How To Attract Patients to your Practice with Facebook Ads
Posted: December 15, 2021 - By Health Dev
Patient retention is an important factor in running your medical practice. But before you can retain patients, you need to focus on acquiring new patients. Patient acquisition involves giving new patients enough information about your practice and encouraging them to contact or visit your healthcare facility.
This process can be challenging, as you need to compel people to choose your medical practice for their healthcare needs. Consistent marketing is essential for improving your brand awareness and continuing to bring in new patients. So, you may have to continuously refine your methods to promote the best aspects of your medical practice.
In the digital age, the social media platform Facebook is a great way to double down on your marketing efforts. Medical practice Facebook marketing can be incredibly useful to find potential patients who might be interested in your offerings.
As of 2021, about 2.89 billion active users access Facebook. In the U.S., seven in ten, or 69% of adults, visit Facebook daily. And 49% of those individuals access it more than once a day. With this massive reach, you can be sure that your existing and potential patients use Facebook.
You can easily tap into the vast number of people who see Facebook ads every day. However, the reach is just a piece of the puzzle. Potential patients need to actually contact you and use your services. For this, Facebook allows you to create ads based on specific marketing goals. You can customize your Facebook ads and get more patients to view them organically.
Facebook also offers analytics or metrics to track your ad’s performance and improve future advertising campaigns. You can also specifically target potential patients to boost your marketing efforts. Facebook is unparalleled when it comes to targeting audiences. Through the available user data, the platform helps you deliver the right message to patients who need your medical services.
Facebook ads are a quick, economic, and powerful tool to target and acquire new patients. To expand your reach, here are some quick tips for attracting patients to your medical practice using Facebook ads.
Understand Who Your Audience Is
Before you start, you must identify your potential patient and understand your audience. The best way to do this is by creating a patient “persona” – who is your typical patient?
Think of a patient persona as a guide to understanding your typical patient. Creating a patient persona will help you identify the features of your target audience. You can then narrow down the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your potential patients.
You can use your email list to gather this information and then target a broader audience through Facebook ads. This can help you find similar traits among your potential patients and create a stronger patient persona. Facebook offers all of the required tools to identify and expand your target audience based on the persona.
You can also use Facebook Audience Insights to understand better your audience for your ad campaigns. Here are some important aspects for developing a patient persona for successful Facebook ad campaigns:
- Personal information. This is the background information users provide on their Facebook page. It can include their location, preferences, marital status, age, gender, and so on.
- What patients are seeking from your medical practice. This includes the problems that your potential patients may be facing. You can list the medical conditions and questions that patients generally come to you for.
- The reason why patients would require your services. This includes all of the solutions you can provide to resolve your patients’ problems. You can list all of the services or treatments you offer.
- The best strategy to attract patients. This includes the analysis of user behavior and interests, or what appeals to your patients. You can check whether your patients click on ads with images, videos, or certain keywords.
Do your patients have something in common with each other? Once you have a general idea of your patient persona, you can start getting into the specifics. You can do this by listing the common traits shared by your potential patients. This can include their age range, location, gender, marital status, or the industry they work in. You can further narrow things down to whether your potential patients are a part of the parent-teacher association of a local school or whether they work in a particular big military town. Such details can help you target niche audiences and improve your reach.
Use geotargeting. Facebook allows you to reach potential patients in a geographic location right down to a specific address. Using Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can enter the address or location and target potential patients in that area.
Geotargeting also allows you to use geofencing. A geofence means that your ads will be shown to potential patients only within a one-mile radius of the chosen area. It also helps you further refine your targeting based on factors such as interests and behavior.
Once you have a target audience, you can move on to creating your Facebook ad campaign.
Create Evergreen Facebook Ads
Evergreen Facebook ad campaigns are ones that you can use throughout the year and reuse in the future. Your ad must contain information that holds value and remains fresh over time. It should have information that doesn’t have an expiry date, like an ad to promote your medical practice to targeted patients all year round. It can also be a registration-based ad to improve audience engagement.
Here are some tips to improve your ads:
- Cycle ads in and out depending on their performance: For each Facebook ad you run, you can view performance insights on Facebook’s Ads Manager. It helps you find out the number of people who see and click on your ad. With this information, you can track the ad’s performance and demographics. You can also check your ad’s reach and impressions, which is the number of times your ad gets displayed on a screen.
- Use emojis in the text description: Facebook ads generally perform better when you add emojis to the headline. Emojis must not be used to replace words but rather to draw your potential patients’ attention. They’re meant to enhance your message by adding or highlighting an emotion. With emojis, you can tell your story in a better way.
A/B Test Your Ads
A/B testing, or split testing, is a strategy to find out what parts of your ad perform well with your target audience. It allows you to experiment with aspects such as your ad headline, text, images, videos, or call-to-action (CTA) phrases.
You can try and test a combination of these aspects and see what works best. You can also experiment with various demographics and ad placements to find your potential patients and what appeals to them. Sometimes, even slight changes in an ad can make it perform better. So, make sure you A/B test your ads.
Leverage word-of-mouth referrals when users “tag” your practice. Word-of-mouth referrals are effective for advertising your practice because they show that your existing patients are happy with you. This boosts your potential patients’ confidence and encourages them to seek your services.
You can leverage word-of-mouth referrals when existing patients “tag” your practice on a Facebook post. By tagging you, your patients essentially share their experience and recommend your medical practice to others.
Setting up a referral program can also encourage patients to share your practice with others. You can offer your patients incentives such as a free consultation to do so. You can even employ Facebook ads to promote your referral program.
Stay consistent. To ensure that your ad campaigns run successfully, you must be consistent with your marketing efforts. If you post ads regularly, the Facebook algorithm gains more information on your practice. The algorithm will then recommend your ads to more people, reaching a greater pool of potential patients for better results.
Offer a Promotion
If you want more potential patients to click on your ads, you need to give them a reason to do so. Offer them promotions with an appropriate CTA and an incentive.
Everyone likes incentives, and they are a great way to grab your audience’s attention. Here are some incentives you can offer to promote your medical practice:
- Free consultation or check-up
- Free e-book
- Free newsletter
- Free giveaways like pens, memo pads, or first-aid kits at the first visit
- Loyalty program membership for potential and existing patients
Leverage a landing page to capture information. When audiences click on your promotional ads, direct them to a landing page instead of your website. This offers users a quick solution for their problems. Landing pages help you drive potential patients to the exact information they are searching for. Your patients can directly find an answer to their query, contact you, or avail themselves of an offer instead of going through your entire website.
Landing pages can be beneficial for your medical practice. They help you target audiences who need specific services from you. They are a great tool to deliver important information straightforwardly. That’s why a good landing page must be simple to understand, with a clear CTA and your contact information.
The best part is that you can create a separate landing page for each ad campaign, which allows you to efficiently track the performance of each campaign.
Get Professional Help
Facebook ads are an effective tool to reach new audiences and target potential patients. These quick tips can help you run robust Facebook ad campaigns to promote your medical practice to acquire more patients. However, consistency is the key when it comes to medical practice Facebook marketing.
If you find this challenging, you can seek professional help to boost your medical practice’s online visibility. WebMD PracticePro offers an all-in-one practice growth solution that can help more patients discover your medical practice online. It will guide you through each step of the patient journey from acquiring patients and managing appointments to retaining and engaging with them.
Request a demo with WebMD PracticePro to get started today.
