7 Ways Docs Can Attract Patients on Facebook

Any good healthcare professional understands that pain precedes healing. So we’ll start with a small incision:

If you’re like most healthcare businesses, you’re wasting tons of money on marketing — and your strategy needs to go to rehab.

How many times did you use Google to search for information and local businesses this week?

Okay … now how many times did you go flipping through the pages in your Yellow Pages phonebook, listen to the radio, or read your direct mail for the same information?

Hand me sutures.

Today you must match the way you market your business with the way people look for healthcare services. Multiple studies now confirm that patients report using the Internet first (85% of the time) when they need a healthcare service, and printed Yellow Pages only about 25% of the time.

In our online marketing work for clients, my healthcare marketing agency has found that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and targeted Facebook marketing have been enormously successful in attracting new local patients.

The hardest part of my job is simply convincing physicians to drop the tactics that don’t work anymore. My dad (a podiatrist in Virginia) was my very first client, and he’s a tough sell!

Another physician, Brian Mowll, MD, hired my agency to handle his SEO and social media efforts in February 2014. The results: Page likes increased from 5,222 to 10,117 from February 14th to May 9th. Monthly website visits increased from 515 to 1,500 per month. Just in the last 90 days, we’ve generated 1,032 new patient leads for his business.

These results came largely because we follow the following 7 Facebook advertising steps.

Digital marketing healing

If you’re one of the few, the proud, the healthcare professionals who “get” social media and understand its power, you know Facebook advertising can be very profitable. But it can also be very complex.

So here are 7 simplified steps to Facebook Ad Success:

1. Get hyper-specific with your ad targeting

Facebook’s own guidelines tout the incredible accuracy your ads can achieve by using their targeting options: “Find the right customers with better targeting. Target by demographic, age, income gender, social interests, likes, city, state, zip, education level, profession, relationship status.”

Facebook offers an incredible amount of user-data to advertisers. Put this enormous gold mine of data to use. And don’t waste money on eyeballs that don’t need your services or can’t afford them. Know your ideal patient inside and out, their socioeconomic status, who sets appointments for the family, their interests, and then show your ads only to them. It’s better to have a couple thousand very targeted people than tens of thousands of disinterested folks.

2. Establish specific goals before starting

Before you create a Facebook Ad, choose from several advertising goals and Facebook will display the actions you care about more prominently in your campaign summary page. Do you want more page likes, website visits, or new patient appointments?

A leading diabetes educator hired my agency to get more local patients to register for his workshop in Philadelphia. We created one targeted Facebook ad two weeks before the event, and received way more registrations — 136 — than he could fit in the room.

But it only worked because we really knew his audience (step 1), and structured our goals to get event signups (step 2), and not page likes or something irrelevant to his business goals. Have your end-goal in mind, and work from that foundation. Anything else will be a waste of time and money.

3. Include eye-catching images (but with only 20% text)

Posts and Facebook ads with images get much higher engagement than those without, as they help your ad or post stand out from a flooded news feed. However, Facebook only allows photos that include less than 20% text on the image, so make sure you have 80% image and only 20% text on the image — like so.

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so find one that encapsulates your desired message, grabs attention quickly, and encourages action. For our clients, we find that uploading an image that is 1200 x 627 pixels for your ads works best for formatting.

4. Get right to the point

Facebook Ads that generate the highest click through rate at the lowest cost include ad text that cuts through the noise and gets to the point. It doesn’t leave the audience guessing at the meaning and it doesn’t beat around the bush.

Text in your advertisement must be right on target and straight to the point. If you want them to Like your page, simply ask. If you want them to make an appointment, get right to it.

Case Study: “Three clinically proven steps to lower blood pressure – diet, exercise, arginine.” This was the copy used in an advertisement that performed at $0.07 per click and had a 9.73% click through rate — substantially higher than Facebook’s 1.8% desktop news feed average.

5. Pay attention to the potential audience meter.

As you put targeting conditions in place and zero in on your specific audience, Facebook will generate an estimated number of people you’ll reach with the ad. This is only an approximate number, but it can assist you in making sure you’re not targeting too many people (or too few). Ads perform best when they’re targeted to at least a few thousand people, so consider removing some restrictions if your audience is dropping below this. This nifty AdStage graphic captures this idea well.

6. Use low-friction conversion pages

If you are driving traffic to your website appointments, downloads, or any other actions, you need to make sure the page you’re sending them to is conversion-friendly. What this means is: make it as easy as possible for them to take the desired action.

If you want them to make an appointment, put an appointment form front-and-center. If you want them to call in, make sure your phone number is on the page, and clickable.

This landing page is for our client’s allograft product, TheraSkin. We want visitors to download the product guide, so we can communicate with them by email. To facilitate this goal, we made an easy-to-use form to collect information in exchange for the product guide.

7. Analyze and adjust

HubSpot, the leading provider of online marketing software, says: “As with every element of Inbound Marketing, a key element to optimizing our marketing efforts is constant, ongoing analysis.”

What makes the Facebook advertising platform so powerful is that everything you invest in is easily analyzed and measured. You know how many people are clicking on your ad, taking action on your post, and viewing the ad.

If you’re getting a good number of clicks, but no actions on the following page, it might mean you are targeting the wrong people who aren’t interested in your offer. If your ad is successful, you can consider putting more money into the daily budget to keep driving people towards your desired goal for them.

Using the Facebook advertising platform is a skill that takes time to learn. You will learn the most about what works by just jumping in and doing some test posts. If you have an office manager that’s savvy with social media, you can print this article to help them get started on Facebook ads.

On the other hand, some healthcare businesses decide to outsource these digital efforts to agencies like mine, which specialize in digital marketing. Whatever method you use, it helps to do a lot of testing and analytics to determine what works best for your target market.

Ready for more? Check out this free guide: Healthcare Business Facebook Advertising 101

Adam McConnell is the Founder and CEO of Pulse Digital Marketing, a digital agency helping healthcare and medical businesses get found online with web design, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and content marketing. Clients include leading biotech and medical device companies, hospitals, and healthcare professionals in private practice.

7 Ways Docs Can Attract Patients on Facebook