Facebook Ads For Dentists: A Step-by-Step Guide For 2024

Struggling to get a steady stream of patients for your dental practice? Facebook Ads for dentists can be a profitable addition to your digital marketing campaigns. With three billion active users worldwide, Facebook is the most popular social media network in the world.

With Facebook Ads, you can customize your ads to reach a target audience while being cost-effective, measurable, and flexible.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use Facebook Ads to attract new patients, engage with potential customers, and grow your revenue with the right dentist ad strategies.

Why Should Dentists Use Facebook Ads?

Facebook advertising is a powerful and versatile method for dentists to achieve a specific marketing goal, whether it’s brand awareness, engagement, or conversions. This method is a great way to strengthen your overall online marketing strategy.

Facebook Ads allow advertisers to target specific audiences according to the following factors:

• Demographics: Age, Gender, Location, Family status
• Interests: Topics, posts, and pages that people engage with on Facebook
• Behaviors: Recent online searches
• Lookalike audiences: Similar people to your existing customers or website visitors

Unlike traditional ads, Facebook Ads can be interactive such as videos, polls, and images. This boosts engagement among your audience and builds trust with potential patients.

Lastly, Facebook allows advertisers to set their own budget and time frame for each Facebook ad campaign. This helps with managing your dental marketing budget, making sure that you don’t overspend and possibly achieve a decent return on investment (ROI).

How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost?

Facebook charges advertisers in several ways: per click (CPC), per 1,000 impressions (CPM), per like (CPL), and per download (CPA). 

A survey indicates that the average advertising costs on average are:

• $0.26 – $0.30 per click
• $1.01 – $3.00 per 1000 impressions
• $0.00 – $0.25 per like
• $0.00 – $5.00 per download

There’s also no way of knowing how much you’re going to get charged for an ad unless you start running the campaign and seeing actual results.

Note that these figures may be lower or higher, depending on your industry, ad quality, and competition.

Fortunately, Facebook lets you set a budget limit for every ad campaign and you won’t be charged more than your limit.

Step-By-Step Guide On Creating A Facebook Ad

Before you can create Facebook ads, you’ll need to sign up for a Business Manager account. Go to the Business Manager page and create an account or log in using an existing Facebook profile.

Once inside the Facebook Ads Manager, you can start running your first ad.

1. Make a Landing Page for Your Ads

You will need to enter a URL or website where people will be taken when they click your Facebook ad. You can use your dentist website’s main home page as the target URL or you can create a landing page.

Landing pages are usually created with conversion-focused ad copy to push people to take action on your ad (buy a product or schedule an appointment). 

You can create a simple landing page using your website’s content management system (like WordPress) or use landing page creators like Leadpages or Unbounce. 

You can also hire a web design digital marketing agency to do this for you to save time and get a tailored, professional landing page that you need for your ads.

2. Create the Ad on Facebook

Follow these steps to create your first dental Facebook ad:

Create a Facebook Page

To run ads on Facebook, you need to create the Facebook page for your business if you haven’t done so already. A Facebook page should be a business page dedicated to your dentistry practice and not your personal account.

Click on the icon (as shown in the photo below) and select Page.

After creating a page, you’ll need to go to your Ads Manager dashboard. You can do this by going to your Facebook account’s menu and clicking “Ad.” 

In the Ads Manager page, click the “Create” button.

Choose a Campaign Goal

Upon clicking the Create button, a new window pops up and you’ll need to enter your ad’s buying type (keep it in Auction) and campaign objective.

Each campaign objective is explained on the right side of this window. Select your objective and click “Continue.”

Next, you need to pick a campaign setup. We recommend using Manual Setup for full control over your ads. 

The next section lets you create a name for your campaign. You can name it after the specific service you are promoting like teeth whitening as we used in the example below:

The Special Ad Categories section is for advertisers to declare whether their ad is about credit, employment, housing, social issues, elections or politics. Since you’re promoting your dental services, you should not check any of these choices. 

The next section allows you to review your campaign’s buying type and goal. For this example, we selected Auction as the buying type and Traffic as the goal:

The last two sections are about A/B testing and Advantage campaign budget. You can read the descriptions of these options to help you decide if you want to turn them on. If you’re not sure you want to do this, keep them toggled off.

Click “Next” to proceed.

On the next page, you need to select some options that are related to your campaign goals. Since we chose traffic as a goal, you’ll need to choose where to send that traffic (website, app, etc.).

Set Your Ad Budget and Schedule

On the next section, you can set your daily budget and schedule for when you want your ads to run:

Select Your Target Audience

The next few steps involve defining your audience, starting with location:

The next section is where you can further specify your audience:

Click the + next to Audience suggestion.

Hover your mouse to the right side of Age and Gender to show the Edit button. 

When that’s done, you can edit the age and gender of your target people:

Under Detailed targeting, you can click on Browse to select from Demographics, Interests, or Behavior. Each of these sections drop down further to different items. The example above targets potential dental patients who work for the Entertainment industry.

The Placements section asks if you want Facebook to show your ads across their network (including Instagram) or if you want to manually choose where your ads are shown. If you’re a beginner, we recommend sticking with Manual placements and only leave Facebook as the checked option under Platforms.

Select an Ad Type

The next stage in this process is to upload the ad itself. First, you need to specify your Ad Setup:

Upload Your Ad Content

Next, you need to upload your ad’s media file along with your ad’s headline and description:

You can also choose the call-to-action (CTA) that appears on your ad:

Lastly, you’ll need to enter the website that opens when people click on the ad:

If you want to track your ad clicks and conversions, you’ll also need to complete this section:

If you don’t know how to do this, you can try reading Facebook’s resource pages that provide a guide so you can complete this step. Alternatively, you can hire a Facebook ads expert to do this for you.

Once all the sections are filled out, click Publish.

3. Track Your Ad’s Performance

To check how your ads are performing, you can go to the Campaigns tab on Ads Manager and click the View Charts button on the ad or ad set you want to check.

You should see a chart that shows the results of your campaign, which will vary depending on your campaign objective.

Based on these results, you can then analyze metrics like conversion rate, advertising cost, and return on investment (ROI). Data like this is vital to improving your marketing strategy, specifically with retargeting and creating Lookalike audiences.

Tips On Running High-Converting Facebook Ads

Getting prospective patients is not a guarantee even if you post ads on the world’s biggest social media platform. Successful dentist Facebook ads are made with a clear branding message coupled with familiarity with Facebook’s advertising platform. 

Here are some basic ways to ensure your ads give you great results.

Identify Your Ideal Audience

Facebook Ads’ best feature is the ability to create custom audiences. Before you do this for your ads, make sure that you understand who your ideal audience is. Picture a customer persona – his lifestyle, relationship status, family life, work, and location. Having these details can help you build a clear idea of who your ideal patients are.

As an example, if you offer pediatric dental services, you might want to target your ads to parents of young children – which is something you can find in Facebook’s Audiences feature.

Creating the right customer persona can help you choose the perfect targeting options that deliver excellent results that bring more patients to your dental clinic.

Choose The Right Campaign Objective

Now that you know the different campaign objectives for Facebook ads, you’ll need to consider which objectives or goals match your campaigns.

For instance, if your goal is to get more patients to schedule a call, then your ad’s campaign objective should be set to Leads so the next ad options allow you to link to an appointment form and not just a dental website. Setting your campaign objective correctly ensures you achieve your end goal.

Have A Compelling Call To Action (CTA)

People are often busy and don’t pay attention to ads. You need to create ads that catch a person’s attention and immediately tell them what they need to do next. 

In addition to writing a catchy headline and description, you need to finish with a clear and strong call-to-action (CTA) to push your audience towards a click. Something like “Get a free consultation” is more likely to get clicks than “Learn More.”

Comply With Laws About Advertising Your Practice

Before running ads, check that you’re not violating any state or federal laws on dental advertising and general healthcare guidelines.

The American Dental Association (ADA) has rules for dentists advertising their practice, which includes truthfulness, professionalism, and protecting patient confidentiality. 

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also says that dentists shouldn’t make unsubstantiated claims about their dental services and that they should disclose any affiliations with other companies.

Start With A Small Budget

Publishing Facebook ads might seem like a risk, especially if it’s your first time and you’re not sure what works. 

The great thing about running Facebook ads is that you can spend as little as $5 a day. Starting with a small budget allows you to run ads without spending a lot of money. 

Even when you don’t get impressive results, running ads on a small budget will give you the opportunity to learn how everything works and gather data about the people who click on your ads.

Do A/B Testing

A/B testing or split testing simply means that you’re using different versions of the same ad. You might be using different images, headlines, and descriptions to see which ad iteration performs the best.

A/B testing allows you to optimize your existing ads so that they perform better, or put non-performing ads on pause while increasing the budget of the performing ad. Either way, publishing several versions of your ads help you tweak and improve your ads for better results.

Experiment With Different Media Types

You don’t have to stick to one type of media when running your ads. Try other ad formats like video ads might work better for ads with a Conversion campaign objective. 

A carousel (which is a collection of photos) might work better when advertising different locations of your dental offices, or various photos of satisfied patients who availed of a specific service. 

Experimenting with different media types helps you gain insight on what works for your ad and what doesn’t.

Hire A Digital Marketing Agency To Run Successful Facebook Ads

Most dentists hesitate to run Facebook ads because they feel they don’t have the skills or the time to learn those skills. Luckily, On The Map Marketing offers digital marketing, including social media marketing, with years of experience in working with dentists.

If you’re ready to run Facebook ads but need expert help, contact us and we’ll help you get started.