Many clinic owners see social media as a bit of a distraction from doing their main thing, taking care of patients. But to grow a practice and help more people, social media is a key tool that can enable doctors to do just that.
Yet many practices have tried social media ads with little or no results—only a lighter wallet and a lot more frustration.
And when the ads have gone out, the leads they generated are almost impossible to contact. And when you do get hold of them, they don’t seem that interested.
Ever experienced that?
If you’re like most, that’s enough to put you off running ads. But before you decide it’s not for you, I want to give you actionable steps to make your first, or next, social media ad campaign. It’s what we use in our clinics that allows us to spread our chiropractic message to more patients who can benefit from our care. It all comes through “application ads” — which we’ll get to in just a moment.
Reaching the Right Audience
Social media is a tool that allows you to get your message in front of the right people who need your help. Relying solely on organic posts not only doesn’t reach the right people, it also consumes far too much time. Trying to create better content to reach new people becomes a chore.
Whereas, with application ads you can get your message in front of the right people who are looking for information on how you can help them. These people can be specifically targeted to get the right message, which causes them to act.
So what is, and how do you create, an application ad?
First, let’s find out what it is. An application ad delivers a compelling message to the right person, which gets them to click through. And as the name suggests, it asks for them to fill in an application to ensure they are right for you and your practice.
Without getting too fancy, you can then call the ones who are right for you and continue educating others who may not be a good fit right now. This can save countless hours, and wasted time, for your CAs.
Since we implemented this in our clinics, we have decreased our CAs’ time on calls and increased the conversion of high-quality leads. Hopefully you like the sound of these ads now.
So, let’s go through the steps to create one. For speed and simplicity, we will keep this all on social media and not use any external tools.
Getting Started
For the first step, you need to know what you are offering and who you are offering it to. Without that, your message will become a droplet in the ocean of social media posts. You may be thinking, “I know what to offer…”, but to get your message to resonate, you must be specific.
For example, is your campaign focusing on headaches and migraines, back pain, sciatica, or something else? You can of course create more than one campaign, but it’s essential to focus on one message. (On a side note, when starting out, just have one campaign with one message).
Before we move on to step two, you need to know who you are offering it to. Again, for simplicity, let’s just think of this in respect to how Facebook allows you to target. I recommend setting the radius to around a 20-minute drive from your practice and to target males and females, 26 to 65+ years in age.
You should now have one message you are going to deliver to one group of people locally. For example: “headaches sufferers in Lewiston, Maine, between the ages of 26 – 65+.”
Step two is to visit business.facebook.com, if you haven’t already, to set up your Facebook business account. Click through to “ads manager” and create a new lead ad. Select “Instant Forms” to create your form on the platform.
When starting out, I recommend keeping this simple. You can adjust, where necessary, when you have too many leads coming in (a good problem). Therefore, I recommend asking two multiple choice questions:
1. What issue are you dealing with right now?
2. How long have you been dealing with it?
We give four options for the first question: back pain, neck pain, headaches and migraines, and other. For the second question, we just give three options: Under 3 months, 3 to 6 months, or more than 6 months.
The reason why this works well is because the prospect is showing higher intent by answering your questions in the form. They are a more engaged lead. Plus, you now have additional information you can use when making the follow-up call.
Now you have an ad up and running that’s spreading your chiropractic message to more people who may need your help. But we’re not done yet…
Ad Management
You need to manage the ad and the responses you get from comments and the leads. To manage the ad, you’ll just need to click on campaign management and there you will see your ad set up. You can see the number of leads generated per day, the reach, and the number of impressions.
Most importantly, you can track the spend. Only spend what you are comfortable with spending on ads; don’t overspend or stretch yourself with this. There are plenty more ways you can spread your chiropractic message.
Finally, use Facebook (Meta) business suite to manage the leads who fill out the form and the comments you get. To get here, simply click “All Tools” and follow the business suite link. You will find all the comments on your ad in the inbox section and all the leads you have generated.
Of course, there is more to this, but hopefully it’s enough to get you started with your first, or next, social media campaign.
Elliot Chudleigh is a seasoned marketing manager for several chiropractic clinics and now empowers other clinic owners with his expertise to assist them in simplifying and enhancing their marketing strategies. The aim is to reach more people and make a positive impact through the power of chiropractic care.
