Wants to grow your dental practice with social media, but you are stuck on the way forward? This complete dental social media marketing guide is for you. Discover some of the things top dental offices do behind the scene to grow their practice with this channel.

Social media has revolutionized the way dentists reach their target audiences. 

In the past, dental offices had to rely on traditional advertising channels like television, radio, and print to reach patients. However, these methods are becoming increasingly expensive and less effective as people continue to spend more time on social media. 

Statista has projected that the number of social media users will reach almost six billion by 2027, up from 2.73 billion in 2017. They believe that these people will spend an average of 144 minutes per day messaging, socializing, and sharing content on these social platforms.

And the results have been impressive so far.

For instance:

• About 27 percent of internet users leverage social media to discover brands, products, and services.
• Forty-four percent of them use it as the primary information source when researching brands.
• Nearly 73 percent of internet users use it for brand research.
• Humans collectively spend 11.6 billion hours daily on social media globally.

[Source]

These statistics demonstrate that, with the proper strategies, one can use this channel to level the playing field and compete on almost equal footing with more established brands.

And that’s what we want to show you here.

But first, let’s see why social media marketing matters for dentists.

Why Social Media Marketing for Dentists

Social media allows dentists to connect with their target audiences in a more personal and engaging way. 

It allows them to share news and updates, run contests and promotions, and build relationships with their customers. They can also track social media results to see how well their content is resonating with their target audiences. This allows them to optimize their campaigns as needed to improve the results.

Here are more reasons social media marketing is never a mistake for your dental practice.

Increased reach and engagement

Social media platforms allow brands to reach a wider audience than ever before. With billions of active users on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can connect with people all over the world. 

Personalized marketing

This channel allows brands to target their marketing campaigns to specific audiences. 

This means you can show your ads to patients who are most likely to be interested in your dental offerings. This can lead to higher conversion rates and more sales.

Measurable results

It lets you track your marketing campaign results effortlessly. 

Social media analytics provide you insights into how many people have seen their ads, how many people have clicked on their ads, and how many people have converted. With this information, you can improve your marketing campaigns for better results.

Real-time feedback

Social media platforms allow brands to get real-time feedback from their customers. This feedback can help your dental practice to improve its products or services, and can also enable you to create better marketing campaigns.

Improve conversion rate

Hundreds of people will visit your dentist’s website.

But sadly, only a few will convert, leaving thousands of dollars on the table. However, with social media, you can retarget them with personalized ads and offers, improving your conversion rate. We have written extensively on Facebook targeting strategies for dentists and we recommend that you check it out. 

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Top Social Media Marketing Strategies for Dentists

You have already seen how dentists can benefit from social media marketing. Now, action these strategies to grow your dental practice with this channel.

Set social media marketing goals

A blind social media marketing campaign won’t get you far.

So, it’s important to set measurable goals to focus your efforts on what needs to be done. Also, setting goals lets you manage your budget, streamline workflow, track your performance, and align social media efforts marketing to the overall business goals.

You can build your  social media strategies around these goals:

• Brand awareness
• Leads generation
• Improve customer engagement
• Generate sales 
• Drive repeat businesses
• Boost positive brand reputation

Ensure your goals are SMART:

Specific

Don’t beat around the bush. 

Be specific. Let your team know what you expect from them in clear terms. For instance, if you intend to run a social media brand awareness campaign on Facebook and Twitter, it’s much better to specify the goals as: improve brand awareness on Facebook and Twitter.

At least, this gives the team a focus area, allowing them to maximize the campaign.

Measurable

Defining your goals is not enough. 

So, make it measurable to enable you to measure and track your progress effortlessly. It’s as simple as adding numbers. And here’s an example:

• Improve brand awareness on Facebook and Twitter by 50 percent.
• Generate 25 new leads weekly from Facebook.
• Boost customer engagement on all social media platforms by 10 percent.

Attainable

It’s always tempting to aim high.

Of course, nothing is wrong with showing ambition. However, overstretching your arm could strain you unnecessarily, leading to avoidable mistakes. 

So, stick to goals that match your budget, team capability, and market realities. 

Relevant

Don’t pick goals that are not relevant to your business objectives.

If the bottom line is to increase business revenue by 10 percent, then each social media goal should support that. For instance, if you project that 100 leads monthly will help you achieve this and your average conversion rate is 10 percent, then you should aim for 1,000 leads monthly.

Also, find out the number of people you’ll need to reach monthly to generate this number of leads.

Time-Bound

Add a due date to goal completion.

It motivates you to complete the goals on time. Also, deadlines have a way of pushing people beyond their limits. So, specify your goals thus:

• Improve brand awareness on Facebook and Twitter by 50 percent in three months.
• Generate 25 new leads weekly from Facebook for six months.
• Boost customer engagement on all social media platforms by 10 percent in a year.

Define your audience

Social media has about 4.8 billion users worldwide.

This represents almost 60 percent of the world’s population and 93 percent of all internet users. These people have different needs, interests, preferences, and experiences. And it is too risky to dive straight into social media marketing without first defining your ideal prospects.

You’ll end up hitting wide of the mark.

To avoid this, then create buyer personas for your ideal audience. These are fictional, composite characters that represent each segment of your target audience. They provide a clear picture of your ideal customers. 

And here’s how to create one:

• Run a survey to get a real insight into your customers.
• Put down customer needs and pain points.
• Describe the ideal experience or solutions to these challenges.
• Give your persona a real-time, upload a picture to represent them, and provide their age, occupation, location, and income level.
• Write a bio for your persona to provide a back story.
• Define their most preferred social media platform and the type of content that resonates with them.
• Organize this information into a visual board.

 Now, repeat these steps for each of your audience segments. Milanote is our favorite tool for creating buyer personas. This resource guides you on how to use this software.

Automate your social media marketing

Dental social media marketing is not a walk in the park.

However, the key to making the most of this channel is consistent posting. Several experts believe that posting one to three times daily can help you unlock its true potential and boost your social visibility. But, doing this consistently across all your social accounts is a chore. 

And that is where social media automation comes in.

Online social media management tools like Sendible can help you schedule up to a month’s worth of content across all the popular social media platforms in a minute, including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Business Profile
• Instagram
• Tiktok
• LinkedIn
• YouTube 
• WordPress

You can also optimize images for each platform without leaving the software. Additionally, the platform integrates with Giphy, Pexels, and Canva, allowing you to find or create quality visuals effortlessly in-app. 

You can learn how we use this send tool in our Sendible review.

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Join trending conversations

Thousands of conversations happen on social media daily.

Don’t be afraid to talk, share your views, or ask questions. Social media is about humanizing your brand, building relationships, and engagement. So, show people that you are original, friendly, and social.

Social media hashtags are the best place to begin.

Find relevant trending hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tiktok and share your opinion. Do this daily to reach new people daily and improve your brand visibility. It’s one of the most straightforward ways to become a dental influencer, subject matter expert, and thought leader.

In addition to these, create your conversation to get people talking about your brand.

Create Twitter spaces, open Facebook groups, and upload new Tiktok sounds. 

However, our favorite strategy is to run a Twitter poll or host a question-and-answer session on the platform, plus Instagram. For instance, you could run a Q&A session called Ask a Dentist Anything. You might want to promote this to amplify the reach.

The good with this strategy is that it lets you assist those who need it, boost brand awareness, promote brand engagement, and create opportunities for more patient appointments.

Explore new audience terrains with social ads

You can get more from social media with the built-in advertising tools.

They help you reach and target a wider audience with more personalized messages, thus supercharging your dental social media marketing.

For instance, a study by OptinMonster found that brands that use social media outperform competitors that do not. Additionally, about 50% of Gen Z and 42% of millennials believe that social media is the most relevant advertising channel.

Another thing we love about social media advertising is that it lets you target people you can’t normally reach, regardless of how you scale your organic campaigns. It can also generate results in less than 24 hours, unlike other channels, providing you quick wins.

We have written comprehensively on Facebook ad targeting ideas. 

Use the insights to design a high-converting Facebook paid marketing campaign. It’ll also make sense to target similar audiences on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. It opens additional touchpoints for prospects to experience your brand, scaling your patient leads acquisitions.

And don’t forget to retarget website visitors on all these platforms to boost conversion rate.

Build loyalty with social contests

I don’t think there’s a better way to build social media engagement than with social contests.

It also helps you get your audience into your brand conversations, encourage user-generated content, and spread the word about your dental practice. You can run a contest that rewards people that follow you on social media, share your posts, or submit pictures with a specific hashtag.   

Here are other social media contest ideas for dentists:

• Sweepstakes 
• Refer a friend
• Write the best caption contest
• Comment to win contest
• Submit an essay contest
• Tag a friend 
• Top fans contest
• Use a filter challenge
• Tiktok video challenge
• Vote contest
• Dental challenges story contest

Promote your contests to reach a wider audience. 

We recommend Gleam for running social contests. Over 45,000 customers use the software, including leading brands like Hubspot, Beardbrand, and Sitepoint. 

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Track brand reputation with social listening

“I don’t care what people say about me.”

You may be right. But it’s a big deal when it comes to marketing a brand. So far you are not the only one providing your services, what customers say about you matters. The truth is prospects will move to the next competitor if what they hear about you doesn’t sit right with them.

And it’s therefore essential to monitor one’s online brand reputation. 

This is where social listening comes in. It’s about monitoring social media channels for a brand or competitor’s mentions in real time.  It provides you with a complete and thorough understanding of online conversations about your brand, products, industry, and competitors. 

Social listening helps you understand brand sentiment and spot negative feedback in real time, so you can control the narrative. Sendible also comes with this negative capability.

Leverage influencers

Use social media influencers if you can afford it.

This channel has impressive conversion numbers. Studies found that half of millennials trust product recommendations from influencers. Additionally, 33 percent of Generation Z have purchased a product based on an influencer’s recommendation in the last three months.

You can find influencers on Grin, Upfluence, and Impact.com. 

TikTok is another solid option. But this channel might work best for building brand awareness and improving brand engagement than generating leads.

How Dentists Can Track Social Media Campaigns 

Use these metrics to gauge your social media marketing efforts:

Share of voice

This metric measures how your brand visibility compares with that of your competitors. 

It’s expressed as a percentage of all the brand mentions in the industry or among tracked competitors. For instance, if you have ten brand mentions out of 100, then your SoV is ten percent. Tools like Hootsuite can save you from the stress of calculating this data manually.

Impression

Use this data to see the number of people who have seen your social media posts or ads.

It tells you how viral your brand has gone. You can also evaluate your brand reach and brand awareness campaign performance with this data. You’ll also need this metric to calculate your conversion rate. 

Audience growth

Track how your social media followers grow over time.

Use the historical data to uncover your audience growth peak periods. Then amplify whatever you did within that timeline to boost your growth rate. 

Return on ads spend

Use this metric to determine whether or not it’s still worthwhile to spend money on ads.

It compares how much you make from every $1 you spend on ads. Track this metric for each ad campaign to get a more accurate view of things. Revisit your audience target and ad copies if the number is below the industry average. Also, use more engaging visuals.

And don’t forget to pay attention to your landing page.

Web traffic

See how much traffic comes from social media.

Determine if the number is worth the efforts you put into your social media marketing. Find out what is wrong and improve on it. Also, look for more traffic growth opportunities.

Conversion rate

The metrics help you keep an eye on your goal completion.

To measure the conversion rate for each of your goals, you need to set up custom goal conversion tracking with tools like Google Analytics and Pikwi. This allows you to get data on their conversion rates. 

Once you have this data, analyze it and see which goals are performing well and which ones need improvement. Then make changes to your website or marketing campaigns to improve your conversion rates.

Here are some tips for improving your conversion rates:

• Make sure your website is easy to use and navigate.
• Use clear and concise language.
• Highlight the benefits of your products or services.
• Offer discounts or promotions.
• Make it easy for people to contact you.

Track your results and make changes as needed. 

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Dental Social Media Marketing Checklists

Use this checklist to run an effective dental social media marketing campaign.

Social Media Strategy Checklist

Use this checklist to plan your dental social media strategy:

• Set your social media marketing goals
• Define your KPIs
• Pick your social media platforms
• Create your buyer personas
• Create your social media calendar

Social Media Content Creation Checklist

Use this checklist to execute and streamline your content creation:

• Set up your accounts and brand the profiles 
• Get Twitter verification
• Apply for Facebook verification
• Verify your website on Pinterest
• Schedule posts with Sendible
• Promote popular posts 
• Post daily using trending hashtags
• Run Twitter polls
• Create Twitter spaces
• Host a Q/A session on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
• Run social media contests
• Retarget prospects and email lists with social ads
• Use Zapier to connect your email list and Facebook custom audience
• Set up social listening and brand mentions
• Contract social media influencers 

Social Media Analytics Checklist

Use this checklist to set up analytics tracking:

• Set up Google Analytics
• Track analytics with Sendible built-in tool
• Set up KPI monitoring with the tracking tools
• Periodically review results
• Spy on competitors’ winning strategies

Social Media for Dentists: What Next?

Social media marketing is the present and the future.

It has continued to grow over the years, staying true to its potential. Leveraging this channel can help you connect effortlessly with your prospects. Build meaningful relationships and scale your dental practice growth. You can begin with the strategies outlined in this resource.

However, we recommend combining social media marketing with dental SEO campaigns and content marketing to open additional touchpoints for prospects to experience your brand. Additionally, use our social proof marketing ideas to improve your dental conversion chances.

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