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by Mike Vestil 

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

Running a dental practice isn’t child’s play, especially if it's newly opened.

You must scramble to find clients who don’t know about your new business and convince them you are the real deal. Not only that. You must also give those clients the best service once you find them.

Finding the balance between simultaneously advertising your dental clinic and serving clients with excellence is tough. That’s where Facebook ads for dentists come in. Facebook Ads provide just the right balance between pricing, ease of use, and effectiveness for most small businesses to rely on it.

This article will cover the essential steps on how to advertise your dental clinic via Facebook Ads.

Why Facebook Ads To Promote Your Dental Clinic?

Facebook ads produce results in every industry.

No matter your industry or profession, Facebook advertising works the same way. 

The dental industry is no different. What makes Facebook ads and Instagram ads stand out from other pay-per-click digital marketing strategies is its powerful targeting engine. It allows dental practices to sift through the billions of Facebook users and aim directly at the exact people who need their services. 

I will elaborate on this feature’s usefulness later.

What Are The Benefits?

There are many benefits of using Facebook Ads to promote a dental business, including:

A Very Large Active Audience

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.

A Tailor-Made Audience

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.

A Very Cost-Effective Channel

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.

A Scalable Traffic Model

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.

The Initial Steps Of Starting A Marketing Campaign

This section will cover everything you must do to start a Facebook advertising campaign for your dental practice. It all starts with a Facebook Business account. Haven’t opened one yet? No worries, here’s an article that will give you step-by-step guidance on how to open a Facebook business page. 

With the backdrop of a company page, let’s get into the first step.

Install The Facebook Pixel

Do you already have a dedicated website for their clinic?

That’s great because you’ve already taken a big step towards marketing your business.

Create And Install The Facebook Pixel (Now Meta Pixel)

For your store and Facebook to work together, you need to link them.

That’s where the Facebook pixel comes in.

It’s a piece of code that gathers data and helps you monitor and optimize your Facebook ads performance. You can use the pixel to track many conversion events like:

  • Appointment Bookings.
  • CTAs clicked.
  • Scroll depth.
  • Purchases.
  • Pageviews.
  • Time on-page.

But to get the info, you must first create the Facebook pixel on the platform. Here’s how.

How To Set Up A Facebook pixel

  • Go to Events Manager.
  • Click the green + icon Connect Data Sources and choose Web.
  • Pick Meta Pixel and hit Connect.
  • Put your Pixel Name.
  • Enter your website URL to check for setup options.
  • Hit Continue.

How To Install The Facebook Pixel On Your Website

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.

  • 1. Go to Events Manager.
  • 2. Click the Data sources icon on the left side of the page.
  • 3. Choose the pixel you want to set up.
  • 4. Click Continue Pixel Setup.
  • 5. Pick Meta Pixel and hit Connect.
  • 6. Choose Install code manually.
  • 7. Copy the pixel base code.
  • 8. Go to the header of your website.
  • 9. Paste the code at the bottom of the header section, above the header tag.
How To Install The Facebook Pixel On Your Website
  • 10. Click Continue.
  • 11. Add events you want to track using the Event Setup Tool.
  • 12. Click Done to complete the installation.

Learn How The Ad Manager Works

To create effective Facebook ads for dentists, you must grasp how the Facebook Ads Manager structures ad campaigns.

There are three major tabs on the Ad Manager:

Campaigns

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.

Ad Sets

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.

Searching on Google

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.

Ads

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.

Ads

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

Choose Your Marketing Objective

For your Facebook advertising to generate results, have a simple goal.

A goal gives your commercial a hyper-focus and informs everything you do from ad format, imagery, ad copy, and ad placements. There are plenty of objectives to choose from.

Choose Your Marketing Objective

Decide on one of the following 3 major Facebook Ad campaign objectives:

Awareness

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.

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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.

Consideration

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:

  • Traffic: use Facebook ad types like images and video to attract visitors to your landing pages where you make offers to get people onto your email list deepen the conversation with potential patients, e.g. offer them a complete guide to oral care ebook. Here is a case study below.
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  • Engagement: with engagement, the goal is to connect with people more likely to engage with your page through comments, likes, and shares. Engagement also includes getting prospective clients to take up your offers and learn more about your services as this ad from Hillsdale Dental Care. 
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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.

  • Video Views: share video clips showcasing your dental services with people likely to engage with them. Users find a video sticky, which makes it a magnificent ad type at the consideration stage.
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  • Lead Generation: collect leads for your dental clinic by giving prospects useful content such as newsletter sign-ups and or guides in exchange for their info like email addresses or phone numbers. This gives you access to them, so you continue to talk about your services. 

    Getting people to book (or make) a call to your business is another goal of lead generation objectives.

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Facebook lead ads are great for this task.

  • Messages: talk directly to future patients and increase interest in your service via Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, and WhatsApp. In digital marketing, having direct access to potential clients is the holy grail. That’s because inboxes are intimate personal spaces. 

    Once people allow you in, maximize the moment and Facebook ads to promote your dental clinic freely, knowing the recipients are all ears.

Conversion

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.

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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.

Pick Your Demographic

Unlike other PPC platforms, such as Google AdWords, Facebook advertises based on users’ interests, not keywords. Interest-based targeting helps you create engaging Facebook ad campaigns that scratch the itch of your target audience. 

To create a website target audience:

  • Go Audiences.
  • If you already have audiences, click the Create Audience dropdown and choose Custom Audience. If you don't have any audiences, you'll see audience creation buttons, instead of dropdowns.
  • Choose Website traffic.
  • Set a rule section. (Start with an inclusive one.) There are standard rules and pixel event rules. Add rules to the section as you see fit.
  • Add more inclusive or exclusive rule sections as desired. You can have up to 5 total rule sections per audience.
  • Give your audience a name (and description, if desired).
  • Click Create Audience.
  • When we finish creating your audience, select it during ad set creation to reach the people in it with ads.

Remember, use Custom Audiences only if you already have an established audience. Otherwise, you must create an audience from scratch once you get to step 2. 

As you explore your targeting options, we recommend that as you create your target audience, focus on:

  • Potential patients closest to the clinic - People, by nature, want the easy way out. Faced with a choice between a hard and easy option, they will always take the easy way. So if there’s a clinic in the neighborhood and another that’s 10 miles away, they will pick the local one. And with Facebook’s laser-precise targeting you will target them down to the nearest mile. And once they know about your service, they will come whenever they need help with oral issues.
  • Dental clients based on gender and age - While anyone of any age can have dental issues, they are typical life ages where people need dental care the most. Since studies show 20% of children aged 5 to 11 have at least one decayed tooth, it’s wise to target middle-aged parents with young children. Because women usually take the lead in child care, target them with your Facebook ads for dentists. Besides, ladies always want to impress people with perfect ravishing smiles, so they are suitable candidates for cosmetic dentistry services.

Split Test Your Creatives

A Facebook ad campaign grows.

Creating ads is not a set-and-forget practice. 

You must keep testing and iterating them until they reach peak conversion levels.

That’s why A/B tests aka split tests are so vital in helping you come up with a good proven Facebook marketing strategy. They show you what’s working and what isn’t. You then ditch tactics that aren’t working and double down on what’s working. 

Split tests help you to:

  • Improve your creative elements: headline, imagery, CTAs, and more.
  • Try marketing to many sections of the population and eventually settle on a specific demographic.
  • Figure out which ad creative works for which demographic.

Facebook recommends creating an A/B test with the Ads Manager Toolbar. It uses a current ad campaign or ad set as a template for your test. Here’s how to perform a split test using the toolbar:

  • Go to the Ads Manager main table. This page lists all of your available ads, campaigns, and ad sets on your ad account.
  • Check the box to the left of the campaign(s) or ad set(s) you want to use for an A/B test.
  • From the toolbar above, click A/B Test.
  • Select an available variable and follow the on-screen instructions.

Prepare Your Adverts For The Public

It’s now time to prepare your adverts for public consumption. 

To make that happen, work on three things: ad placement, budget, and delivery.

Ad Placement

With Facebook advertising, your ads can appear on:

  • Facebook News Feed.
  • Facebook In-stream Videos.
  • Facebook Marketplace.
  • Facebook Video Feeds.
  • Instagram Feed.
  • Instagram Explore.
  • Facebook Stories.
  • Instagram Stories
  • Facebook Instant Articles.
  • Facebook Right Column.

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

Budget

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.

Delivery

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.

Coming Up With A Good Dental Clinic Ad

In this section, I will provide some solid advice specifically on how to write a good creative for your dental clinic.

Decide On The Best Ad Format For The Job

Facebook gives you many ad formats you can use to reach your dental marketing goals. These are the different Facebook Ad types at your disposal for you to decide which one is the best fit for the job you want to do:

Image Ads

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.

Image Ads

Video Ads

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.

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Carousel Ads

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.

Instant Experiences (Canvas Ads)

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.

Collection Ads

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.

Consider Your Audience's Interests

Make your creative more personalized to the potential clients.

Tie it to user interests, monthly income, free offers and seasonal events. 

For example, running ads during Christmas or Halloween can give them a special appeal because the commercials are wrapped around a trending season.

People engage better with personalized content that’s relevant to their needs and interests.

Feature Your Dental Staff In The Ads

Include presentable photos of your staff in campaigns for more appeal.

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Featuring its staff with beaming smiles makes the clinic look warm and welcoming to new patients, so they are more likely to visit it. While including your workers in your Facebook ads for dentists is a smart move, there’s something better.

Featuring staff members working.

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By showing staff working, you also give new patients an idea of how the service looks.

Target People Who Have Just Moved Into Town

Think about it. 

When someone is new in an area, they prioritize convenience. They want to do their shopping close by. They send their children to the nearest schools. And, they want health facilities (which include dental care) near where they live. So if you use dentists’ Facebook ads to make them aware of your dental practice, they’ll probably come to your dental office first when they need help with oral health issues. 

Plus, people are smart enough to know that they’ll have dental emergencies. When that happens, they want to know exactly where to go. Facebook’s targeting options allow you to target people who recently moved to an area. It’s a handy feature for attracting new clients. 

To spice things up and generate more brand awareness, offer new arrivals in the neighborhood a discount or a free consultation, as Seaglass Dental Care did.

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Who can resist a free comprehensive exam and free x-rays? 

By dangling these juicy freebies, the clinic gets many people to get a taste of their service. Impress them and they’ll snap up all your patient slots and keep you busy for a while.

Grow Your Dental Clinic With Facebook Ads For Dentists

Without a doubt, Facebook advertising works.

Marketing your dental practice on the channel is a no-brainer.

While the workings of Facebook Ads are easy to understand, it takes a lot of time, practice, and experimentation to master the platform. So keep at it.

Continue to optimize your ad campaigns.

Eventually, you will get the hang of it and strike gold for your dental business.

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About the author 

Mike Vestil

Mike Vestil is the author of the Lazy Man's Guide To Living The Good Life. He also has a YouTube channel with over 700,000 subscribers where he talks about personal development and personal finance.

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