Facebook Ad Workflow
Facebook Ad Workflow
Facebook Ads can be confusing and frustrating, but the good news is it is getting easier to manage Ads Manager. They have recently updated it even further and creating a FB Ad is easier than ever before. I believe if you put an hour into it, you will know how to run a Facebook Ad.
With that said, most chiropractors still struggle mightily to run effective Facebook Ads, and they typically struggle with the strategy behind paid ads. That leads to poor results, wasted money, and ceasing all Facebook Ads.
In this Facebook Ad Workflow, I want to instruct you on campaign strategies to start targeting the right people and having the best results for your practice.
We all want to see a direct ROI on our ad spend, but sometimes it can be difficult to quantify it directly. As I wrote in my book Doing It Right: Modern Chiropractic Marketing, your ROI isn’t always going to be measured directly. Here is an excerpt from the book discussing why you should still be spending some money on Ads.
Marketing Return on Investment
During my 2018 interview with Sam Carlson of 25th West for our Marketing & Business Virtual Summit, he discussed a phenomenon called “Lift.” Lift is the growth your clinic gets from consistent and effective marketing that you can’t directly measure.
Sam discusses a chiropractic client of his that was seeing a certain number of new patients each month during their marketing campaigns implemented by his company. After a while, the chiropractor decided to discontinue his marketing services for a couple of reasons, one being difficulty directly measuring the ROI. However, once the marketing was turned off, the clinic saw a considerable decline in new patients each month and decided to bring Sam back on. They had lost that marketing lift that their content marketing and the campaign was producing.
Sam calculates Lift by taking the growth of your clinic over the last 3 years and then what it looks like after 6 months of consistent and effective marketing. That is Lift. That is why it is imperative to know your clinic’s number of new patients, office visits, revenue, profit, office visit average (what is the average office visit revenue), new patient value (how much is a new patient worth), etc.
Example of Office Visit Average: Each office visit, on average, is worth $60.
Example of New Patient Value: Each new patient on average is worth $1,000.
Knowing these numbers will not only help you gauge Lift but will also help you understand how much you can spend on marketing to attract new patients and/or office visits.
Let’s now agree that we should be running Facebook Ads if you are creating valuable and consistent content that has proper messaging. We also discuss that in the book. Now it is time to develop your strategy. Here is my step by step approach.
Step 1: Pick your target audience or your topic
If you pick your target audience, then select your topic or condition next.
If you pick your topic first, then select which target audience is it for. It could be a niche audience or a general audience.
For example, if your content is about headaches, it could be a general audience. If your topic is about elbow pain and golfers, it would be a niche audience of golfers.
You could have a general topic such as headaches but have a niche audience of desk workers, for example.
I need you to be very clear on the topic, the audience, and what you are trying to solve for that audience.
If you decide to start with the audience you want to target, then I want you to pick a topic that is pertinent to them. If you started with golfers as your audience you wanted to develop content for, what conditions do they suffer from? Back pain, shoulder pain, elbow pain, hip pain, etc. That is how I came to the audience and the topic of elbow pain in golfers above.
Step 2: What is your content type? Blog or Video?
If it is a blog, your campaign objective will be for Traffic.
If it is a video, your campaign objective will be for video views.
Step 3: What phase of the patient life cycle are you targeting? New Patients, Patient Experience, or Inactive Patients?
If you want to target new patients, and it is a niche topic, you need to utilize a specific targeted audience on Facebook. Examples: Runners, Golfers, Fitness Enthusiast, CrossFit, Tennis. Facebook Audiences allows you to get really niched. Here is a resource for creating audiences.
If it is a general topic with a broad audience, and you are targeting new patients, you want to use a 2% lookalike audience of your email list. Here you can find more information on Lookalike Audiences.
Retargeting current and past patients: If you want to get content in front of your current and previous patient base, my favorite strategy is to target your email list via a Facebook Audience. Yes, you can upload your email list into a FB Audience, and anyone on your email list that has that email address affiliated with their FB Account will go into a custom audience. When you run ads towards this email list audience, only people who have been in your practice will see your ads. This is a great strategy to keep top of mind awareness with your patient base.
How do you determine which strategies to use?
If your budget is limited to around $500 or so, that is okay. In that case, I would determine what your practice needs the most based on your practice analytics. Do you need more new patients? Are you having issues with patient reactivation or patient adherence? Based on that answer, you will know if you need to do a new patient strategy or a retargeting strategy.
If you have more of a budget, and you have the content creation capabilities, you can run multiple campaigns in the same month. You could run a niche topic ad, and new patient ad to a 1-2% lookalike audience, and a retargeting strategy to your email list concurrently. That is what we do in our practice.
I hope this provides you with the baseline strategy to start running Facebook Ads effectively. Please let me know if you have any questions inside the closed FB Group.