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Facebook Ads for Dentists to Win Patients This Holiday Season

Social Media Marketing

Dental clinics are generally busy during the last months of the year, so you might find it unnecessary to spend time and resources to promote your dental practice during the holiday season.

However, having a social media marketing strategy for dentists and investing in Facebook Ads can put your practice top of mind and help max out your appointment slots throughout the holidays up till January of next year.  

Facebook Ads are a powerful marketing tool that can boost your practice during the holiday season and beyond. They can help you cut through the noise during a very competitive time, attract new patients, and grow your practice.  

In this article, we will teach you nine valuable strategies that will help maximize your Facebook Ads for dentists' results in the holiday season.

9 Facebook Ads Strategies to Attract New Patients

Want to make this holiday season your most profitable yet? Here’s what you need to do!

1. Change the Placement of Your Ads

Marketers are planning where to place new FB ads for dentists.

Ad placement refers to the different places your ad can be displayed on Facebook and across partner platforms, such as Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network.  

Your campaign objective will determine which ad placement is suitable to best achieve your goal.  

Ad placements are grouped based on how users encounter them. Here are the different placement types:

  • Stories
  • Feeds
  • Messages
  • Search
  • In-Article
  • Apps
  • In-Stream

The right Facebook ad placements can help you target specific segments of your target patients.  

However, during holidays, it’s best to move the placement of your ads to areas that are used less often by other advertisers because of how intense the competition is during this time.  

All in all, Facebook has over 16 different placements so moving your ads won’t be a problem. In fact, there's a lot of opportunity in less popular places like Instagram stories, audience networks, and many more.  

It’s just a matter of studying which ad placements generate the best results for your campaign type. By keeping tabs on the data, you can determine what works and what doesn't, which allows you to optimize your ad spending and ensure not burning through your budget without getting any returns.  

If you’re not sure where to start, try using the automatic placement options.  

Don’t be afraid to start experimenting as early as today to find what will work best for you during the holidays.  

When it comes to social media for dentists, we suggest you run Instagram Stories ads. They can be very profitable if done right.  

2. Create Custom Audiences for More Targeted Ads

Facebook will automatically show your ads in front of users who are going to find your ads relevant. However, you can further target your ad delivery to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns through Facebook ad targeting.  

Through this feature, you can specifically define to whom you want your ads to appear using three audience selection tools:

  • Core Audiences – Enables you to define an audience based on age, demographics, interests, location, and more.
  • Custom Audiences – Presents your ads to people who have previously seen your ads or engaged with your practice both online and offline.
  • Lookalike Audiences – Reaches new patients whose interests are similar to your best patients.  

Since reaching a larger audience means paying more, this holiday season, it’s strategic to target a smaller group of warm audiences or those who have expressed their interest in your dental products or services but haven’t converted yet.  

In Facebook ad targeting, this is called Custom Audiences. There are four main types of custom audiences:

  • Custom audiences from a customer list – This is where you upload lists of data, such as email lists or customer lists, on Facebook and its system will match the data you have with their users.  
  • Website custom audiences – This allows you to advertise to everyone who has visited your website in the past 180 days. However, you need to have Facebook Pixel installed on your site. You can even target users who specifically went to a certain dental service page on your site within a given timeframe. You can also target visitors based on the time they spent on your site.
  • Mobile App custom audiences – If you have a mobile app, you can target users who have engaged with or used your app within the last 180 days.  
  • Engagement custom audiences – You can target users based on interactions, such as users who have watched your videos on social media, those who have filled out forms, engaged with your page, and many more.  

You can use any of these custom audiences to target users who will likely convert when shown relevant holiday ads.  

If you already use Facebook Ads for dentists to boost your dental practice, update your Custom Audience with your latest patient information.  

The only problem you need to be aware of is oversaturation or ad fatigue. It happens when the same person sees the same ad over and over again. Avoid this issue by using evergreen and dynamic retargeting strategies so you can communicate to warm and piping hot potential patients compellingly.  

3. Create a Clear, Simple, and Compelling Offer

Social media for dentist lead generating strategy for holidays.

To stand out from other ads on the platform during the holiday season, you need to craft a clear, simple, and compelling offer.  

The discounts on your dental products or services need to be at least 20% to stay competitive. But, if this eats up your profit margin and can be damaging to your practice, consider giving freebies instead.  

Giving away free items, like teeth whitening kits or dental hygiene kits, can be more effective than just a simple discount that patients can find anywhere else.  

4. Increase Budget and Check Your Spend Limit

Before running holiday Facebook Ads for dentists, it's best to get a clear understanding of how much you need to spend to get the results you want during the peak sales season.  

You can use the Facebook Ads budget calculator to help you compute. All you have to do is type in your metrics and Facebook will automatically provide you with the best budget for your goals.  

Once you’re done with all the computation, go to Business Manager and head straight to the Billing section to set your new spending limit for the holidays.  

Check your ad account limit regularly to make sure you’re not spending above your set budget.  

During the holidays, it’s common to go above and beyond your budget quickly, especially when things are going well. However, this can result in your ad campaigns turning off until you pay your ad account balance.  

It’s best to increase your ad budget during the holiday to achieve maximum results.

5. Your Image or Video Thumbnail Should Have Little to No Text

Facebook prefers ad images that have little to no text. They have also found that ad images with less than 20% text tend to perform better.  

Unless you’re trying to promote a book, album, or post a poster for a festival, make sure your ad images don’t contain the following:

  • Numbers
  • Watermarks
  • Text-based logos

However, it’s still important to optimize your ad images, especially during the holidays. You want them to be compelling enough to capture your audience’s attention as they’re scrolling and inspire them to take action.  

Here are some images ads best practices to keep in mind:

  • Use the recommended aspect ratio for different ad placements.
  • Post-high-resolution images to ensure your ads don't appear pixelated.
  • Communicate your message effectively by using relevant visuals. Showcase the essence of your dental practice with a holiday twist!
  • Focus your message on what you want to communicate. Be direct with your offer.  
  • Use Ads Manager Preview to see how your ads appear on your audience’s computers or phones.  
  • Use the carousel format to showcase several images of your service or dental products.  
  • Use a call-to-action to urge potential patients to book an appointment with you.

You can use Facebook’s text overlay tool to check if your ad images or video thumbnails are up to Facebook’s standards to avoid getting penalized.  

6. Do A/B Test Campaigns

A/B testing Facebook Ads for dentists is crucial because it allows you to determine what variables, such as audience, placement, and ad creatives, work best with your ideal patients and iterate on that in your holiday ad campaigns. It also provides you insights you can use to improve your future campaigns, enabling you to get better results without spending more.  

Here are some A/B testing best practices to follow:

  • Create a testable hypothesis that will help improve your future campaigns.  
  • Test one variable at a time to have more conclusive results.
  • Use an audience large enough to generate reliable results. However, don’t use this same audience for other Facebook campaigns you’re running at the same time.  
  • Run your test campaigns for a minimum of 7 days and a maximum of 30 days.  
  • Set a budget that will allow your ads to produce reliable results and confidently determine the best ad copy for the best results.  

7. Book Your Campaigns Extra Early

Photo of marketer setting up Facebook campaigns early for the holiday.

Ad approval usually takes only a few hours at most. However, during the holiday season, it may take Facebook's approval team somewhere around 24-48 hours, especially if they decide to do a manual review of your campaign.  

To make sure your ads get approved on time, schedule them earlier. The latest should be two days before Black Friday.  

8. Keep an Eye on Your Campaign Performance Daily

Monitor your holiday ads daily so you can assess which ads are underperforming and which ones are successful. This way, you can pause ads that aren’t generating results and shift your budget to fruitful ad sets.  

To make it easier for you to stay on top of your holiday social media ads for dentists, consider automating your reporting entirely to save time.  

9. Use Facebook’s Holiday Guide to Your Advantage

Each year, Facebook releases an advertising guide to help strengthen your dynamic marketing strategy for the holidays.  

This guide contains insights, key dates, checklists, and even a campaign planner you can use to structure and optimize your holiday campaigns.  

Make This Holiday Season Your Most Profitable Yet with Facebook Ads for Dentists

Take your dental practice to the next level during the holiday season by investing in Facebook Ads for dentists!

Maximize results by changing the placement of your ads, using custom audiences, being forward with your offer, increasing your ad budget, doing A/B testing, monitoring ad performance, using Facebook’s advertising holiday guide, and optimizing your ads.

If your dental practice is too busy during this time of the year, don’t hesitate to reach out to experts.  

At Digital Resource, our social media specialists will work with you to create a custom FB ad strategy, from building momentum to attracting new patients to making the most out of the post-holiday season.

Want to grow your practice? Allow our experts to help you! Contact us today.

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