Why these 3 paid social mistakes are harming your dental practice (and how you can avoid them)
Author: Kathryn Myers
Senior Digital Marketing Executive
Uncover the top 3 paid social mistakes dental practices make and how to fix them to drive more bookings.
The competition for online visibility is more intense than ever with even more dental practices facing the challenge of how to stand out in today’s crowded landscape, and lots are looking at paid media.
Paid social has quickly become a powerful tool for dentists to reach potential patients, but it’s easy to waste budget if you forget to approach your campaigns strategically.
→Fact check: Did you know, Meta now owns 4 of the biggest social media platforms -Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram-, with Facebook recently reporting around 4 billion active users each month? With such a wide customer base, paid social provides a unique opportunity to connect with patients who may not have discovered your practice before.
Whether running ads on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, here are 3 common paid media pitfalls – and how we can learn to avoid them.
1. Tracking the wrong results
Data is key to making informed decisions about how to steer campaigns in the right direction.
The mistake
If your campaigns are not tracking the results you’re ultimately looking for: leads, phone calls or profile visits, you may end up spending more for a different outcome.
Although measuring results like impressions or views can be useful indicators of how far your ads are reaching, a thousand likes does not correlate to consultation bookings or real leads.
How to avoid it
Set up tracking that is accurate and works.
Include phone call tracking, lead form submissions and booking conversions.
2. Targeting an overly generalised audience
The statistics earlier clearly demonstrate social media’s incredible reach, so it’s easy to be tempted to try reaching everyone. Just remember, it’s all about quality.
The mistake:
Ignoring who your ideal customer is and how they behave on social media can lead to broad targeting and disconnected messaging that reduces the effectiveness of your paid social campaigns.
Targeting everyone within 30 miles of your practice can easily waste your ad spend. If 70% of your target audience are women aged 45-55 based in Manchester who are interested in cosmetic dentistry, that’s who your messaging and ad creatives should resonate with the most.
How to avoid it:
Use location-based targeting with age or interest filters.
Tailoring the audience targeting, messaging and creatives for your campaigns can help drive engagement and conversions from those patients you want to reach the most, and stop you from spending on those who are most likely to scroll past.
3. Using the same untested, unoptimised ad creative for too long
Paid social does not work with a one-size-fits-all approach. What performs well on one platform may have the opposite effect on another.
That’s why it’s important to test, learn and diversify the ads in your campaign to drive the most effective results.
The mistake:
If you’ve been using the same creatives for weeks on end, you’ve probably noticed your spend increasing alongside a downward trend in results. Your patients will notice repeated content and eventually become desensitised to it, often lowering engagement and driving up the cost of that ad.
Repurposing videos or ads without making any adjustments might also limit your ad. Your ad will need different versions based on where they’re shown. Think about how posts look on your Instagram feed versus on Stories. Does the auto-play always work with sound, or will you need subtitles? Where does the button usually sit on Stories compared to a Reel?
How to avoid it:
Regularly rotate and refresh your ad creatives, testing new and different concepts each time to learn more about what your patients actually relate and respond to. Try a mix of patient reviews, before and after images, or videos of your team.
Don’t forget to capture horizontal and vertical versions of content, and add subtitles to videos, so you can optimise for where your ad is being shown too.
Final tip on how to avoid these common paid social mistakes:
Paid social is a great opportunity for you to get a competitive edge – but it needs to be done with care. Avoiding these simple, yet common, mistakes can help save your budget and help your campaigns perform more effectively to bring real people through your practices.
Most importantly, what works now will likely change in the near future. Advertising platforms like Meta are constantly evolving and we need to learn to adapt with them to stay ahead of the curve.
If you need help with your next paid social campaign, take a look at our Paid Media service. We’re here to help elevate your practice with expert paid media strategies for maximum impact.
