Dummies’ guide to Facebook advertising

FacebookAre you thinking of dipping your toe in Facebook advertising? Chris Baker explains the ins and outs.

I imagine many of you have a practice Facebook page and regularly post interesting and engaging content. If you do that’s great but even if you don’t that doesn’t mean you cannot take advantage of Facebook advertising.

According to the website Avocado Social, there are now more than 31 million users of Facebook in the UK – an audience that must be worth considering. Why Facebook advertising? Because there is no more targetable form of advertising available today.

Top 10 tips

  1. As with any advertising campaign, have an achievable aim and measurable goals. The more specific you can make it, the better. ‘We are a wonderful dental practice in X’ is not going to work well on Facebook
  2. Facebook is so targetable – but this is only useful to you if you know who your ideal audience is
  3. Set a budget over a defined period of time and stick to it. Start on the low side and then test, record and improve. Allocate more funds to what is working
  4. If you have a business page, you are able to upload email contact lists to target. Facebook will then create a ‘Lookalike’ audience from those email addresses associated with a Facebook account. You can then use this audience to target Facebook users who share common characteristics with your existing patients
  5. What do you wish to achieve? Facebook offers a number of options but the three keys ones are ‘boost post’, ‘gain likes’ and ‘conversions’
  6. Boosting posts does what you expect – you can allocate funds that will promote individual posts to followers and non-followers. To be used if you have a particularly good piece of content, preferably pictorial
  7. If you have a Facebook business page and less than 500 page likes, I suggest that you run an ad to gain followers. Remember – what’s in it for them? Why should they follow your page?
  8. Conversions is the one to use whenever possible and choose to pay for ‘clicks’ rather than ‘impressions’ – that way you only ever pay for results, ie when they have fulfilled the desired action. If you are after website conversions – perhaps for an event, then make sure you have a specific ‘landing page’ on your domain. This will greatly improve conversion rates
  9. There is not enough space here to cover all the various demographic and behavioural targeting options; suffice to say that the amount of options will probably scare the life out of you!
  10. The advertisement itself can contain either pictures or video – a video will often generate a better response. The associated text needs to be compelling and convince the viewer to take action straightaway.

Facebook advertising can be tremendous value for money. For instance, a client of ours filled an entire Invisalign event by spending just over £90 on Facebook advertising that led to 10 patients going ahead with the treatment.

What a fantastic return on investment!

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