Can Social Media Marketing Grow Your Dental Practice?

Why Dentists Value Social Media Marketing

Social Media is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of marketing. It's a mistake to think of the rise of social media as a gimmick or a force restricted to tech-heavy industries. Dentistry is a good example. As a profession, dentistry is not nearly as connected to technology as online retail, but it can benefit just as much from a social media presence. The key lies in the fact that while the business itself does not rely on the Internet, there is a huge potential market online who uses social media frequently. Marketing a dental practice through social media has advantages beyond traditional forms of marketing, like buying ads in magazines or on billboards.

Social Media Can Access New & Existing Patients

First of all, social media marketing has the power to reach an unprecedented number of people. A magazine ad will only ever reach the people who read that magazine. There are far more people on Facebook than subscribe to any magazine or even a group of magazines. In addition, it costs more to advertise in several magazines at once. On the other hand, with a social media ad, you can be sure that more people will see the ad because you can use a form of ad payment called cost per impression. Cost per impression means that you pay for the ad to be displayed to a certain number of people. For example, if you choose a cost per impression model for a Facebook ad and buy a hundred thousand impressions, then your ad will load for a hundred thousand viewers on Facebook. If you put that ad in a magazine, you can't be sure that people who read the magazine will look at the ad. This is a portion of what makes Facebook advertising so effective.

Measure Patient Engagement

Secondly, you can gather a lot of information about the effectiveness of your ads when they are on social media. That's because these ads generate data about who clicked on them. You can use that data to analyze what kinds of ads work best for different target demographics. That kind of information is crucial for deciding what kinds of ads to run in the future and where to place them. For example, you might learn that Twitter ads don't do well because your practice's target demographic doesn't have a big presence on Twitter. But on the other hand, they are much more likely to be active on Facebook and Pinterest. Social media ads also give you some control over who gets to see your ad. That enables you to customize your ad placement based on the data you gather from your previous ads.

The bottom line is that social media marketing is quickly becoming a critical part of the strategy of many businesses, and that includes dental practices. If you run a dental practice and you aren't taking advantage of social media, then you can be sure that the competition will. Don't pass up this opportunity to bring in new patients. Use social media marketing and open up a whole new world.