Facebook Ads Masterclass
If you look through your Facebook newsfeed, you will notice sponsored posts that are very targeted to you and what you’ve been searching for on the internet. This targeting is one of the benefits of Facebook ads, another benefit is just how cost effective it is to advertise your healthcare practice using Facebook ads over traditional advertising methods.
With more than 15 million Australians on Facebook as of October of 2017 and each user spending an average of 10 hours a week on Facebook, Facebook offers a unique opportunity for healthcare professionals to reach people in their local area. Trouble is, many healthcare professionals are unfamiliar with how to run Facebook ads and are fearful of what they can and cannot advertise due to industry rules and regulations.
To help, we’ve put together this article to step you through the process of how to set up a Facebook ad and what to be mindful of as you launch your Facebook ad.
Please note, this article covers the basics of Facebook ads. For some of the more advanced features, we recommend engaging a Facebook ads expert like us here at Splice Marketing, and an agency familiar with your industry.
Facebook Ads: How-To Guide for Healthcare Professionals
Start with a Strategy
Before you jump right into creating your ads, you need to start with a game plan, your Facebook ads strategy. You want to determine:
- What is your goal?
- What is the message?
- What is the content type you will use to convey your message?
- How will you promote your message?
To take the guesswork out of the equation and as many healthcare practitioners just want to get their business in front of their local community, we suggest the following:
- What is your goal? A brand awareness campaign.
- What is the message? We are [Insert Name Here] of [Insert Business Name] and this is what we do.
- What is the content type you will use to convey your message? Put together a 1 min video. A video is the most engaging and effective way to communicate a message online.
- How will you promote your message? Facebook Ads.
Understand the Facebook Ads Structure
There are three parts to a Facebook Ad:
- Campaign – where you set your ad objective
- Ad Set – where you select your audience, budget, ad placement
- Ad – this is where you load your video and some copy to support your video
Step 1: Creating Your Campaign
An ad objective is what action you want someone to take once they see your ad. Facebook gives you 10 ad objectives to choose from. For the purpose of your campaign, you want to select the ad objective, ‘brand awareness‘ as you are trying to reach more people in your local area.
Step 2: Creating Your Ad Set
Know Your Audience
If you want a successful ad, you need to know who you are talking to.
Knowing who you are talking too will help you focus the content of your video and your ad. Your video could offer some stretches for the office worker who sits behind a desk all day, or perhaps an interview of you answering some frequently asked questions.
Ad Placement
Facebook offers you a few placement options to display your ad which include:
- Mobile newsfeed
- Desktop newsfeed
- Right Column (Desktop)
- Audience Network (shown in third party apps)
For the purposes of your brand awareness campaign, Splice Marketing recommend you select mobile and desktop newsfeed as these are cost-effective and have generally, a higher click rate than right-hand column ads and audience networks ads.
Budget and Schedule
It’s important to note that Facebook ads will cost you every time someone sees (known an impression) or clicks (known as conversion) your ad.
With this in mind, Facebook gives you two budget options for your ads:
- Daily Budget – what you are willing to pay each day e.g. $20 a day.
- Lifetime Budget – what you are willing to pay over a particular period e.g. $400 over 4 weeks.
It’s up to you what you’re willing to pay, however, $20 a day is a good start so you can get your ad in front of more people within your local area.
Also put this into context, $20 a day on Facebook advertising is more cost-effective than any traditional advertising and, you can measure the results easily.
Compliance Time…. AHPRA and Facebook Advertising
Before you go any further with your ads, it’s important to have a quick read of the AHPRA guidelines and their social media policy so you know have an understanding of what is and isn’t allowed.
Here are a few quick statements within AHPRA that you should note:
- Don’t use testimonials or positive statements
- Don’t promote any misleading information such as “This treatment will CURE this”
- Be mindful and respectful of patient privacy
Not only do health professionals have to be mindful of AHPRA, Facebook also has some policies that healthcare professionals must abide by. These include:
- Personal Attributes – “Adverts must not contain content that asserts or implies personal attributes”
- Personal Health – “Adverts must not contain before-and-after images or images that imply unexpected results”
Read more information on Facebook’s ad policies.
Step 3: Your Ad and Ad Content
Facebook ads are structured in the following format:
- Branding
- Text – you want to keep this to 90 characters
- Creative – your video or image
- Headline – keep this to 25 characters
- Call to actions
Here is an example below of a Facebook Ad we did for one of our physiotherapist clients.
Again, when writing your content for your ad, just be mindful of AHPRA and Facebook ad policies.
Quick Recap…
- Step 1 – Create your campaign
- Includes your ad objective – brand awareness
- Step 2 – Create your ad sets
- Know your audience
- Select your ad placement – desktop newsfeed and mobile newsfeed
- Step 3 – Create your ad
- Design your ad – your text, your video and your headline
Contact Splice Marketing To Discuss Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager is a sophisticated dashboard that allows you to upload your advertisement and provides a great overview of your campaign and its performance.
We won’t reinvent the wheel so here are Facebook’s instructions on how to set up your Facebook Ads Manager account.
Launching Your Facebook Ad
So you’ve gone through the planning process, now it’s time to launch your ad using Facebook Ads Manager. Here is a video demonstration of Splice Marketing going through the launch process for one of our clients.
P.s. there is no sound in the video so pop some music on in the background.
Bravo…. your ad is up and running!
Measuring Your Ad Success
Once your brand awareness campaign is up and running, how do you measure if it is successful or not?
Jump back to Facebook Ads Manager to review your ad results. You will be blown away by the number of statistics that are provided to you so just focus on these four for now:
- Reach – how many people did your ad reach in your local area
- Frequency – for someone to recall a business or a message, they need to see an ad more than once. Frequency will show you how many times the one person saw your ad. Anything from 1-2 is a good result.
- Video Engagement – how many people watched 25% of your video, how many watched 50% and how many watched through to the end? This is a good measurement of whether you should make shorter videos or stick to the same length for future campaigns.
- Relevancy Score – Facebook will score your ad between 1 to 10. Anything from 7-10 is a good result as it shows your ads are relevant to your audience. If it’s lower than this, reach out to us at Splice Marketing and we can do a quick audit and provide you with some recommendations.
Parting Advice…..
The best part about Facebook Advertising is that you learn as you go.
If your first ad didn’t work too well to start with, then try something new the second time around following the same process we’ve outlined in our article.
We’d also like to point out that this article only covers the very basics of Facebook Advertising for Healthcare Professionals and Healthcare businesses so if you want to dive deeper and see a greater return on investment, engage a Facebook Ad expert like us at Splice Marketing.
Thank you for reading and happy advertising!
Whilst we are on the topic of Facebook, make sure your page is AHPRA compliant with our FREE Facebook Compliance Checklist.
Simply click the image below to download.
