Marketing for dental implants on Facebook used to be so easy. Simply throw together an ad with a picture of a person missing a tooth, post it on the social platform, turn the dials to only show the ad to people with a household income high enough to afford the care, and then wait for the patients to come rolling in. And for years, that strategy worked.
Unfortunately, today’s environment is very different. In the summer of 2018, Facebook stopped allowing advertisers to target individuals based on household income (as well as several other criteria), so targeting has become more of a challenge. Whereas in the past, ads could be targeted based on income, today they are shown to people across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. The result is many practices receive large numbers of interested leads from people who won’t have the financial wherewithal to pay for the needed services. These individuals no-call/no-show at higher rates and take up valuable time in the office when they do show. Also, more dentists caught on to the fact that practices can recruit implant patients through Facebook, so the cost to acquire a patient lead has risen over the years.
So, Facebook sucks for marketing dental implants, right? Well, not exactly. While the platform has certainly gotten more complex and nuanced, it still hold tremendous promise for enterprising dentists looking for implant patients, but just as you wouldn’t use a screwdriver to hammer a nail, it’s important to understand how to use Facebook to recruit patients to the practice.
Dental implant marketing is rapidly moving to a multi-channel approach. Successful practices are using Facebook alongside Google and email marketing to create “surround sound” for their prospective patients online, and particularly savvy practices also tie their non-digital marketing, like mailer campaigns, into a comprehensive strategy to recruit implant patients to the office.
To use Facebook appropriately, it is important to understand its strengths. Facebook, and social media marketing in general, have a couple of incredibly valuable attributes to take advantage of for dental marketing.
First, Facebook allows practices to target certain demographics in a population. Through the tool, it is possible to target based on physical attributes (most commonly age, gender, and location) and on interests. For example, if a practice determines that their ideal implant patient is a woman between the ages of 50 and 65 who enjoy baking and soap operas living within 15 miles of the office, it can target people on the platform who meet those criteria. It also allows for advertisers to build unique audiences based on actions that individuals take on the Facebook platform, like watching a certain amount of a video or clicking on an ad that the practice posted, or on the practice’s website. Often, these unique groups of people are referred to as “warm” audiences. The creation of warm audiences is critically important for the next major benefit Facebook offers.
Facebook allows a practice to “retarget.” Essentially, retargeting allows the practice to serve content to individuals who have been placed into a warm audience. Through this capability, practices can focus their advertising efforts on people who have previously shown interest in dental implants.
Finally, the third key benefit of the platform is that Facebook allows practices to push content. As opposed to search engine marketing, where the practice is only able to engage with prospective patients after they have initiated the conversation, social media marketing allows a practice to proactively reach out to advertise to targeted prospects. This is valuable because it puts the office in the driver’s seat when it comes to patient recruiting.
Now that the advantages of Facebook are clear, how does a practice best use it to recruit dental implant patients?
Facebook is best as a part of a multi-channel marketing strategy. More specifically, it is the ideal tool for retargeting prospective patients who enter the practice’s funnel through a different entry point. For example, prospects who find the office’s website through Google should be retargeted on Facebook with ads to motivate them. Patient testimonials, messages from the docs, and the like will get prospective patients to schedule and show for their appointments. Additionally, the practice can also use this retargeting capability to provide special offers only to prospects who are believed to be interested in dental implants, based on their activity on the website or reaction to a mailer. Ultimately, Facebook is a great tool to integrate multiple advertising channels into one unified approach.
A second application for a tool like Facebook is as a follow-up system. The decision to move forward with implants is often a lengthy one. It may take a prospective patient months or even years to make the decision to move forward with care. It is possible to use Facebook to serve ads to patients thanking them for their interest in the practice and to educate them while they are working through the treatment decision process. These advertisements can be time-based, so that patients who have recently interacted with the practice get one set and those that were working with the practice some time ago get a different one. These targeted prospects can also be identified through their activities on Facebook, on the practice’s website, from a mailing list, or even from the practice’s existing patient database. As long as the practice can produce a list containing the user’s email address, Facebook can advertise to the members of that list.
Advertising for dental implant patients on Facebook has changed significantly over the past several years. In the past, all a practice had to do was put a simple ad up targeting financially sound individuals in the area they served and qualified patients would find their practice. When Facebook removed the ability to target patients based on income, it got more difficult to find the right patients. Add onto that the fact that more practices are using the platform for patient acquisition, driving up the cost to advertise, and you have the recipe for a platform that frustrates advertisers.
Today, Facebook sucks as a standalone advertising channel for simple, one-step marketing. If a practice is expecting great results from doing the same thing that was done three years ago, it will waste money, time, and energy and be sorely disappointed. But, if the practice changes with the times and understands Facebook’s capabilities in either a multi-channel strategy alongside Google and email marketing or as a platform that requires multiple steps to educate and motivate patients, it can see incredible success bringing patients into the practice seeking dental implant services.
Two years ago, marketing for a dental implant practice was easy. Simply put a couple of ads on Facebook, target the correct income demographics, and high-quality implant patients found your practice. Unfortunately, Facebook has changed their system so you can no longer target potential implant patients based on income. That’s made it much more difficult for dental marketers to find the right patients for a practice and it means that a practices advertising on Facebook have been flooded with prospective patients who may have a genuine need and desire for care, but don’t have the ability to afford the therapy. That can be frustrating to all parties, since the patient really wants to fix their smile and the practice really wants to provide that service, but needs to do so in a profitable manner.
So what is a growth-minded dental implant practice owner to do? Give up? Absolutely not.
While advertising online for dental implants has gotten more difficult, savvy dental marketers are using that fact to their advantage – separating themselves from the competition and connecting with the best patients online. While others are flooding their practices with “low-quality” Facebook leads who don’t show to their appointments, the best marketers are taking a multi-channel approach that consistently delivers motivated patients and educates them throughout the process.
If you are interested in growing your practice’s dental implant leads through digital marketing, here are five things you need to keep in mind:
Search Engine Marketing should be the main way patients find your practice.
For dental implant patients, motivation is the name of the game. Motivated patients show up to their appointments, they engage with the dental practice to build the right treatment plan, and they find ways to afford care. So, where do you find motivated patients online? Google. More broadly, you find motivated implant patients through search engine marketing on platforms like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
By definition, patients who find your dental practice via a search engine are motivated to find a solution to a problem. Otherwise, why would they spend their time googling terms like “dental implants” or “how much do dental implants cost”? There are certain keywords that a prospective patient searches when they are looking to fix their smile and savvy practices are set up to connect with those patients when they search for those phrases.
There are two ways for dental practices to win in Search Engine Marketing. The first is paid advertising. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all have platforms that allow a practice to pay to show up in search results when someone looks for certain keywords. The platform is an auction between everyone willing to pay for the chance to talk with this pool of prospective patients. To win, a dental implant practice needs to spend the time building a strategy and then executing with skill to beat the competition. Done well, paid ads can provide a tremendous return on investment. Done poorly, it’s easy to lose a lot of money. The other way to connect with people searching for implants is through search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO typically takes months or years to rank for targeted keywords (especially highly competitive ones), but when done well, it positions the practice to win big in connecting with the best prospective patients.
Facebook is best used for retargeting / educating / building motivation.
One of the greatest aspects of social media marketing for dentists is a concept called retargeting. In short, once a practice identifies someone with interest in dental implants, the practice can serve Facebook ads to those people, and only to those people for as long as they would like. If a patient searches on Google for dental implants and visits your website, you can retarget them by providing educational materials, patient testimonials, messages from the doctor and staff, and special offers on Facebook to create affinity toward your practice, educating them to the implant process, and generally building excitement about the possibility of finally having that smile they are seeking.
While we would prefer that a patient searching on Google would immediately book into a consultation and move forward with care in the matter of a week or two, the reality is that making a decision to invest in dental implants can take months, or even years. Successful practices nurture prospective implant patients through retargeting for as long as is necessary to get them to come into the office – motivated and ready to move forward with care. Retargeting on Facebook is one of the two ways to do that.
You can use Facebook for first contact, but you have to be really targeted.
While Facebook did away with income targeting several years ago, there is one way to connect with quality implants patients on the platform – high-value interest targeting. So while it isn’t possible to target users on Facebook based on their income level (among several categories that were banned), practices can still target Facebook users based on certain interests that are correlated with income level. By carefully selecting those interests, and aggressively excluding others, it is possible to build an audience of desirable potential dental implant patients. Once that audience has been built, the practice can advertise to it with content that would only be relevant to those who may need implants. Over time, the practice builds a new audience on Facebook – a group of individuals who are qualified (based on your high-value interest targeting) and motivated (based on their engagement with the advertised content). Once built, this audience can be a gold mine of quality implant patients for the practice. This approach takes longer than running “cold” ads to a large population of Facebook users, but yields vastly superior results. Additionally, only the practice can specifically target this pool of desirable patients, reducing competition and increasing the ROI for Facebook marketing campaigns.
Use Email / Texts to educate potential patients throughout the process.
Motivation is a bucket with a hole in it. It is extremely common for implant patients to get cold feet and skip their appointment. How do you keep motivation high? Constant contact. Unfortunately, it is not practical to call prospective implant patients daily to check in and keep motivation high. Instead, successful practices use carefully crafted emails and text messages to automate much of the patient motivation outreach. These automations might include patient testimonials, messages from the doctor and staff, useful information about the healing process after implants are placed, or other content to address many of the questions implant patients might have. By segmenting the patient journey into steps, the practice can provide the right content at the right time. For example, the practice can show it understands what the patient is experiencing by providing a video on what to expect during the first visit delivered the day before the initial consultation. Sending a text expressing the practice’s excitement to meet on the morning of the appointment helps with show rates.
Many practices are intimidated to produce their own content for these communications, but they shouldn’t be. A 60 second welcome video shot on an iPhone is all that is necessary to build the library of content that will keep motivation high in prospective patients and increase the number of patients moving forward with care.
Use Email and Facebook to keep in touch with patients not ready to move forward yet.
As mentioned before, for many prospective implant patients the decision to move forward with implants is a lengthy one. While some patients that find the practice via a search engine are ready to receive care today, most will not.
To succeed in the long run, it is important to build an ever-expanding pool of potential patients who will eventually choose the practice for care. As mentioned before, Facebook is an excellent way to do that. Retargeting allows a practice to share content directly to this group of individuals. The other tool is email.
While many complain about being bombarded with email on a daily basis, the fact remains that email remains the most cost-effective method of marketing. Once a practice has a person’s email address, it is essentially free to send them content (assuming proper SPAM laws are being followed). With email automation systems, a practice only needs to write an email once to communicate with everyone in the database.
By taking a proactive approach and sharing relevant content that a prospective dental implant patient would care about, the practice generates a tremendous amount of goodwill and brand recognition in the eyes of the patient. Sophisticated email systems also allow for lead scoring – a system of determining who is engaging in the content in a way that warrants a phone call from the office. This ensures that the right patients are contacted by the office and that the office staff is efficient in their outreach.
The past two years have changed how dental practices use digital marketing to grow their dental implant patient base. Gone are the days of Facebook-only efforts that yield tremendous results. Now, dental implant practices must use a multi-channel approach to grow their procedure volume and by doing so, are seeing incredible growth. Incorporating the five keys to success that have been outlined is a great first step to a building a successful, sustainable, profitable digital marketing strategy for growing the practice’s dental implant procedures.
For most cash-paid services, success relies on connecting with new patients – patients who have no previous experience with the office. They are coming in cold, having responded to an ad online or a direct mail piece. They are feeling a mix of nervousness, excitement, and hope. Your front desk staff sets the tone for the entire first visit, and as you know, success building rapport during the first visit is the biggest predictor of whether the patient will close for care.
What is your process for welcoming new patients? Does your front desk staff:
Greet with a smile and welcome the new patient?
Come around the desk to meet the patient when they come in?
Offer the patient water or another beverage?
Ask the patient if there is anything that can be done to help them get comfortable in the office?
If they are doing all that, you are probably seeing a lot of success selling cash-paid services. If not, you may not be seeing the results you are seeking.
The other area where your front desk can make or break your cash-paid services is on the phone. Patients are constantly calling in to connect with your office about cash-paid services – is your front desk setting you up for success? Here is how to tell:
Is your front desk excited about bringing more patients into the office? You’d be surprised by how many offices struggle because the front desk staff sees connecting with prospective patients as a nuisance, a secondary task, or just “not part of their job.” If you want to grow cash-paid services, it is a requirement that your front desk is bought in to the work it takes to call prospective patients in a timely fashion, confirm appointments, and communicate the office’s excitement over the phone.
Does your front desk staff have their skills down? Are they able to connect quickly with a prospective patient, to connect with the emotional “Why?” driving the patient, and to share just enough information over the phone – enough to convince the prospective patient that a visit is worth their time and not so much they don’t need to come in?
If growing cash-paid services is a goal of yours, there is a lot that must be done. You must be trained on delivering the care, your case manager must be talented at closing for care, and you have a strong marketing effort to get patients to the door. But, please don’t overlook the power of your front desk to make (or break) your success. Time invested getting them to world-class is time well invested in the success of your practice.
As business leaders, we spend our time focusing on what the future of our business or practice needs to look like. Though we may be thoroughly deep in the weeds, we are also paying attention to what next month and next year need to look like – “Are we going to expand our services? Do I have the right staff and do they have the right training? What does success look like for us?”
We may have a clear picture in our head of what we are trying to accomplish, but it is very common to forget the importance of sharing what’s in our head with our teams, receive feedback from them, and then make adjustments to the plans based on what you hear. In today’s high-speed world, it’s becoming more important than ever to provide clear direction and guidance – if there isn’t time to do it right this time, when will we have time to do it right later?
Here are a couple of ways to ensure you are communicating the goals for the upcoming quarter:
1. Write it down and send it out. In our busy world, it’s easy to have a quick conversation about goals and plans, but conversations have a way of being misinterpreted. By writing your goals down and sharing them with the team, you can reduce the likelihood of a misunderstanding. You can also reference back to it time and time again, as questions arise.
2. Review the plans with everyone together. Staff meetings are great for this, but at least once a quarter (more frequent is better), it’s critical to share the direction of the organization, any anticipated changes, and have the opportunity for a question and answer session.
3. Regularly touch base. The famed boxer and philosopher, Mike Tyson, is known for saying that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. He would certainly know. Though we aren’t in the same line of work as Mr. Tyson, things definitely pop up in life. Expect to need to make changes to your plans. Depending upon how dynamic your practice is, you may want to have daily stand-ups – a 10 minute touch base where the team all get together to look each other in the eye. If that’s too much starting out, perhaps try twice a week. The first few times you try it, it may feel a little clunky, but as you get used to it, it will speed up and you’ll keep everyone aligned with just a few minutes of touching base.
The business of patient care is a team sport, from the front desk through the care managers to the clinician putting hands on the patient, alignment drives success and clear communication drives alignment. By taking the time to make sure everyone understands what success looks like and their role in that success, you can see your practice hit a new level.
I am blessed to spend a lot of time building out marketing strategies for practices across the country. I really enjoy the work and feel like I can add a lot of value in a fairly quick conversation, based on the fact that I have the opportunity to see so many practices across the country some being very successful, and some not as much.
Here’s one lesson I’d like to share with you that I think can be very valuable to how you think about marketing your practice’s services – there are three types of customers and a specific way to advertise to each of them.
Here are the three types of customers you should think about when you are considering building your practice:
1.Existing/Previous patients – These patients already know who you are and have a pre-existing relationship with you. These patients are usually the easiest to connect with and are often very likely to communicate when you reach out. Email is a great way to communicate with these patients. Whether it’s a monthly newsletter, a thoughtful ad hoc note, or an orchestrated multi-step email campaign, reaching out to these patients can do wonders in terms of re-engaging them for services. This is the smallest, but often the easiest group to motivate for care.
2. Active Seekers – These are people who have an issue and are actively seeking a solution to it. They may have a relationship with your practice, but most won’t. To connect with these patients, you need to go to where they are and provide them information to get them to connect with you about a solution. These patients start their searches on Google and then perform most of their research online (generally on the first page of Google). Google AdWords campaigns and optimizing your website for internet searches are the tools you should use to connect with them. You can also connect with them on Facebook groups and other group chats. These prospective patients are motivated to move forward with care – we know that because they are actively searching the internet to fix a certain problem.
3. Engageable Afflicted – These are people with a given treatable condition or loved ones of someone who has a condition your practice can treat. They tend to be suffering, but not to the point that they are actively seeking a solution yet. Many times, they’ve just been living with the condition for long enough that it is part of their “normal.” These patients are often the patients you connect with on Facebook or respond to TV, radio, direct mail. These are most of the new patients you’ll bring into your practice, especially if your focus is high-dollar cash-paid procedures.
To build a reliable new patient engine in your practice, I would advise you to think about each of those patient types and how you can connect with each. If you aren’t emailing your existing patients regularly, now is the time to begin.
