Learning Center Topics: Pay-Per-Click advertising

Why should you use Facebook ads for a dental practice?

Facebook is, by far, the most widely used social media platform in the world. At the end of 2018, Facebook saw over 2.3 billion monthly active users! Advertisers are spending more time and money on their Facebook advertisements. You should too! If you run both Facebook and Google advertisements, you cover 2 of the most widely used social and search platforms on the internet. The potential to reach far wider audiences is huge. If you can effectively reach these audiences, you will see your conversions grow.  

Done correctly, using Facebook Ads for a dental practice can really help your marketing take off.

It’s the Biggest Online Hangout

The average person spends 28% of their time online using social media platforms. With 2.3 billion people spending 28% of their time online on Facebook, the potential audiences you can reach are enormous! Online advertising is all about finding out where your intended audience spends their time online. For certain businesses, this can be quite difficult.

If you need to attract audiences from certain industries, with certain likes or values, you need to do some research into their online habits. For dentists, the intended audiences tend to be far broader. Often, they are defined primarily by their proximity to the practice. Facebook adverts give you the opportunity to easily reach multiple defined audiences in one central hub.

Targeting Exact Audiences

One of Facebook’s most advantageous features is its ability to target exact audiences. Facebook holds thousands of data points about each of its users. These include location, employment and relationship status, likes and dislikes and far more! These data points can be used in your advertising strategy to narrowly define the exact kind of audience you want to see your adverts.

If you offer luxury cosmetic dentistry in London, you can tell Facebook to show your adverts only to people with high-paying careers, who live close to your practice and who like the finer things in life. If you offer paediatric dentistry, you can tell Facebook to only show your advert to new parents or children and teenagers close to your practice. This means you don’t need to waste time and money showing your adverts to audiences who have no intention of ever converting!

Remarketing to Warm Audiences

Remarketing is another of Facebook’s most useful features for advertisers. Remarketing is the process of showing adverts to what are known as warm audiences.

Cold audiences are those who have never heard of your business before, who are not aware of your brand or your services and products. Hot audiences are those who have subscribed, engaged regularly with your business or have even made a purchase. Warm audiences are those who are aware of your business, perhaps they have watched one of your videos, seen an advert or visited the website briefly.

Remarketing to warm audiences allows you to show adverts to audiences that you know are already interested. They may need a product or service similar to yours and are shopping around, they may have developed an interest in your brand in particular. You can tell Facebook to only show an advert on orthodontics to audiences who have already visited your orthodontics page, read one of your blogs on braces, watched a video, browsed your website and read up on the treatments you offer etc.

Coupled with Facebook’s ability to target narrowly defined audiences such as teenagers and their parents within a certain radius, you can make sure only the exact people to whom you want to re-market will see your adverts.

The Decline of Organic Traffic.

Once upon a time, businesses could reach a decent-sized audience simply through organic reach. Simply put, organic reach is how far your social media posts can reach without you paying for them to be shown to specific audiences. You rely solely on the quality of the content and the engagement rate of your followers to make sure it is shared and seen as widely as possible.

Unfortunately, Facebook has been taking steps in recent years to reduce the ability of businesses to reach audiences this way. Facebook is a business, and they want you to pay for that privilege. Facebook’s algorithms have made it far harder than 10 years ago for your organic posts to reach much further than your immediate followers. And even then, most of your followers might not see the post on their wall either!

The most efficient way to reach audiences, therefore, is to pay for adverts. This ensures that your posts not only get the widest reach possible, but that they reach only the audiences you want them to.

Analytics

Facebook’s bread and butter is analysing their users’ data. In the same way that Facebook has countless data points on each user, they also have in-depth analytics for their own platform. Facebook’s analytics (or Insights) allow advertisers to examine just how well (or poorly) their adverts are performing.

More importantly, it allows you to determine what features of your advert are performing well or poorly. The analytics portal allows you to investigate things such as audience engagement rates, click-through rates, cost per click, conversions and much more! By using this portal, it becomes far easier to amend your adverts so as to truly maximise their impact and, in so doing, minimise their cost.

Facebook Ads for a dental practice: Conclusion

In summary, Facebook offers one of the (if not the) best platforms online to advertise your business. Facebook’s ability to target the exact audience you want, coupled with its remarketing functionality, allows advertisers full control over where their adverts are shown. Being able to stop your adverts being shown to irrelevant or uninterested audiences keeps the cost per click down and conversions high. Facebook’s relatively simple user-interface, its low cost and ability to analyse the performance of your adverts makes it a perfect platform to effectively market your practice.

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Google is the biggest search engine in the world by far. In November 2018, an incredible 73% of online searches occurred through Google, as opposed to 7.91% on Bing. Most people don’t even think about it anymore, using Google as your first port-of-call has become second nature for most people.

In many ways, to ‘Google’ something has become synonymous with using the internet at all. Simply put, audiences are far more likely to use Google to find their dentist than any other online platform. Therefore, Google is where you need to direct your efforts.  Done correctly, using Google Ads for a dental practice can really help your marketing take off.

Google’s reach is huge

As we have already said, Google is the largest search engine in the world, and this doesn’t look like it is going to change any time soon. Each day there are 3.5 billion searches made on Google, that is 40,000 a second! ​ Compare that to the year 2000 when Google saw a measly 33 million searches per day! Imagine how far Google’s reach will be in 5, 10 or 20 years!

Using Google AdWords is an easy, simple and relatively cheap way of getting your name directly in front of those audiences. Google doesn’t just let you show your adverts to the entire world, it allows you to define exactly which audiences, which types of people, you wish to see your advert.

Target Specific Audiences

With so many users on Google each day, it is important to let Google know exactly who you wish to advertise to. There is no use showing your advert to someone on the other side of the world; if there isn’t a good possibility a user will find your advert relevant, you’re wasting your money. Google allows you to decide who should be shown the advert based on a large number of data points. Some of the criteria by which you can filter your audiences are:

• Location
• Age
• Sex
• Interests
• Online behaviour
• Previous online activity

You can tell Facebook to only show your ads to audiences who have visited a certain page on your website, who have searched for products and services similar to yours, you can even define audiences based on their lifestyles and milestone events, such as those recently married, or new parents. The ability to target only the people to whom you want to advertise doesn’t just make your adverts for efficient and effective, it keeps the cost down! Google has masses of data on each user’s habits, use it!

Using Keywords

In PPC marketing, keywords, as they do with SEO, act as tags that allow search engines to match up your advert with a user’s searched term on Google.  If the keywords you have associated with your advert appear in a user’s search, they will see your advert.

When choosing your keywords, it is important to understand that you are trying to guess what your intended audiences are searching for. You can’t tell them what to search to find you. You need to get inside their minds, figure out how they behave online and understand what they are searching for. Then you can mimic their searches in your keywords and ensure that yours is the advert they see. 

A good tip with keywords is to group them together by category. Instead of using separate keywords such as “London”, “Orthodontics” and “emergency”, group them together as “London Emergency Orthodontics”. This helps to further narrow down the audience and really target the most likely leads.

It is also possible to tag your adverts with negative keywords. Negative keywords are the keywords with which you DO NOT want your advert to be associated. For instance, imagine your practice is in York and one of your adverts has the keywords “Emergency Dentist”. You may see some of your adverts being shown to, and being engaged with, audiences who have searched something like “Emergency Dentist Portsmouth”.

Obviously, you do not want audiences 200 miles away seeing your advert, it’s a waste of their time and your money! Google gives you the option of adding this as a negative keyword, meaning anyone who performs the same search in the future will NOT see your advert.

Fast results

There are 2 main ways of getting yourself to the front page of Google; SEO and PPC. SEO is great; it’s organic, it’s free and it works. However, you could build the perfect website for SEO, but it will still take Google time to index your website as first-page material. The process is not instantaneous, sometimes it’s not even quick! You could make endless improvements to your website and only see it creep up slowly.

There are so many factors governing Google’s ranking algorithms, and Google do their best to keep them secret! The good news is, there is a quick and easy fix. With PPC, you can pay to have your advert appear immediately, within seconds, at the very top of the very front page of Google.

Google wants you to succeed. 

As a marketing platform, your success is in Google’s best interest. Google has made advertising on its platform easier and cheaper in recent years. Of course there is lots of data you can work through, lots of small changes and tweaks you can make, but for the most part the user interface is simple, straightforward and easy to use for even the average business owner. You don’t need a degree in computer analytics or a lifetime’s worth of marketing experience to make it work or to see results. 

Furthermore, the user interface is straightforward. More importantly, the user interface you see is exactly the same as the interface that mega-corporations see and use as well. There are no hidden features that only the big hitters can access. You have access to the same features as companies such as BMW, Calvin Klein, or Apple.

Also, there are mountains of blogs, videos, and articles out there explaining how to get good results from Google Ads. Many of them were written by Google themselves! 

Google Ads for a Dental Practice: Conclusion

Google is, without question, the largest search engine in the world. This makes advertising on Google a no-brainer. If the vast majority of your potential patients are hanging out online in one place, and that place just so happens to be where they will be going to look for you, why wouldn’t you advertise there? In terms of reach and demographics, Google is absolutely your best option. Furthermore, Google’s platform is relatively cheap and easy to use. You do not have to be a technical or marketing wizard to use the software! Advertising on Google can bring you quick, easy results at a fairly low cost per click.

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Establishing a dental practice is just the beginning of the story. The practice needs to grow in order for you to achieve the success and rewards that you are looking for. In today’s competitive market, you need to make sure that prospective patients know what your practice has to offer. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

If you get it right, PPC advertising can provide significant benefits. It does require the investment of time and patience up-front, but the results make the effort worthwhile. As a guide, there are some factors to consider when looking at PPC for dentists.

Use categories for keywords

The aim of PPC for dentists is to attract patients by using the keywords that they are searching for online. The best way to do this is to categorize your keywords, so that the advertising, and content, you provide is relevant. This always helps with Google ratings; the more relevant the content, the better.

For instance, you may want to attract people who are looking to straighten their teeth, so grouping keywords and phrases like “braces for adults” and “adult teeth straightening” is appropriate. Grouping keywords makes sense because you want people to get what they are looking for from the search they are making. If this happens, they are more likely to use your services.

Use Google Ads effectively

Google Ads is an important aspect of PPC for dentists. This is because using Google ads gives you a way of attracting people to your practice, without having to pay for clicks. Including the phone number of your practice, prominently, in all of your ads means that people are more likely to pick up the phone and call. This advertising practice can be used in conjunction with paying for clicks, making your campaigns more cost effective. Always make sure that people can clearly see if someone is available to take their call.

You can learn more about Google Ads for dentists here.

Make use of extensions in your ad campaigns

There is no charge for using extensions in your PPC ad campaigns. This means that it makes sense for you to use extensions, such as a map of your location or a download button, to generate clicks. It’s worth mentioning that although you do not pay extra for including extensions, you do still have to pay for the clicks that they generate.

Test your PPC for effectiveness

Creating a campaign, using PPC for dentists, is just the start. You cannot just sit back and relax once the campaign has been set up. You need to test the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. It’s a case of seeing what works and what does not. Use three separate ad groups for each campaign, with three ads in each one. Each group should contain eight separate keywords. Having this range of content means that you can accurately test which keywords are performing the best.

Having this information means that you can make slight changes along the way, so that you improve the effectiveness of your campaign. If you do not do this, you are unlikely to get the clicks that you are looking for. PPC for dentists evolves and is not something that you use once and then forget about.

You can find out more about PPC here.

Use Geo-Targeting for your PPC campaigns

You do not want to waste your efforts on advertising to people who are never likely to visit your dental practice. Your ads should be aimed at people who live, or work, in your area and want to register with a local dentist. This means that you need to use geo-targeting when creating your PPC campaigns. You can use maps of your location and include the postal code of your practice. Remember to use keywords that also show where you practice is located.

You can also restrict the appearance of your ads, so that they only appear to people for whom they have relevance. This means that you advertise directly to people who are looking for a dentist in the area where your practice is located. Making sure that you target the location of your practice in this way means that you should generate more clicks from your PPC campaigns. It also means that the clicks you get should have a better conversion rate, as people should find just what they are looking for.

As you can see, PPC for dentists is an excellent tool to use, to help grow your dental practice, by attracting more patients to your services.