We recently worked with Meltham Dental Care, a locally based dental practice from Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire who are very active on social media and use both Facebook & Twitter to engage with the local community.
We discussed them trying out a Facebook advertisement to see if it would help to generate enquiries and gain exposure.
Janet asked Joanne Holroyd, Practice Manager for her thoughts after the Facebook advert had run its course. Here’s what Joanne had to say:-
What channels have you used in the past to promote your products / services?
We have not done very much promotion of services in the past – we’ve attended networking groups such as BNI & Ladies 4 Networking. We’ve had an A board & banners outside the practice, leaflets in-house, used Google+ and Google Ad-words
Have you found traditional ways of marketing to be useful & cost effective?
See above – Google+ and Ad- words have not been very successful. Word of mouth is our biggest referral
How did you feel about using Facebook’s paid for ads to promote your business?
I was keen to try it out as I had seen another local business’s advert and they had quite a few Facebook ‘claims’ and for the small price of the Facebook advert (less than £50 for the insertion) we thought it was worth a try
Which option did you use (was it an offer which would appear in people’s news feed & did you select it to go to people who liked your page & people who haven’t liked your page)?
It was a “claim this offer” advert. We chose the demographics of the people we wanted it to go to – Age range, Male/Female and our local area
Did the Facebook Ad meet your expectations?
This advert exceeded expectation but we were promoting something people want
How many people have taken up the Facebook ‘offer’ (not just clicked to claim but actually rung up & booked an appointment)?
From the date the advertisement was run, to the 31st March 2014 (31st March was the closing date. The final date we would be letting patients book appointments) 177 people made new patient appointments, these are definitely from the Facebook Advert. We had 111 patients appointments that were unaccounted for as to why they came to us. Due to the number of phone calls we took I think the majority of those will be from Facebook.
How much has it cost you in total & what timescale did you set up/run the campaign for?
It cost £37 for the Facebook Ad plus the consultative time from Social Progress Ltd and we ran the advert for one month
Would you use Facebook Ads in the future? If so, what would you promote?
I have run another for braces since. The cost £37 only lasted 5 days due to the number of people it went to (we widened the area). It says 134 claimed the offer but we have only had about 5 people make appointments for the assessment at the time or writing this
If so would you do anything different?
I think we will try a few more to get more of an idea as to what works the best
Joanne Holroyd
Practice Manager