Dental Practice Marketing-What to Know about Social Media Like Facebook
Why Social Media is NOT the starting point for dental practice marketing.
Every practice has a limited amount of energy, dollars, and, one very finite element that is precious and non-renewable-Time!
The reality is every “new patient” strategy, every strategy that creates prospective patients and patients for silos of business in the practice (cosmetics, sedation, dental implants, TMJ, apnea, etc.) must all be looked at from the standpoint of how many of these resources are devoured.
Currently Facebook™ is something that a fair number of dentists use in dental practice marketing.
Far too much is being written about it in various publications and diverting practices from what’s truly important and better use of limited things like money and time in dental practice marketing.
Yes, “internet marketing” via Facebook is enticing; especially since it’s “free.” But, what you don’t know is that virtually all of the internet marketing that really works costs money and a lot of it. We spend a LOT on SEO just so we’re on page one for “dental case acceptance” there is simply no free way to go about this……
There are lots of big companies wasting money on this but they can afford to do so. AND….some of the extremely unique national online businesses attract traffic and business with FB but most businesses don’t. Another category that benefits a lot from social media are performers, entertainers and celebrities because “fans” can be crazy and rabid about those individuals they identify strongly with and as a result do and buy whatever comes across the “feed” or the “tweet” to the fan. Now…..guess who won’t/don’t benefit from this type of dental practice marketing ?— local dental practices.
Free strategies virtually never make money… and the why SHOULD be obvious to you as a business owner concerned about the bottom line. If they did, the social network companies would ultimately find some way to charge for it AND be profitable. An example–I use (pay) for a social media site called SoundCloud where a lot of folks in the music industry congregate and it’s profitable because almost everyone is a paying customer—up to $300 per year to have unlimited server space for your production work.
Somebody’s gotta’ get paid. Another truth—most internet product only marketers share lists and split up the profits, or they buy ads on Facebook™ and target their customers…and this strategy for National Businesses CAN work.
What works for National companies (like mine) won’t always work for local businesses (like yours).
(But, don’t think that the grass is greener!…there’s a lot of things that you can do that I can’t which includes buying big mass media which I can’t do in every market where we have members…..
Okay back to Facebook™…
If you have a Facebook™ account and reveal in some way in your profile that you are a Dentist, you’ll notice that the ads you see are probably Dentist Specific… Targeting Dentists. Someone is paying Facebook™ to put their ads on YOUR page…and if you click the ads, you’ll go to their website. (But even that step is just one of many steps that have to happen right in order to make money. It’s not easy to make this work and it gets complicated especially when you analyze the behavior and “attention span” of those congregating and spending time on social media sites.)
But, your real market is approximately a 30-60 minute commute radius around your practice …VERY dependent on how strong of a case you’ve made for your unique “method” and the type of patient you are promoting for in big media. Targeting enough viable prospects using Facebook™ to justify the expense and the time is extremely difficult, if not impossible, as a local small service business.
Does this mean that you shouldn’t open up a Facebook™ account and post comments and photos? Not necessarily…but be careful. If you say or share the wrong information or photos, it can repel prospects and/or patients.
But more importantly, you must realize that you aren’t going to get much traffic (visitors to your Facebook™ page) without marketing it….and THAT’S why, based on spending plenty of test dollars on Facebook™ ads and even more on getting “visitors” to our national website, for attracting deep disability patients, there’s far better strategies to employ that do not include Facebook™ or any Social Media marketing at all…
To see what we do on Facebook™ click this link…
By the way, this site does NOT make us money… I need to do a lot of things before and after this page to attract business and this page isn’t a big part of my marketing efforts.
I’m only showing you this so you can have access to more free information—if you want it. In exchange, feel free to hit the “Like” button for me…and also hit “Like” for any of the articles or videos that you visit on the page. This will help other Dentists get valuable free information that will save them time, money, and stress.
The next time you hear someone bragging about all of the business they are going to build from FB in their dental practice marketing, you can smile and know the truth……..
Want to learn more…………Visit my website here or check out my top selling book on Amazon.
