Promoting your dental clinic in the local area with Facebook’s advanced location targeting

Facebook Location Targeting
17 December 2019 | | Blog, Social Media

Your dental clinic is based in a certain location. You want to make sure people in and around that location know about your clinic. So how do you reach out to them effectively and in a way that doesn’t cost a fortune?

Well, one very simple way to do so is via Facebook advertising.

Facebook’s Advanced Location Targeting

When you advertise on Facebook, you are privy to a whole host of targeting options that allow you to whittle down and find your ideal customer. As the options provided are extensive, we will home in on just one. The one that helps you find people in your area, which is Facebook’s advanced location targeting.

Through this, you can drill down and find people based on more creative geographical aspects than you may realise. As a dentist, promoting your local business to the right people in your area is exactly what you need to be doing. Let’s walk through the options available to you.

Audience Locations

The first filter you arrive to will be the Location dropdown arrow, which provides you with the below options:

Facebook Audience Loctaions

Everyone in this location: People whose home or most recent location is in the selected area

People who live in this location: People whose home is within the selected area

People recently in this location: People whose most recent location is within the selected area

People travelling in this location: People whose most recent location is within the selected area but whose home is more than 125mi/200 km away

Depending on the type of ad you plan to promote, it would be a safe bet to say dentists would want to focus on people living in their location. You are trying to encourage repeat business in your practice after all, so aiming for people who could visit you time and again would be a smart move. Though that isn’t to say that there aren’t opportunities to be had by reaching out to those passing through the area.

Map Search – to Include or Exclude?

Not only can you add in a whole plethora of locations, but you are also able to exclude those you don’t wish to approach. This would be handy for dentists who own more than one clinic in a wider area. Should each clinic be reaching out to their local audience with a specific message, the sister clinics can refrain from crossing over into other territories.

Facebook Include or Exclude Locations

To switch from the default to exclude locations, simply click the ‘Include’ dropdown and select ‘Exclude’ instead.

Map Search – Type to Add Locations

Next to the Include/Exclude dropdown, is the option to type in your locations. Here you can refine by country, county, postcode, region, city or town, a specific address, a designated market area (areas that receive the same television, radio and broadcast channels – USA only) or a continent.

Facebook Typing Locations in to Map Search

Naturally, the more localised your business is, the closer to home you want to filter down. However, it is clear the benefits that are here for those companies spanning across many locations. Such as a dental clinic chain who want to promote their clinics to a national audience, for instance.

Radius and Pin Drop

If you are wanting to drill down to a very localised audience, or perhaps reach a wider area outside of your chosen locations, you can adjust the radius to your liking (within reason). Generally, the rule with this is the wider your search, the less flexibility you have with this adjustment.

For instance, if you search for an address or drop a pin on a particular spot, you can adjust from 1-50 miles. If you search for a city, you can do so between 10-50 miles, whereas county’s, postcodes and countries are fixed locations with no flexibility.

Facebook Radius and Pin Drop

As a dentist, the ability to refine your targeting to within a mile of your clinic’s physical location is quite something. Think of the potential to attract walk-in customers if you had a giveaway when new patients come in to register. Or you could get prospect patients over the line by promoting your loyal customers who sing your praises in testimonials, even better if these are people who are well known and influential in your area!

To adjust the radius, either go the drop-down that appears next to your chosen location title or use the drop pin option located on the bottom right of the map.

Add Locations in Bulk

If your company has a large reach, for example, new emerging teledentistry companies, you may want to target numerous specific locations. You can now add these in bulk to save time. Facebook gives you the option to choose from countries, regions or states, designated marketing areas, cities, postal codes or addresses. If you plan on advertising to many locations in an ad set, you may want to compile a list of these that you copy and paste to save yourself the hassle of manual entry.

For this option simply choose to add locations in bulk, select the location type from the dropdown, paste in the text and check to see if your locations have matched.

Facebook Add Locations in Bulk

Please note that Facebook requires you to format the text of the locations accurately, so pay attention to how they appear. This will help you compile your lists accurately. Once you are happy the list is ready to go, click to add the matched locations and voila!

Location Targeting is Just The Beginning

Hopefully, that gave you an idea of how you can use Facebook’s advanced location targeting to your benefit when promoting your dental clinic. As dentistry is a generally a localised service, the ability to refine your ad audience in this manner really is incredible. These targeting options should be considered early on in the advertising process, as they may well change the direction your ad creative ends up going.

Not to mention that location targeting is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the entire range of targeting offered on the social platform. Though, we’ll save that for another blog post.

For more helpful tips on how to market your dental practice effectively online, read more of our blogs here.

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