Five Steps for Facebook Success

Richard Gibbons, founder of Facebook advertising agency Boost My Customers, shares his five-step process to grow your clinic using Facebook advertising.

 

If you’re trying to use outdated methods to grow your clinic – you’re in big trouble. Social media is constantly changing, and doing what all the online “gurus” say isn’t going to cut it. You need to learn the new model for growing your clinic consistently and predictably, and you need to learn it quickly. 

 

You may have tried Facebook advertising in the past, either running it yourself or with another agency. I regularly hear clinic owners who are frustrated with not seeing the return that they expected when embarking upon their marketing journey. Bad leads. No one is picking up. No shows. The list goes on.

 

However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. After working closely with over 100 clinics, we’ve found a bulletproof five-step formula to ensure your ads don’t get swallowed up online. Plus, it doesn’t require you to be a “tech genius” or to discount your services hugely. Let’s dive in.

 

STEP 1: Decide on the treatment and offer

 

Before we go straight into creating our exciting new advertising campaign, we need to think about the fundamentals of how Facebook Ads work. With Facebook Adverts, we only have 1.7 seconds to capture our potential clients’ attention. I regularly see adverts online which have no clear offer, and it’s hard to understand what the clinic is offering. We want the treatment and offer to be crystal clear.

 

When starting out, it’s always best to focus on one treatment at a time, as it allows you to dive deeper into perfecting your campaign. If you try and advertise all of the treatments you offer in one advert, it’ll confuse the potential client, and they’ll just scroll past. Be specific and clear on the treatment you want to promote and the transformation it brings. After we start generating bookings, we can then branch out into other treatments.

 

If you can think of a treatment that matches these, you’ve got a winner. Of course, many variables exist, and we can’t advertise POMs (prescription-only medicines) online. This is just a guide.

 

Once you’ve decided what treatment you’d like to promote, it’s now time to choose what offer we’ll put on the advert. I know some clinic owners reading this will immediately be put off by the word “offer” as they’ll not want to cheapen their brand. However, the Cambridge Dictionary defines the word offer as “to ask someone if they would like to have something or if they would like you to do something:”. We don’t have to offer “crazy discounts’, but just have a clear path for clients to follow.

 

When crafting your adverts offer, the best way to do this is to ‘sell the sizzle, not the steak’. We need to sell the transformation and not the ins and outs of the treatment process. Of course, we want to educate the potential clients, but first, we want to hook them in so that they book an appointment with you.

 

 

The idea here is to be creative and just test multiple offers. The goal is to get them into the clinic so we can provide value and help them reach their skin/body goals. 

 

STEP 2: Who do you want to target?

Now that we know the treatment and offer we want to promote, it’s time to look at WHO we want to attract into the clinic. 

 

With Facebook Advertising, we can get extremely specific in who we want to target. Gone are the days when we’d wish our dream clients would stumble across our clinic. With Facebook, we can dial in exactly who we want to see in our adverts. 

 

 

This will vary depending on your demographic and who you want to attract, but the idea here is to really be specific and visualize your dream clients’ traits.

 

This sounds so ridiculously simple, but nine out of 10 people make this basic mistake. You don’t print and distribute flyers in areas where your services are not needed, so why would you make this mistake online?

 

You can also target people who have visited your website, people on your CRM database and people who live in certain postcode areas. 

 

You can be the best practitioner and have the best devices out there, but if no one knows about it, then you can’t help anyone. This is where our advert comes into play.

 

The biggest mistake I see clinic owners make when creating their adverts is trying to push the ‘device’ rather than the transformation that the device offers. People aren’t paying for your ‘device’ or your ‘time’, they’re paying you to help them solve a problem they don’t know how to solve on their own.

 

In the advert, talk about the problem you can solve for your dream clients and position yourself as the ‘industry experts’ in the area. We don’t want people to visit us because of the price; we want them to come in because they trust us and know we can help them reach their goals.

 

 

In the advert, you’ll also want to have ‘real’ images/videos of the treatment in action. This works much better than stock images on Facebook, as people online will want to see your team, clinic and real-life clients being treated. Please ensure that you follow Facebook’s Guidelines on what images/wording you can use on the adverts to make sure your adverts are not banned.

 

STEP 4: Qualifying your enquiries

It’s now time to qualify the potential clients who are viewing our advert. The best way to do this is to set up a dedicated Landing Page for the campaign. Landing Pages are websites (usually one-pagers) that are specifically designed with one goal in mind: converting viewers into paying clients. 

 

The whole goal of running our campaign is to generate sales, but the vast majority of clinic owners just send traffic to their website homepage with no clear end goal. Although they may have spent lots of money making their site look great, this isn’t the best strategy for Facebook adverts.

 

Your landing page should build trust, position your clinic as the solution to their problem and have a clear Call To Action. The best landing pages are the most simple ones, so there is no need to go overboard.

 

A big mistake clinic owners make is just collecting basic information on their landing pages, such as name, email and number. Although this is the information we need, the best landing pages also dive deeper and collect more information. 

 

 

You can be creative here and experiment with different qualifying questions. We just want to ensure we weed out any time-wasters before they get to us.

 

STEP 5: Converting enquiries into package sales

Generating new enquiries is an amazing feeling, but if they’re not converting into paying clients, it can be very frustrating. Before you launch any paid advertising, you need to ensure that you have your follow-up strategy in place. If you don’t, you’ll lose out on new clients every day. 

 

The most effective way we’ve seen work for our clinics is to call all enquiries within five minutes of them coming through (between working hours). Even though this sounds quite intense, calling within five minutes is 21 times more effective than calling after 30 minutes. The longer it takes you to phone up the enquiries, the less chance there is to convert them. We’ve tested this on countless clinics, and the ones with the highest conversions are the clinics that call the enquiries ASAP.

 

Remember that if you’ve qualified these enquiries as we discussed above, you’ll already know that they’re local, have disposable income and are a good fit for the treatment you’re advertising. You have the solution to their problem, and they’re waiting to hear back from you.

 

Delegate a member of your team to follow up with all enquiries, give them a sales script and ensure that they understand the end goal. Remember that these enquiries are in a different buying state compared to warm referrals (which isn’t a bad thing). You will just need to warm them up on the phone a bit more to build trust and answer any questions, but it’s all worth it to gain a new paying client.

 

Facebook marketing can be tricky to master and confusing. However, if you follow the five steps in this article, you’ll be on your way to filling up your bookings in no time.