcript
What do you get when you combine simplified practice marketing, proven ROI strategy, and Vans skate shoes? You get Mark Thackeray, of course.
So lace up, grab your green smoothie and get ready because this is Dental Marketing Secrets and this is Mark.
Hello and welcome my friends to another episode of the Dental Marketing Secrets podcast. So excited to be with you. My name is Mark Thackeray and this podcast is all about providing actionable tips and tricks that you can apply immediately to grow your practice, to serve more patients and to leave a greater impact because that is what it’s all about.
My friends, as always, I am stoked to be here with you in this very moment, wherever and however you may be listening. Thank you for spending your time on Dental Marketing Secrets. It will be time well spent.
We have a very exciting, controversial, all of the above topic. Today we’re going to be talking about something that has the potential to radically transform your practice. One of the things that I hear about, one of the things I hear most really when I’m dealing with practices, practice managers, doctors these days is, Hey, we need to be doing more with Facebook and Instagram. We need help on social media.
There is so much talk going on right now. So much chatter, so much clamor around social media these days. It’s all the rage right now. And it’s not just our industry. This is the whole business world is a blaze with social media and how you need to be on Facebook. You need to be on Instagram, you need to be on Snapchat and Twitter and Pinterest and YouTube and the list goes on and on. It seems like every two weeks there is a new social media network that you need to be on and how many of you have fallen into this trap, right? And myself included.
Now, how many of you signed up for all of these social media networks because you feel like you need to be in all of these different, on these different networks filled out your profile. You’ve posted once or twice and then you know you’ve kind of let it be, you haven’t touched it for the last six months or if you’re like me and some cases two years.
That is one of the massive challenges surrounding social media. In order to find success and really build out an audience, you need to be consistent and active. And that can be extremely challenging when you already have patients that you’re concerned about delivering exceptional care, a team that you’re managing and overseeing and sometimes motivating and sometimes coaching as well as all the other details that you’re dealing with, insurance and billing, advertising, marketing, and that’s not even to say, not even to mention family and social life at all. Right?
You are extremely busy and that’s why it makes Facebook ads or just Facebook and social media in genera so challenging. Another thing that I’ll hear a lot is that, “you know what? I tried it. I posted weekly for about six months. Nothing happened. We didn’t get any new patients from it. Facebook doesn’t work.” Okay. I hear that similar statement from so many different practices all the time. It’s not, and again, it’s not isolated to solely our industry.
Most of the time though, it’s not working because you’re asking too much from people who know you too little. Okay? Remember our episode when we talked about dating and how marketing is a lot like dating and too many businesses, too many practices are asking for marriage at the very first contact. Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. That’s asking way too much from someone. Take the time, build a relationship, cultivate trust, provide value upfront, and then ask them for a date or for that next step. Okay? Don’t be a creep. Don’t ask for hand in marriage when you first meet someone.
After I talk with practices about social media, another question that inevitably comes up is, so what’s the deal with Facebook? Does it really work? You know, people ask me all the time, once they find out that I’m a Facebook ads expert, they’re always like, well, it doesn’t work for me. What do you, what do you say? I mean, is it not working anymore or is it in and out of style already? And the answer is most definitely, yes, it does work and it can work tremendously well, but there are some things that you need to be aware of in order to do it right. Okay. Just like anything else you need to prepare and plan accordingly.
But let’s, let’s back up a step step and let’s talk first about why Facebook ads. Why would you even consider running an ad on Facebook or Instagram? And when I say Facebook ads in this conversation, that’s really an, a larger umbrella for Facebook ads, Instagram ads, even YouTube ads where it’s applicable.
But let’s, let’s start with Facebook. Okay? So Facebook has an incredible ability to target people wherever they are. Okay? And that is very, very powerful. Facebook. And not only that, but they have over 1.4 billion daily users, that’s billion with a B. Can you imagine? That is some serious usage. And on top of that, it collects an enormous amount of data information on each of those users. On you and me, what our likes, what our interests, our interests are, where we’re going half the time. All of that is stored. And, and I’m not a big conspiracy theorist so I’m not saying that I would worry too much about it, but it makes for an incredible marketing opportunity. Right? And doesn’t mean that we’re going to cram this stuff down people’s throats and make them come to our practice. But no, it just gives us that opportunity to provide value up front like I was just talking about. And really try and connect with a patient, provide a message that resonates with them and their specific situation and hopefully garner enough trust to allow them to come take that next step, to come in for an exam, for example.
So this is a huge opportunity you guys to be laser specific in your targeting and marketing. When you have that many users actively engaged on 1.4 billion and it’s already has all that information on them, you can be very specific in your target and your marketing and get really granular there. Example: So let’s say your best clients, let’s say you know your best clients, you’ve done your research and you’ve identified that your best clients are moms with kids who are in the middle range of their schooling. So maybe they’re in middle school or junior high school, maybe they’re in high school. But you can target those that audience, moms with kids in that age range, for those people that are nearest to your practice.
Or let’s say your target audience, your ideal patient is a senior, senior citizen. So seven 60 to 75 years old that are living in a specific neighborhood or zip code. You can target those people exclusively on Facebook. Or let’s just say another example could be your looking for working professionals. So those are your best patients, that share an affinity for who knows the Simpsons or Seinfeld or something like that and live within seven miles of your practice. All of that can be done with Facebook ads. And again, when I say Facebook, I mean Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and most of the social media networks. Think about the possibilities that that opens up, right?
But as I talked about before in earlier episodes, it comes down to knowing your ideal target audience and who makes an ideal patient for you. Once you’ve created that profile, once you fleshed out that avatar, you know how old they are, their likes, their dislikes, what type of employment do they have or career, you know, do they, they live in your area, do they have a home? Do they, do they rent? All those different things. You can flush that out so that now you take all that information and you select that targeting and you can fine tune an ad. You can create an ad that’s specific to them. It doesn’t have to be this generic, this vague ad cause you’re trying to hit everyone. But now you can be very specific and what you’re asking people to do and what you’re telling people, what you’re, the value that you’re communicating to them. Okay?
So your messaging becomes so much more clear. Okay. You could speak to their desires, their concerns, their goals instead of just using platitudes or like I said, just being very vague. You could target these people and then serve them a message that speaks directly to their situation. So powerful.
Another reason to consider Facebook is this idea of retargeting. You know, this is a word that gets thrown around around a lot retargeting, remarketing, and what this means is the ability to serve a message to those people who have performed a specific action. So a specific action in this case could be they visited your website or they, let’s say they’ve commented on your Facebook page or they’ve liked your post on Instagram. Any of those actions you can serve, you can retarget someone who’s taken that action with a different message.
And why is that so important? Well, if you think about it for a minute, these are people that have already taken that first step towards your practice by either visiting your website or connecting with you on social media. They are a warmer prospect because they’ve already taken that action. Okay? Does that make sense? We know that they are at least interested in what you have to offer because they’ve spent time going to your website, they’ve commented on your blog or they’ve commented on Facebook. All those things indicate that there is some interest there. They have a much greater likelihood of converting into patients because they’ve already demonstrated that they’re interested.
You know, it’s like they’re silently raising their hands saying, “yeah, I’ll hear what you have to say.” And that is extremely powerful. Your ability to re market to them, to send another message to them to help them along this process, right, and building trust and eventually come into your practice. Very, very, very powerful.
Okay, so let’s say an example, a perspective patient, visits your page and let’s say on this page is dental implants. They’re reading about dental implants. You can now send them (as well as anyone else who has visited that page within a set time period, 30, 60, 90 days for example.) you could send them a specific ad that talks about dental implants. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that powerful though? If you think about, okay, someone’s doing some research, they’re gathering information, trying to identify, what’s the next step in this process? What do I need to know to make a good decision? And you have this group of people, let’s say you’ve put out a blog post or let’s say you’ve made a promotion to drive people to this, this information on dental implants. Now you can serve them a message to get them to take that next step. So that is extremely powerful. You don’t have to just use a general ad anymore to hit those people, but it can be very specific, specific and target their situation right in the moment. Very, very powerful.
Here’s another example for you. Let’s say someone posts on your Facebook page a question about veneers. After you’ve posted, let’s say you’ve just posted a recent patient transformation, a post essentially where you’re, you’re showing the before and afters and someone comments or someone asks a question about it on Facebook. Well now you could serve them an ad for let’s say a free resource or a free guide or free video series that talks about, you know, everything you need to know about veneers, for example, and it’s providing value to them. It’s helping to educate them on the details of veneers and move them along that sales path that we’ve talked about so much. Extremely powerful.
Another reason to consider Facebook ads is the cost. Okay. Facebook ads are one of the most cost effective channels out there. Despite the rising costs and people getting, it’s more more popular and that’s driving the price up a little bit. It is still a lot less expensive than most other options. In fact, it is the most cost effective way to advertise online, in my opinion. I will say that again, I believe it that Facebook ads are the most cost effective way to advertise on online because also have the ability to dictate who will be seeing your ads and like we talked about before, they offer incredible targeting options and you can be very specific in who sees your ads.
Let’s take direct mail for example. You can’t always be that specific. Yes, you can create a list of of patients and then you know who’s getting it, but if you’re just doing a generic mailing, let’s say a Valpak or a Money Mailer or some other type of coupon or or even a saturation mailing where it’s going to every home in that area, you can’t control who reads it and who doesn’t because the likelihood of everyone in that area being a good prospect is very low, right? There’s going to be some people that are much more likely to be a better patient than others and that’s what’s so powerful about the targeting with Facebook. Okay.
The other thing that comes into play with Facebook ads, and this is one of the reasons why it makes it so powerful and ultimately so cost effective is your ability to test and test and test and test. Again, it is, and this is where you really see some massive, monumental gains because you’re comparing one, you know, one variable to another and you’re constantly tweaking to see which outperforms the other and inevitably there’s always a winner. There is almost always a winner when you’re comparing head to head. You know, maybe you’re just comparing an image. Well compared with another image or maybe you’re comparing a headline with another headline, but there will always be a winner and that this allows you to, to find what’s working best and really see how high is high. You know, a lot of times people will find success and they’ll stay there when in reality they could have had two or three or four or 10 times that growth if they would just have taken the time to test. Okay.
All right, just to give you a small example, you could run a small test for seven days and see, you know, see, look at all the data and, and identify empirically and factually how many people saw the ad took action on that ad and the resulting number of sales that came from it. And you can compare side by side comparison. If you’re running a split test, for example, all for a fraction of the cost and fraction of the time that you would find in other mediums.
Again, if you tried that with direct mail, oftentimes it would be you’d have to wait at least a month or sometimes two or three or four months until you would see the results. Okay, and then usually what happens in that situation, let’s say you’re not feeling like you’re getting many results. Then the sales rep comes in and you’re sitting and you express that to them. They usually say what they say, “Well, you’ve got to give it at least six months for people you know to see your ad and start to trust you and then take action on it.” Right. How many have heard that statement before? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that and it doesn’t have to be the case. Okay.
That’s what’s so great about Facebook is it allows you to test and test economically and quickly. You can test everything. Like I was saying, let’s say you’re going to do an image versus a video or you’re going to switch out the headline. And the headline is extremely important. If you’re gonna focus on one thing, I would suggest doing those first two things, a video, an image, test those as along with the headline. Those are the biggest pulling elements that I’ve seen as far as how much greater your return can be by tweaking those, but you can also test your body copy. You can also test your call to action or your offer.
Now imagine for example, if you did this with your practice consistently month after month, can you imagine the geometric growth you would attain? I mean, seriously, think about that. If you were consistently testing to see and fine tune and tweak and optimize how much better and bigger your practice would be or how many better ideal patients you would be serving, you could be weeding out all those patients that are causing your headaches and really not doing much for your business and replacing them with better, more loyal patients. That is what we’re talking about here.
So I wanted to share a few case studies with you to prove that this stuff works. It’s been, it is so powerful. So I had a fairly new practice in the area that I was, I was helping and they needed to bottom line, they just needed to attract more patients. That’s what they’re looking for. He had a number of competitors within a stone’s throw. Honestly, I could see one out the window and he really just needed to break into that market.
So the first step, as is the case with all marketing plans, really is to identify your target audience and then work to create a compelling offer based on their needs and their interests, their desires, their unique situation. Okay. Once we did that, we created a Facebook campaign and here are the results that we got. We targeted those people like we’ve talked about before, but was very specific in that. And then we created, crafted an offer that would speak to them and their situation and and make it easy for them to take that next step.
And here are the results, so fun. In about six months, again, this is a new practice. They generated 671 appointment requests resulting in nearly half a million dollars in production. Not to mention the recurring revenue year after year or the referrals that they will receive from these new patients. That is just immediate media influx of production. Isn’t that amazing? 671 appointment requests. Okay, and there’s so much more to be gained from that too because not all of those people came in, so there’s opportunity for additional growth right then and there without any further marketing spend.
Isn’t that powerful? What would that do for your practice? Like I said, this could be a total game changer for your practice. That is the power of proper positioning and proper marketing where you can identify exactly who you want to serve, who you are the best fit for, and how to connect with them and their unique needs. Okay.
Let me share another case study with you. So I had a client focused on, they wanted to run a special on crowns and this is latest and greatest. Honestly, I just finished this up yesterday and I’m excited to share with you because I’ve been watching these numbers climb. It’s been so exciting. But this client wanted to to run a special on crowns. They knew that September historically has been very slow for them and they wanted to do something to ramp that up. Okay. And they’ve done this in past, they’ve done this particular special on crowns in the past before, but it never really moved the needle all that much. They knew that they could do much better.
And so I started working with them and again, we crafted a message that spoke to those that had crowns on their treatment plan, hadn’t come in yet to the practice. They hadn’t taken action on that just yet. And we built a case to have them done during the month of September, for them to really just take action immediately on this and not wait any longer. So from there we broadcast the campaign via a couple of different ways. We did an email blast and then obviously team members were talking about in-office when patients were coming in. But the bulk came from promoting it via Facebook ads.
And you guys, the results are just phenomenal. Okay. So I’m going to compare what they did last year at this time versus what they just barely did this past month. And these, these numbers, make note that these numbers only represent production from crowns. Okay? So last year in September, they generated $74,129 in production for crowns, for that month of September for 2018. Compare that with this year in September, 2019 they did $204,820 just in crowns. Close to $205,000 versus $74,000. Amazing difference. That’s a 275% improvement year over year. It’s a gain of close to $131,000 more than they did last year.
That is a home run. You guys, that’s a campaign that you can bank on, you know, and that’s, that’s what’s so cool about this. And then they’re going to plan on running this again next year. You know, the caveat is you don’t ever want to run a special like that too often. Otherwise you will condition your patients to wait until there’s that special, until there’s that promotion. But this is so cool. That really is what your goal is to fine-tune several different marketing campaigns that you can use to generate predictable results year after year after year.
So like I said, this practice now has a proven system to run every year at this time when it’s has been slow in the past for immediate cash flow. So much fun. You guys.
Case study number three. I want to share one last case study with you. And this one is still ongoing. So I expect these numbers to continue to get better and better as we evaluate and as we optimize their campaign. But this is on dental implants. Okay. So they wanted to start getting the word about out on dental implants. And so we started with an educational campaign. You’re probably noticing a theme that I like to start on that level if with people that are, you don’t necessarily have a relationship with yet, and even actually with patients that you already have coming into your practice, it’s a great opportunity to establish that trust to build even more trust, right? And build more credibility and goodwill is going through this educational process.
So we did this, we started with an educational campaign focused on helping clients understand their options for replacing a missed missing tooth or missing teeth in general. And it ultimately led them to the conclusion that implants are the best option. Okay. That’s why they’re considered the gold standard when it comes to treatment options for replacing missing teeth. Right.
And so we answered, commonly asked questions just about the process, all those things that normally come up when you’re meeting with someone and discussing dental implants. Okay. We wanted to address those because those thoughts are already going on in the head of prospective patients. Okay. If they’re thinking about replacing a missing tooth, they’re already wondering, okay, what, what are my options? You know, I mean, what is, what is the price, what are my options? How long does it take? All these other things that factor in those who are playing on their mind. Okay. And so if you can provide answers to those, especially up front, then it switches it. It changes their perception of you. Okay. They, start to look at you as someone who totally recognizes their unique situation. They start to think, man, this doctor knows what she’s talking about. You know? I mean, that’s exactly what I was thinking.
Those are the questions that I had and I’ve had patients, I’ve had well clients who’ve had patients that have come up to me where their patients said those exact words. They said “it was like you were reading my mind, you know, those were the exact questions that I had.” And that is so powerful. You instantly build credibility that way. Okay.
So we started a Facebook ads campaign. Again, it was an educational focus that provided value up front. Provided a resource for them again like I was saying, that talked about commonly asked questions that started to outline some of their different options.
Just again, the goal is to help them make the best decision possible, but it started the conversation, it started that relationship and then invited them to take the next step, to come in for a free evaluation at that point. You know, again, we’re trying to, we’re providing value up front. This is the process, provide value upfront, educate them and then make it easy for them to take that next step. And in this case it was come in for a free evaluation. We’re not going to pressure you or anything like that. We just want to give you all the options. We want to give you a plan so that you know what it’s gonna look like if you would like to move forward. Simple as that.
And in 30 days we generated 66 leads in 30 days for people that were, that really wanted to know about dental implants. Okay. There was an immediate inflow influx of production. You guys that resulted in an ROI of 853% and it’s still going. It’s still counting upward. So exciting. You guys, these, like I said before at the beginning of this podcast, this can be a total game changer for you if done properly.
So my question is if you feel like you could use more patients in your practice or if you feel like you have enough patients but would like a greater percentage of those patients to follow through with treatment, then I would definitely consider Facebook ads as a way to accomplish either of those objective objectives.
They have helped me considerably in so many different circumstances from promoting grand openings to special events to highlighting a specific offer or sale like the crown special we talked about earlier or even showcasing community involvement to help build awareness. That is a fantastic mechanism to start gaining exposure to start that relationship on a very, very low risk level. There are so many awesome, awesome applications.
But that’s it, my friends, that’s it for today. Thank you for joining us today on Dental Marketing Secrets. If you have any questions about Facebook or Instagram ads, I’d love to hear from you. This is truly our bread and butter and we do it very, very well for our clients, as you have seen. So simply email me, shoot me an email at markthack@gmail.com.
And if you have enjoyed this episode, please I ask, please leave a review for this podcast. We are just getting going. Then that would be a tremendous help and share it with your friends, your peers, your team, so we can make the most of this. Until next time. My friends make it a great week!
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