A Staggering 87% of UK dental practices are failing to harness the power of Facebook to help grow their practice
Not running Facebook Ads is a mistake, not having the Facebook Pixel installed is an even bigger mistake.
In marketing your dental practice Facebook ads are where all the action is but you need to be setup to succeed.
Is your site Facebook ready, are you setup to succeed or fail ? at the bottom of this article there is instructions to show you how you can easily check.
The Problem
To train Facebook to do your bidding , to ensure you have the best chance of delivering the right marketing message to the right people at the right time you need to have what is called the Facebook Pixel installed on your website.
I personally manually checked 197 Dental web site’s in the UK and only 13% of those I checked had the Facebook pixel installed.
The sites I checked were located all over the UK. In many other ways, the standard of these sites is very high, but all of that work is been seriously undermined by the omission of not been set up correctly to take full advantage of what Facebook has to offer.
87% of those sites I checked can’t do any of the things I am about to describe.
The Facebook pixel is what you might know of as a cookie but it’s better, much better. . It’s a little piece of code that when installed on your site will allow you to
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Build invisible lists of different people who visited your website
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Build invisible lists of people who visited particular pages on your website , for example, one for those who visited your orthodontics page and one for those who visited your implants page.
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Build invisible lists of people who took particular actions on your site such as registered for your newsletter or registered for information on a particular product.
- Allow you to profile site visitors and action takers so you can find more people like them to bring to your site.
Installing the Facebook Pixel is not that hard and it is FREE.
The Opportunity
The Facebook pixel will track people who visit your site no matter where they come.
They might be there because of a recommendation, a Google Ad they saw and clicked on. They might have seen an ad in the paper or heard an ad on the radio,it does not matter the Facebook pixel will track them all and reveal their true intent.
Why do this, I hear you ask. Because when you know somebodies intent you can
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Send hyper-targeted messages via Facebook Ads to people, only send a message promoting orthodontics to people who visited you orthodontics page & implant info to those who visited your implants page.
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Save a bundle on your marketing spend, no more wasting money promoting an orthodontics services Ad to people looking for implants .
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To be absolutely frank badly targeted Facebook Ads tick people off and ticked off people are a lot less likely to buy.
All fo this leads to increased sales and reduced marketing costs.
But there is more , much more
Facebook actually a bit of a dog and with the Facebook pixel installed YOU CAN TRAIN FACEBOOK TO FIND THE PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO TAKE THE ACTIONS YOU WANT THEM TO TAKE.
Say for example you sell orthodontics. A well-established marketing strategy is to offer visitors on your orthodontics page a chance to register to have information on Orthodontics emailed to them. A visitor enters their name and email into a form, hits submit and the info is automatically emailed to them.
They get the info they want and you have an email address of somebody very interested in orthodontics. You can now nurture that lead and try to get them to convert.
Remember Facebook has a huge database of information on all its members.
Next, thanks to the Facebook Pixel been installed you can ask Facebook to look at the profiles it has of those who have registered for more information on Orthodontics. Using that information it can then target others who have profiles similar to the people who have already taking the action you want.
Basically, you have trained Facebook to hunt down customers for you.
Get an Edge
Remember 87% of the dental website I checked can’t do any of this. This means they are either not running Ads at all or running them very badly
This gives the 13% that do a big marketing edge over the rest.
This I think is a huge marketing mistake, As I already said in dental terms it’s like giving somebody a root canal but forgetting to give him or her the anesthetic. Painful , very painful except here the pain is in your pocket.
In the UK there is 38,000,000 Facebook subscribers and a huge proportion of them use Facebook multiple times a day.
In relation to selling, particularly in the Business to Consumer space that dentists are in Facebook advertising works. Businesses know this and in the last two years have piled onto the platform.
You can see this in the sky rocketing revenues Facebook is making from its advertising platform.
Is everybody who advertises on Facebook making money ? I douth it but those who are in that 13% that are able to do the things I described most certainly are.
As I am sure you are aware dental practices are not cheap to run.
Apart from the need for highly skilled dentists, there is also a need for supporting nurses , administrative staff, and a great location. All of this costs. To fund all of this and hopefully see a profit at the end of it dental practices need a steady stream of clients coming through the door.
Installing the Facebook Pixel and running Facebook ads correctly will give you the edge over your competition.
Even if you are not going to run ads now , install the Facebook pixel and start collecting the visitor data and building the invisible lists.
Click here for instructions on how you can check to see if you have the Facebook Pixel installed. Please share this post with other dentists that you think might to know this.
If you have any questions or need advice leave a comment below or email jmcgarry@webworks.ie and I will get an answer to you asap. You can of course call me on 00353 87 6778855