Grow Your Healthcare Practice With Social Media Advertising
You post content on social media regularly. Sometimes you get likes and shares. But many times you hear crickets — and wonder if it’s even worth posting.
Organic social media marketing can only get you so far when it comes to attracting more prospective clients and patients. That’s why it makes sense to include paid social media advertising into your social marketing strategy.
With paid social marketing, you can expand your reach and ensure that people interested in your services and products will see what you are offering.
You don’t have to have to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to create a big impact on your business. In fact, it’s better if you can start small and run just a few ads to test and track what works for your practice. Then you can increase your budget when you find an approach that consistently drives traffic and new clients.*
Paid Social Media Guarantees Views
Organic content that you post may or may not show up on feeds. A lot of it depends on how many people share and click your content.
Social media platforms promote paid content, ensuring that interested people see what you’re promoting. With paid social media ads, you are guaranteed to have eyeballs on your content and have it served to people interested in what you offer.
Social media platforms have their own proprietary data that, based on their users’ activity, can serve up highly-targeted ads and content based on what people want to see. The more the person uses the social platform, the better the platform knows what the user wants to see.
Paid Social Media Shows You What People Want
Another advantage to paid social media is the insights it can give you about what your prospective clients and patients want to see.
Your social media advertising accounts include data that shows you the performance of every ad that you run. It can give you insights on:
- Which paid promotions got the most engagement (clicks and shares)
- The demographics of your audience members
- How your paid ads perform versus your organic posts
The more you dig into your data, the more insights you can gain about audience members — who your ideal patients and clients are and who are most engaged with your practice and your brand.
5 Steps to Get Started With Paid Social Ads
Step 1: Pick your platforms
You don’t need to be on every single social media platform. So pick one or two at maximum to test your ads on.
Choose the platform where you think more of your prospective patients and clients gather and are looking for your products or services.
Step 2: Determine your ad goals
Do you want to build brand awareness and increase visitors to your website? Get more subscribers to your newsletter? Have more prospective patients and clients contacting your practice directly? Or promote a particular program you want to offer?*
Your ad goals will help determine the messaging and creative that you put together for your ads. Goals will also help you determine which metrics you will track to know if you are reaching your targets.
Step 3: Learn from the competition
To get inspiration for your own ads, it pays to look at ads that other competitors and industry thought leaders run on your chosen platform. Facebook makes it easy to see what other businesses are utilizing through their Facebook Ads Library. By studying your competition, you’ll get a general sense of what works and plenty of ideas on how to promote yourself and your practice.
Another way to look at what other practitioners are having success with is to spend time on their accounts on your chosen social platform and see which ads are served to you. You can study the headline, images, and calls to action to see what other health & wellness businesses are using to get more attention.
Step 4: Put together your ad creatives, targeting, and calls to action
Social media ad platforms programs will show you exactly what you need to put together a successful ad and walk you through the process when you are setting them up.
You will need to understand:
- Ad specs and sizes — so you know if you have the right-sized images, how many characters you can have in your ad text, etc.
- Call to action phrases you can use — many platforms have specific calls to action for their buttons and links, such as “learn more” or “buy now”
- Your audience — who you want to reach. For example, you might only want to connect with women aged 35-50 in the US
Step 5: Run, test, and track your ads
Once your ads are set up, you can set a small budget (say $10 – $20 per day) to test them and see which ads are getting the results you want.
It is recommended that you run your ads for at least 7-10 days before determining which ones are working best for you. That’s because you need to get enough people seeing them to get a sample size big enough to know if you’re getting the results you want.
Once you have a campaign that is working for your practice, you can keep it running to grow your audience and capture more prospective patients’ and clients’ interest.
Social media advertising can be a great way to grow your list, get more brand recognition, and attract new ideal patients to your practice. If you start small and clearly define your goals, you can build a winning strategy that helps you expand your practice faster and with less effort.
*Designs for Health products can not be used for advertising purposes. No mention of pricing, discounting, etc. can be mentioned when displaying Designs for Health’s product on social platforms. Designs for Health does not allow product images on personal websites.
