Facebook Ads For Your Dental Clinic – A Step-By-Step Guide

With almost 3 billion users, Facebook is a rich source of dental clients for dental practices that know how to advertise strategically, generating interest in their service. Not only do most people use Facebook, but they also spend a lot of time on the advertising platform—up to one hour a day. This guarantees that your Facebook ads for dentists will generate engagement.

Because there are billions of people with varied interests you target for your dental clinic, Facebook makes it easy for you to create a custom audience. The advertising platform has countless data points about its users. Therefore, it’s simple to create ads that are engaging and tailor-made for the target demographic.

Advertising, both online and offline, can be costly. Traditional advertising is expensive. For instance, according to Statista, running a 30-second commercial in the United States can cost up to $100k. No small dental clinic can afford these sky-high fees. In comparison, you can run a successful Facebook ads for dentists campaign starting at only $100. If that isn’t a steal, Then I don’t know what is.

Shopping online for products and services is the norm these days. The goal of digital marketing is to generate awareness about your brand and turn that attention into traffic. Facebook advertising driven by excellent, engaging ad copy increases traffic to landing pages, which boosts clinic appointments. 

Want to increase online and foot traffic to your dental practice? 

Easy. 

Invest more money in high-performing ad sets. You will get a constant stream of new patients.

Now that you’ve seen how powerful Facebook ads for dentists are, let’s get into the practicals of creating them.

Once you've set up your Facebook Pixel, go to your website’s admin panel where you will insert the code. You start the process on Facebook and finish it on your site.

Campaigns are the foundation of a Facebook ad. At the campaign level, you choose the tactical goal of your commercial. Do you want website traffic, likes on your Facebook page, or more new patients at your dental practice? Whatever the goal of your Facebook online marketing campaign is, you pick it at this level.

With your goal in mind, you move on to ad sets. Here you decide who you are targeting, so you produce powerful Facebook ads that align to your goal and appeal to the needs of your target audience. 

You pick an audience based on location, interests, gender, and more. At the ad set stage, you also set your budget and schedule. Lastly, pick the best ad placements to give your Facebook ad campaigns the best chance of success.

Google is another good resource for finding products within your niche. If you search something like "best selling (your niche) products", Google will return top results within your selected niche. You will see ads for some of the items in your niche.

The last tab is the ad creatives. You picked a goal on the campaigns tab. You fine-tuned your target users using the advertising platform's many targeting options. The ads tab deals with the ad formats you will use to reach your target audience efficiently. From images to videos, there are many ad formats to create impactful dentists’ Facebook ads. We will look at the ad formats shortly.

Overall, each tab extends the previous one. A campaign contains ad sets, and an ad set contains a certain number of ads as shown by this graphic.

Now that you understand the workings of Facebook advertisements, move to the next step.

In digital marketing, awareness means generating interest in your services to as many people as possible. Reach is how far the message about your business spreads. Online marketing has a wider reach than traditional advertising. 

Offering a free consultation is great for getting your brand name out there. Importantly, potential clients can try the service risk-free.

That’s exactly what Compassionate Dental Care did. The company appealed to any new patient reading its advert by offering a free consultation and a free digital scan. Since people love freebies, such offers can build brand awareness fast.

Next up in the campaign objectives is consideration. It’s one thing for people to know your dental practice exists, but it’s another to convince them to consider it a viable option. In the consideration stage, you want prospective clients to think about your clinic among the many options out there. 

Consideration objectives include:

The call to action “learn more” says it all. The aim is to get people to click through to the website and learn more about the clinic’s services.

Facebook lead ads are great for this task.

At the conversion stage, you seek to close the deal. How? By gunning for the exact action you want people to take on your clinic’s website or landing page. That action may be booking an appointment, calling one of your dental offices, or downloading a resource.

It’s at the conversion stage that you show visitors a catalog of all your dental services to generate sales. You show this type of ad to those who have shown serious intent and interest to do business with you.

Here’s an ad that targets a conversion.

The ad is direct.

Need an exam, X-ray, or cleaning?

Dial the number on the ad. 

The ad goes straight for the desired action—getting people who already know they need dental care to make that all-important booking call.

With Facebook advertising, your ads can appear on:

Facebook can do ad placement automatically or you can place them manually. Launching your first ad? Then let Facebook do it for you.

In terms of budget, you choose between daily and lifetime. In the lifetime budget, Facebook does all the heavy lifting for you. They place bids for you and choose the best deals. All you do is tell them how much you want to spend for the entire campaign. With a daily budget, you set a daily budget every 7 days. Once you reach the budget cap for the day, you can no longer bid for clicks. So you may lose out on lucrative opportunities. That said, better rely on the lifetime budget for flexibility and the ability to maximize bidding opportunities.

The next step in the Facebook advertising process is ad delivery and scheduling. For delivery, decide how frequently the ads will appear to your target audience based on the budget and length of the campaign. Your target users must see the advert as many times as it takes for them to convert without being bombarded with promotions. The right frequency for ad exposure is 2-3 times every 7 days. That’s enough to keep your clinic top of mind without overwhelming users.

Drive prospective new patients to your landing page through still high-quality image ads. People find visuals more appealing than text so they will engage more with your Facebook ad. You can use image ads to build awareness about your dental practice. Facebook recommends JPG and PNG file types and a resolution of at least 1080 x 1080 pixels. Image Facebook ads for dentists are very popular as they show, rather than tell upcoming new patients about your dental services. Here is an example of an image ad from Momentum Dental.

Want to show off your staff members or high-tech equipment in action? Then video ads are the answer. By adding sound and motion to still images, videos connect better with potential clients. In terms of specs, your videos must use MP4, MOV, and GIF file types and have a resolution of at least 1080 x 1080 pixels. Short 2-minute videos perform best. For text ad copy recommendations, videos must have a headline with 40 or fewer characters, a primary text of 125 characters, and a 30-character description. Below is an illustration of a video dental ad from Kremer Dental Care.

Carousel ads allow you to display up to ten images or videos in one ad, each with a link pointing to a separate landing page with a tailored patient offer. Slideshows are great for showing off your dental offices or your dental care process, so a new patient sees how you work. This inspires confidence in your dental practice. Design and text recommendations are the same as those for video. With tech requirements, you can use between 2 to 10 carousel cards and your ad and your image file size must be 30MB or less.

An instant experience is a captivating full-screen encounter that happens after a user clicks on a mobile device. It’s crafted to capture attention immediately. Mesmerize your potential clients with a blaze of photos, carousels, videos, and colorful service listings, all in one ad. With most people now engaging with brands from their mobile devices, this is an invaluable digital marketing tool.

A collection ad in the Facebook News Feed includes a main cover image or video, followed by 3 supporting product images. By combining video and images, you can tell a catchy story about your dental practice. You can also use them to impress patients-to-be by highlighting key areas of your dental office. As for specs, Facebook requires MP4, MOV, or GIF file type, JPG or PNG images, a 40-character headline, and primary text ad copy that doesn’t go over 125 characters. 

Running ads is all about using the targeting options to target people who care about your service with the right ad types in the right places. 

No matter which ad type you choose, one thing is certain: engaging content is the core of ad creation.