The idea of being able to generate new chiropractic practice members while sitting in the comfort of your office, hiding behind a computer screen is VERY attractive to many people.
…but does it work?
I put $100 into a facebook advertising campaign with a Calgary doc to find out. The goal was to see how many people actually took action on an ad from the social network and see if it was worth the money. I’ll show you what we did, the results it pulled, and what you can learn from this for your own chiropractic marketing.
Objective: Get people from Facebook to call the office or “opt-in” to learning more
Niche: Those with headaches and migraines looking for a cure
Targeting: Men and women within 25 miles of the office address, showing interest in Headaches and Migraines
Round 1: Disapproved.
This ad received the following rejection notice:
Your ad wasn’t approved because it doesn’t follow Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines for language that is profane, vulgar, threatening or generates high negative feedback. Ads can’t use language that insults, harasses or demeans people, or addresses their age, gender, name, race, physical condition or sexual preference.
Round 2: Disapproved.
This ad received the following rejection notice:
Your ad wasn’t approved because it doesn’t follow Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines for language that is profane, vulgar, threatening or generates high negative feedback. Ads can’t use language that insults, harasses or demeans people, or addresses their age, gender, name, race, physical condition or sexual preference.
I thought the issue with my ads from the first round meant that I couldn’t use images of people in pain, so the second try I changed the image to someone who was too tired to get out of bed… harmless image.
In actuality, the real issue with my ads was both the image and the written copy. You cannot ask people to identify with a negative situation on facebook (which in our case included having headaches)
…makes sense that this is a social, transparent platform and people’s private matters should remain private.
Round 3: Approved.
SUCCESS!
We ran $100 to this ad which was a cheeky way of getting around the rules and saying that if they agree that headaches are a pain in the ***, give the link a click.
The landing page educated them on the benefits of chiropractic for headaches with a call-to-action in the form of a free consultation. They could receive this consultation by calling or putting their name and email in the form at the bottom of the page.
RESULTS:
9,130 impressions
61 clicks to the landing page
0 conversions
In the end, we didn’t actually receive any new patients that booked a consultation.
Reasons could be:
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the landing page wasn’t optimized for conversions, as we only used what was already pre-made.
-
the call-to-action wasn’t very actionable (who really wants a free headache consultation…)
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targeting was very broad
How we did benefit from this was that we collected a new bucket of people we can target for the next promotion. In the process of setting this up, I added an “Audience Pixel” to capture the “cookies” of anyone who landed on the Headaches page. They currently have 400 people in this audience, which is 25 cents per lead. (in layman’s terms, we “saved their computer’s address” of every person that visited us, so we can “advertise directly to them” again).
We can now promote anything headache related to this audience that is already familiar with these doctors and have expressed interest in headache solutions (hyper-targeted)! If they wanted to run a lunch & learn on the benefits of chiropractic for headaches, or wanted to promote a headache relief product, they have an audience of 400 people to put this ad in front of whenever they want (and the audience grows daily).
So… was it a waste of $100?
Not if they do something with this data at their fingertips. I recommend they write the best article they’ve ever crafted about headache pain and how chiropractic can solve this, with a call-to-action at the bottom of the article for something that will actually entice them to come in (coupon perhaps).
It’s easier to promote content than it is to promote a hard sales offer.
So there is the data from the $100 facebook advertising test. In my opinion it was a worthwhile attempt and provided many insights into the audience that was attracted to an offer like this, making it easier to run an advertisement next time.
If you wanted to experiment with a facebook ad, I would encourage you to do it through a great piece of content (article, webinar, video), or a better call-to-action like a free lunch & learn. This would probably get a better conversion ratio.
We are offering complimentary 20-minute marketing consultations for anyone who wants help creating a strategy like this, or simply setting up marketing systems in your business.. Just click the link below to book: