Posted by Amy Carbone on Apr 6, 2020 9:00:00 AM
Are you considering Facebook remarketing as part of your dental practice’s marketing strategy? It’s a smart move, and a lot of businesses have success with using it to acquire new and repeating customers.
These are nine ways for you to start.
But before we start, what is Facebook remarketing?
What Is Facebook Remarketing?
Remarketing is the practice of reaching back out to people who had visited your practice’s website. Then, for whatever reason, they choose to leave your website without contacting you or scheduling an appointment.
For example, a visitor reads a blog post on your website about teeth whitening. Then, they leave your site without calling to book an appointment or contacting you. Remarketing allows you to reach out to that visitor on Facebook after they leave your site with ads tailored to their interests — teeth whitening services — so that they’ll re-engage with your practice.
Your ads display on Facebook for them until they achieve your goal of scheduling an appointment with your practice. For the more stubborn prospects, you can also turn off ads at a certain point so you’re not wasting money on patients who will never work with you.
Facebook Remarketing Best Tips for Dentists
Here are nine best tips for you to start Facebook remarketing for your dental practice.
1. Tell Your Brand Story
Because dental practices are both common and important to your potential patients, it’s likely crucial that you tell your “brand story” through Facebook remarketing. You can do this by publishing blog posts and other pages on your website, both of which you can use to tell your story as a business. How did you start? Where did your passion for dentistry originate? Why is your team different from all of the others?
Once you’ve created this website content, you can use remarketing campaigns to promote it on Facebook. This allows you to tap your audience of potential customers by re-engaging them with a significant story, enticing them to learn more about your practice because you don’t just say you’re different — you really are!
2. Create Custom Audiences
When you use Facebook as an advertising platform for your dental office, you can advertise to people who have encountered your practice in the past, but not yet become a patient.This existing relationship between your practice and potential new patients is the foundation for Facebook’s custom retargeting audiences.
You can fine-tune your retargeting ads to display to specific groups, such as visitors who have visited your contact page, or visitors who came to your website without giving you their contact information to follow up.
Through this, you try to bring interested visitors back to your website to complete a desired action by using ads that are based on what they’ve already seen from your dental practice.
For example, you could use remarketing ads to entice someone to go back to your contact page so they can get in touch with you, or you could use them to promote pages about your services to individuals who have looked at pages about getting a checkup.
3. Follow Industry Guidelines
Dental remarketing can be challenging to navigate because of HIPAA guidelines and other restrictions. Retargeting ads may not be able to contain certain medical content or vocabulary, due to these privacy restrictions. You will need to review the applicable rules.
Your retargeting ads can highlight your practice and services you offer, such as root canals or dental implants. You may also need to be aware of whether your ad could be interpreted as a professional recommendation.
For example, if a website visitor finds a blog on treating halitosis, your remarketing ads could highlight your dental hygiene team or special dental cleaning services you may offer that are different from other dental professionals in your area along with other important information.
You may need to avoid providing information about a specific treatment option for a specific situation.. When planning these types of ads, you should seek the advice of professional marketing or legal experts to guide your efforts.
4. Create Dynamic Ad Campaigns
Dynamic remarketing ads take remarketing a step further, allowing you to display advertisements that contain the services or products a previous visitor to your site has already viewed there. A dynamic remarketing campaign offers you additional reports and settings designed specifically to reach previous website visitors.
Dynamic campaigns work well in Facebook, where it may take a few times for someone to see your ad before they eventually get in touch with you. As a result, Facebook remarketing is not only helpful for reaching back out to potential patients — it could also be a reliable way for you to stay top-of-mind with your audience.
5. Use Both Inclusionary and Exclusionary Targeting
Remarketing allows you to include or exclude certain audiences based on the criteria you select. This means that if a visitor to your practice website meets your inclusionary rules, they'll see the ads chosen for that audience.
The reverse is also true. If a user meets your exclusionary criteria, they will not be shown your ads. Many people make the mistake of using only inclusionary criteria and not taking the time to determine what audiences should be excluded from your ads.
By removing certain audiences who are not a good match for your dental practice, you can focus on reaching audiences that are the most likely to become new patients. This could reduce your upfront advertising costs and could increase the chances that your ads will yield future income.
6. Explore Sequential Targeting
Sequential retargeting is an advanced remarketing strategy that uses multiple ads to take visitors through a "sequence." Instead of seeing the same ad over and over, they'll see fresh content designed to nurture them through the buyer's journey. This can be powerful for dental practices that want to spend more time helping prospective patients through the decision-making process instead of showing the same ad dozens of times.
Sequential retargeting has a number of benefits for dentists, including preventing ad fatigue (when someone gets sick of seeing your ads) and providing an opportunity to address common objections to dental procedures that may have discouraged viewers from contacting you. You can also use sequence ads to tell a story or promote specials within your office.
7. Target Visitors by Actions Taken on Your Site
Remarketing uses your website's own data to divide visitors into "categories," or audiences, depending on what actions they take on your site.
For example, website visitors can be segregated into different audiences based on:
- The length of time they spent on your site
- What website pages they visited
- If they read your blogs
- If they watched your videos
- What ads they clicked on
- If they did or didn't fill out your contact form
- If they interacted with a specific landing page
- If they downloaded a free guide
So if you have a group of visitors who downloaded a free guide on the dangers of gum disease, you could create a remarketing campaign to display an advertisement specifically to this audience for your deep cleaning services. Or, if you have a group of visitors who visited your teeth whitening page, you might select an ad for a discount on new patient laser teeth whitening consultations.
8. Try Hyper-Focused Ad Content
The idea behind Facebook remarketing is that it delivers tailored content to specific audiences that are already interested in your brand. Instead of marketing to cold audiences who may not be interested in your services, you're marketing to warm audiences with ads that specifically display content related to them.
That’s why it’s important to create hyper-focused ads when possible, addressing specific concerns that a specific audience of yours may have. The above scenarios are good examples of hyper-focused ad targeting where the ad was highly relevant to what the user was engaging in before they left the site without taking the desired action. The more relevant your retargeting ads are to prospective or existing patients, it generally increases the likelihood that they will return to your website or call your practice to make an appointment.
It may seem like a lot of work to set up custom audiences for multiple actions and inactions and also design several ads specifically for those visitors. However, once your remarketing campaign is set up, it practically runs itself. You also get the peace of mind knowing that you’re not just throwing any old ad onto Facebook. You worked hard to create an ad that will resonate with people who need your dental services.
9. Use Facebook Lead Ads
Getting visitors to fill out forms on your website is challenging. You want to collect the data, but the more questions you put on your form, the less likely website visitors are to complete it. Facebook lead ads are a relatively newer marketing solution that allows businesses to collect data from website visitors directly from mobile advertisements.
Instead of funneling traffic to a specific landing page where visitors manually complete a form and click a submit button, they click on a Facebook ad, which opens up the lead form in a popup within the app. Basic information like name, email, etc. are pre-populated, which makes it easy for new visitors to send you their information.
Lead ads are arguably one of the better performing ad units online today, and it's one of the most effective ways to obtain targeted website visitors' information online. You can set up remarketing ads to display for individuals who have opened your lead form but didn't submit, ideally enticing them to come back to finish the job.
Don't forget to also use exclusionary criteria to make sure there's no overlap in advertising between people who have already filled out your form.
Grow Your Dental Patient List with Our Free eBook
Marketing your dental practice and growing your patient list can be challenging, especially when you're busy providing superior dental care to your patients every day.
Our free guide below can help you learn how to implement dental marketing strategies, how to target your ideal patient type, how to try to build your online presence, and creative ways to help you earn new patient referrals.
You'll also discover how community outreach programs can attract new patients, what to do to encourage more patient reviews, and how to promote your dental practice in various ways.
Download your free copy of Strategies to Grow Your Patient List here.
Treloar & Heisel and Treloar & Heisel Property and Casualty are divisions of Treloar & Heisel, LLC.
Insurance products offered through Treloar & Heisel, LLC.
Treloar & Heisel, LLC. and its divisions do not offer practice management advice. Please consult a professional concerning this topic.
