Facebook Advertising Guide for Plastic and Cosmetic Surgeons

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  Two Trillion Inches

63 round trips to the Moon and back. Or 1/3 of the way to the Sun.

That’s the amount of ad space Facebook displayed back in 2012 – and that’s when it was a fantastically horrible advertising platform. Facebook is light-years better now.

They’re serving up lots more ads, which you can target much more accurately to your perfect prospects, so you can get significantly better results from your advertising.

The best-known Google AdWords guru and author of several leading books on Pay-Per-Click, Facebook, and various other topics is now saying he gets more business, less expensively, from Facebook than he does from AdWords.

“Facebook ads are now my #1 source of new customers, surpassing Google AdWords. No other traffic source in the last 5 years has brought me more customers for less money. Facebook advertising is working 4X better than ever before, and for more people than ever before.”

Perry Marshall, World’s #1 Google AdWords Expert

And Facebook is on track to triple their revenue in only 3 years’ time. Since people vote with their wallet, that’s a pretty strong indicator that they’re getting it right and the ads must be working. Finally.

That’s why there is an epic land grab going on right now – for your perfect prospects – on Facebook.

Don’t sit on the sidelines like when AdWords built whole practices back in the early to mid- 2000s. Or like when video first started and there was no competition to get gobs of free, engaged visitors to your site.
 
 

But Social Media Is All Cloud and No Rain You Say?

Nope. Not anymore. So you better get out your umbrella.

I know. You’ve already “tried” Facebook. But you haven’t done it the right way – the strategic way – that we’ll be explaining.

If you have done it the right way, creating the right kind of content and using all the new game-changing advertising features, and it didn’t work well, we’ll donate $100 to SmileTrain in your name right now.

We’ll also do a quick walkthrough of the advertising interface to de-mystify it and get rid of some of the fear of the unknown.

Facebook is no longer just a place for music artists and movie stars, or a place to kill some time and play with your friends.  It’s morphed into a serious business tool that can build your bottom line by bringing you qualified, ready-to-go prospects/consults/patients.

But don’t worry – this isn’t going to be another “you need to post 4 times a day on Facebook…Social Media is the answer to all your advertising problems…” write-up.  It’s going to be meat-and-potatoes – what you need to do to leverage Facebook to help build your practice (and stay relevant) in 2014.  Quick and easy . . . and you can probably have someone on your staff do it.

First, who are we, and why should you pay any attention?  We’re AdWords and marketing experts in the Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery field.  (Take a minute or two to look at these articles on pay-per-click advertising that we wrote for Aesthetic Society News.)

We understand your business.  And we get that Facebook has finally become a powerful marketing and advertising tool.

It’s like the early days of AdWords, when it was falling-off-a-log easy to get inexpensive leads and consults because you had no competition.

The world keeps changing, and this information may be critical to your practice.  (If you’re the practice manager . . . it might be critical to your job.)

So let’s dig in.
 
 

Tell Me How Facebook Specifically Benefits My Practice

Sure.

If you’re anything like the other practices we talk to, you were promised that social media was the answer to all your advertising worries.

You’ve been constantly hammered by people offering to “do” social media for you, or selling you on how important the related “reputation management” world is (for a huge added fee, of course.)

You see, as a plastic or cosmetic surgeon you have the unfortunate distinction of being at the top of the list of “business types to target when you are getting started doing Internet Marketing.”

Yes, that’s why you get so many phone calls from “consultants” who don’t know the difference between a blepharoplasty and a rhinoplasty.

And, as much as you may wish you didn’t even have to “market” your practice, things are changing.  You need to embrace the digital world.

Hopefully, we’ve wiped away some of the disgust and disdain you have for all things “digital marketing” related. So with the “lenses” a little clearer, let’s look at how Facebook specifically can benefit your practice.

Facebook is a place to grab attention.  In that respect, it’s no different than the direct mail or print or radio campaigns you’re running now.

But the beauty of Facebook is that you can hyper-target your perfect prospects, and eliminate much of the typical advertising overhead and waste.  Magazine ads or advertising on conservative talk radio (or whatever you’ve been doing) may have been profitable for you.  But you wonder how much waste there is every time you approve the next check, right?

Facebook’s demographic and psychographic data is nothing short of phenomenal.  Way back in 2012, they were already gathering 2.5 Billion pieces of content.  Per Day.  Simply astonishing.

They’ve partnered with Big Data providers like Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon.

Why do you care?

You care because that brings data about your perfect prospect that is to be found nowhere else in the “Social Media” world.  It’s data like:

• What people are buying out there in the real world
• Where (and how) people are travelling
• How people are voting
• What charities people are giving to (and how much)

Are you starting to understand how truly game-changing this is for growing your practice?

Maybe your perfect male necklift prospect hasn’t yet “Liked” the Facebook Porsche page.  But he did just buy a Turbo S Cabriolet now that he’s through with his divorce and “back on the market.”  (If you follow the herd and do rudimentary targeting of the Porsche page like your competitors, you’ll never reach that perfect prospect.)

There’s truly nothing like it out there right now.  It’s a huge, huge advantage if you seize the opportunity.

Used in the correct way, that data is worth whatever Facebook charges you to advertise.  But the wonderful thing is that since “Facebook Advertising 2.0” is new, it isn’t flooded with advertisers (your competitors) yet.  So you’ll pay far less now than you will in the next 6 – 12 months for this major patient acquisition advantage.

We haven’t dug in to the “how” part yet, but rest assured that leveraging Facebook will not mean posting 4 times a day.  You’ve probably tried that already.

Since it is tough to come up with valuable, relevant content, I bet your staff has fallen back to posting “10% off Botox” and “Free Consultation” status updates, right?

I know.  That’s what almost everybody we audit in this market does.  Which gets back to why there is so much low-hanging fruit if you’ll just do it correctly.

You’ll be focusing on fewer but higher-quality and information-rich posts.  Here’s part of the magic – you’ll then promote or “boost” them so they have a better chance of reaching most of your followers.

Quick example: a client with a little over 20,000 “Likes” of his page went from having 568 people view his unpromoted post, to having 19,007 see it after being “boosted.”

For $5.

Over a 3,300% increase in views for $5?  Yes, please.

And the crazy part is that hardly any of your competitors are using this technique, which is less “salesy” than using the standard Facebook banner ads on the right side.

Most of your competitors are indignantly saying “those jerks at Facebook…I’m not paying for something that should be free. I’ll show them!”

But since you wisely remember who owns your Facebook page (umm…Facebook), you figure they can make the rules.  If it only costs $5, that’s one of the best marketing bargains out there.

Yes, it works the same way when you have a link back to your website in the boosted post – the more people who see your post, the more people who will follow the link to your website.

Oh, and in case you’re ahead of the curve and already creating quality content on YouTube…yep, you can do this to get people to your channel as well.  You get the picture, so we’ll move on.

Sure, you’ll also be creating those little “salesy” ads mentioned above.  This will help you reach new prospects as well as build trust and nurture people who have “Liked” your page already.  Done correctly, those little salesy ads work extremely well.

You know that the essence of marketing is getting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time, correct?

With Facebook… check and mate.  You can do exactly that with Facebook.

Keep reading for the details on the turnkey strategy below, but you now have the wide-angle view.

Sales Pitch Alert: Our “pitch” is an offer to let you engage us for a 30-minute Strategy Session. No obligation, no hard sell. If you don’t feel like you got value out of the call, yep, we’ll donate $100 to SmileTrain in your name. So stop peering at your screen with that skeptical look because you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Click Here to schedule your Strategy Session now.

Facebook Advertising Requirements

This is the easy part.

There aren’t any long-term, expensive contracts to sign or commitments to make.  You can set a daily budget – which you can change or stop at any time – for each different campaign.  This isn’t the same kind of money pit that SEO has turned into over the past couple years with all the treacherous Google algorithm updates.

You’ve wisely noticed that there are similarities between this and AdWords and other similar platforms.  AdWords is our first love, going back over 8 years now.  But AdWords requires a near full-time, post-graduate level of PPC knowledge to truly take advantage of and profit from.

Facebook is so much easier to leverage.  So let’s do that.

You or one of your staff members already has a personal account and you have your business Facebook page set up.  (For the rare practice who doesn’t have a page, email us for a free step-by-step guide.)

You’re mere minutes from being a Facebook advertiser by following the steps below:

1. There are various places to get into the ad platform, depending what you have or haven’t done with your Page, interface updates, etc. Here’s one “entry” – just click on the “Ads Manager” button.

Here’s another – click on the “Create Ad” link on the left side of your home screen.

Worst case, go to http://facebook.com/ads, which will redirect you to the current place to start.

2. Again, depending on your account and various other things, you might see any of the screens below. Click on “Create Ad” or “Create an Ad” to get to the next step.

Here’s another:

You’re Now a Facebook Advertiser - Let’s Look Under the Hood

Congratulations!

Now that you’re in execution mode, let’s continue – you can enter your payment information after you’re done creating your first ad.

We’ll get into the all-important strategies below, but, first, this walkthrough of the creation of a simple ad will allay your fears about the process being too complicated.

1. After you click on “Create Ad” or “Create an Ad” in the steps above, you should see a screen similar to this:

Click on “Clicks to Website” to start your practice process.

2. The next screen will appear. Fill in your website where shown. Simple.

3. Facebook will dutifully go out to the website and try to make your life easy by suggesting images.

Usually, that’s not going to work very well – we’ll talk more about image best practices later in this article. But for now, while running through this “practice” advertising process, you can usually accept what Facebook gives you and move forward. Images are important and should contain very little text – you’ll write the copy in the next step.

Or, if you want to dig a bit deeper, look in the highlighted section at the bottom of the image below. You can upload an image from your computer, or find stock images by clicking on “Find Images.”

Remember that what we’re doing now is to get you used to the process. Don’t agonize over the perfect image and keep from moving forward.

4. This is where you get to write…but don’t worry – it’s short and sweet.

The “Connect Facebook Page” field below should be pre-filled. If you have more than one page, be sure to select the correct one.

The “Headline” and “Text” fields are where you write the ad copy.

While the image in your ad is ultra-important on Facebook, your headline still has a considerable impact.

Headlines (and ad copy in general) are a very involved subject – we can easily recommend 10 books for you to peruse in your spare time 😉 But if you remember these things, you’ll be ahead of most of your competitors:

• Think “benefit” (to your prospect) and not “feature” (what you can do.) People don’t want surgery – they want the results of surgery, right?
• This is really just restating the point above, but it’s that important: Focus On Them, Not On You! Quick tip – if you’re using the words “we, our, my” . . . you might be breaking this rule.
• Although it’s tough to do within the 25-character limit, be interesting. Use action-oriented or intrigue-filled adjectives. Use numbers. Use a question mark.

Here are three sample headlines:

• “Top Blepharoplasty Doctor” (Bad)
• “Natural-Looking Eyelift?” (Better)
• “He Told Me I Looked Tired” (One of our “out-of-the-box” ads which is running really successfully so far.)

The body copy (to enter in the “Text” area below) can be up to 90 characters in length. Copywriting is an art in itself, and digging deep here is outside the scope of this document.

If you simply follow the headline suggestions above for your body copy, you’ll be off to a good start. Focus on your prospect, and try to be a little more interesting or provocative or something. Stand out from the crowd a bit here, and PLEASE don’t think about stuffing in keywords. Finish with a call to action.

There’s much more about offers and winning techniques below, but, worst case, ask your prospect to do something. Anything. With all the noise on Facebook, if you expect her to add 2+2 together and take action on her own, you’ll be very disappointed with your results.

For the “Call To Action” dropdown, “Learn More” is usually best for what you should be doing with your Facebook ads (as opposed to “Shop Now,” “Download,” etc.)

5. Defining the Audience is actually kind of fun. More than likely, you’ll be amazed at all of the information that’s available here – especially when we talk more about Facebook’s Power Editor in an upcoming post.

Advertising to everybody over 13 years old in the US won’t work very well.

The image below is far better (women between 40 – 55 years old.) But as bad as Facebook wants your money, even they point out that your audience is “fairly broad.” (24 Million people = fairly broad . . . Facebook has a gift for understatement.)

You’ll certainly want to restrict the geography in which your ads show similar to the following:

240,000 people, in geographies that you entered specifically because your tracking data shows that people there convert into clients for your practice. Much better. Even Facebook now says “Your audience has been defined.”

This is where 98% of your competitors stop – write a decent ad, define gender/age/geography, and let ‘er rip. That’s why it hasn’t worked for them!

If you want Facebook to work – no, if you want Facebook to crush it for you – you need to go deeper.

Deeper in many ways that we’ll go into further down in the document. But for now, let’s just apply “deeper” to finish out the targeting part.

We’re able to narrow down our potential audience even further by adding some “Interests” as shown below:

That’s a little better. And sure, we could have used the “More Demographics” ? Relationship Status setting. We’d set “Single” or “Divorced” or whatever was applicable to our campaign and ad theme, but there are various considerations there. . .and let’s keep this from being War & Peace, yes?

Now you aren’t writing just another stupid “Top Plastic Surgeon” ad to the 24,000,000 women on Facebook between the ages of 40 – 55. You can do smarter, more eye-catching – and better converting – things with your campaigns.

With the targeting we’ve done above, how about something like the “He Said I Looked Tired” headline mentioned above, with an image of The City and some body copy about “Don’t want to go on another first date to Kuleto’s? Find out more about being an Ageless Beauty…”

You’re inside her head about wanting to look less tired. You’ve caught her eye with a picture of San Francisco. Maybe Kuleto’s isn’t the perfect restaurant to reference there, but again, you get her and her pain and what she’s going through as she starts dating again.

We just threw that together in a few minutes because it isn’t fair to give away all the secrets our other clients are using. Maybe our ad isn’t perfect, but remember, the goal of this section is just to take away some of the trepidation about going big with Facebook.

There are probably at least 10 different ways that even the simple targeting above could be improved. As a quick example, instead of targeting 40 – 55, we’d suggest at least three different ads, all with a slightly different tone/image/headline. The difference between 40 – 45, 46 – 50, and 51 – 55 can be the difference between being ignored and “Wow . . . they really get me!”

6. You’re on the homestretch. This is the simple stuff, but be sure to use a thoroughly descriptive name in the “Ad Set Name” area as shown. You’ll thank us later as you’re going through reports. You’ll save time going back through so that you can minimize the things that aren’t performing as well, and really press the things that are delivering big ROI for your practice.

Last screen. Leave “Bidding” set to “Bid for clicks” – we’ll get into “Bid for impressions” (CPM) bidding in a future advanced strategies post.

For “Pricing,” click on “Manually set…” and then enter your maximum bid for each click on your ad. This can be an involved subject, but try this:

• Go on the high end of the suggested bid to start – remember you have a daily budget set to keep costs from getting out of control.
• Think about this being a process, and think about the numbers and where they fit in your practice and its economics. In other words, think about your average client lifetime value, your lead-to-consultation conversion rate, your consultation-to-procedure conversion rate, etc.
• Realize that you can change the bid at any time.

As you may have guessed by now, when you are done with that, click the green “Place Order” button and you’re off to the races.

You may have seen some of the “Help” links in the screenshots above. Those will be available within your Facebook ad interface for you to read at any time. (It’s decent info, but just keep the ol’ story about the fox guarding the henhouse in the back of your mind…)
 
 

Seems Straightforward. Now Tell Me How Much it Will Cost.

You wouldn’t still be reading if you weren’t striving to grow your practice, so we’ll assume that you’re willing to devote at least $1,000 to this effort. That’s $1,000 which you have full control over, and can modify or stop at any time. You don’t even have to ever talk to a human being at Facebook if you don’t want to. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.

And speaking of costs, you don’t truly care how much you spend IF you get a return, correct? As a smart businessperson, if you can put $1 into the Patient Generation Machine and get out $4 or $7 or more, you’ll gather up and spend (invest) all the dollars you can.

Will you spend that first $1,000 (and yes, some of your/staff time to set up) and bring in a procedure with $10,000 net profit? Possibly, but probably not.

If near 10x ROI was possible for everybody that just started, the word would have spread like wildfire.

Will you see more people “liking” your page, engaging with your boosted posts, commenting, etc.? Will you get some inquiries and even book a consultation or two?

Absolutely. Remember that you’re still controlling this whole process. You don’t have to take it on faith and do the ol’ SEO “wait and see” approach for 6 months to see if it works. Most likely, you’ll start to see results right away and realize that things are moving in the right direction.

If not, for whatever reason, you stop and you’ve only invested $1,000 or $2,000. If you can tell us you haven’t allocated many times that amount in the past on other techniques to find new patients, you’d be the first one.

Just a couple more things while we’re talking about money and budgets.

You’ll want to start with Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, and only move to the different Cost Per Impression (CPM) strategies once you have things dialed in.

Plan on allocating 80% of your total budget to the ads mentioned above, and 20% of your budget to Promoted Posts (the “boosting” discussed above.) Again, be smarter than your competitors and just plan to pay that small amount to have people see your posts. $5 is the deal of the century for an ad format that doesn’t scream that it’s an ad.

The good news is that you already know almost enough to start advertising with a positive ROI right now. But stick with us through the next section to learn how to avoid common mistakes and virtually guarantee that you’ll start off strong.
 

This Is Sounding Too Good To Be True. Details, Please.

We’re going to document a proven, winning strategy below. And it won’t be a full-time job for your already overworked staff or require committing a 300-page book to memory to work well.

Don’t overlook this opportunity because it seems simple. Haven’t many of the things that have gotten your practice to the next level been the simple things – that have simply been executed on?

First let’s get the bad news out of the way.

You will not dominate Facebook by posting a few thin updates and trying to get people to part with their personal information or call you.

There are huge companies with large dedicated groups of people writing 4 or 5 or 10 great, information-rich posts daily, and sharing it for free.

I’m not going back on earlier comments – that does not mean you need somebody to write stuff for your Facebook page full-time. It just means that you need to understand the Facebook landscape and the context for the strategy you’ll be executing.

And that strategy is:

Give value first

That simple concept has been working well for many years, but only recently has the “content marketing” revolution hit the world.

(Funny how winning techniques going back 100 years all of a sudden get noticed once a catchy name and groundswell starts. Does that remind you of anything you’ve seen in your own market? 😉

Give first, build trust, and nurture the fledgling relationship you have with your new follower.

Facebook is all about marketing the “Transparent Business.” Your practice is impacted more by reviews and recommendations and complaints than many other businesses, so transparency is nothing new to you.

Number of “Likes,” comments, shares, reviews, pictures, etc. – people love to scroll up and down your Facebook page to “get a feel” for who you are and how your practice is run.

People love to look at pictures of you and your staff. They love to look at before-and-after pictures. They love to see what other people just like them say about you.

That’s what it’s all about (and the raison d’être for Google+, again, validation from the 800 lb. gorilla.)

How different is that from the beautiful (yet anonymous) postcard you send with the phone number to call for a free consultation?

Facebook is, as one of the Godfathers of Marketing said 100 years ago, “Selling from the Front Porch.”

Setting the context above is the hard part, but without it, you’ll fail – simple as that. Now, we’ll go through the mechanical stuff which is comparatively easy.
 
 

Targeting: The “Check” in the “Checkmate”

It is incredibly important to get the right offer in front of the right audience. This hasn’t changed since way before “Mad Men,” and it isn’t about to change now.

Facebook has incredible targeting capabilities, period. If we haven’t convinced you to open a free advertising account yet, we hope you at least followed along with the targeting walkthrough above.

Either way, don’t worry – you can still get a feel for your targeting possibilities without using their advertiser tools.

Go up to the “graph search” area at the top of your Facebook page, which looks like this:

Now, commit 5 minutes to just messing around. Don’t worry about the structure or saving the results to a spreadsheet or building something actionable right now. Just play for a few minutes to see the information that’s right there for you.

Here’s a few simple searches to get your creative ideas flowing:

• Women who like Gucci
• Women who like FITNESS Magazine
• Women who like Lifestyle Lift (only 3,177 Likes as I type this? Your practice can have more than that within a month!)

Then, for the searches that return lots of results (like Gucci above), you can narrow it down like so:

This quick exercise wasn’t to give you everything you ever needed to create a perfect Facebook campaign. It is just to give you a feel for what’s available even outside of the advertising tools.

As you review some of the people who like certain magazine pages, products, luxury products, etc., you can start to better define your perfect prospect. And you already know how important that is…

We’ve just about beaten “targeting” to death. But just to whet your appetite, here’s a quick shot of just one part of the “Power Editor” where you can select the Partner Categories we talked about toward the beginning of this article:

Being able to do all of the demographic and geographic targeting, combined with women who like jewelry, and are “connected to” something, and not already connected to something else, and who have friends that have still other connections?

Wow.

Okay, now I’m done.
 
 

An Irresistible Offer: The “Mate” Part ?

“10% off of Botox®” is not an irresistible offer.

Don’t follow the herd and start out that way. You need to think about Facebook in terms of being “demand generation” and not “demand fulfillment.”

In other words, people don’t get on Facebook thinking “gee. . . I hope I can book an appointment for Botox® right now.”

They get on Facebook to relax, catch up, and generally escape a little bit. So that’s where the Slow Dance comes in. Don’t try to take them from a handshake to the honeymoon in one fell swoop.

Her credit card isn’t out when she logs in to Facebook. In fact, it’s put away tighter than when she’s doing some general web browsing. At least in that case she’s already admitted to herself that she “might” end up on Amazon or Zappos or something.

She simply isn’t buying, or even calling, the first time she comes across your ad. So do what winning practices are doing – educate and even entertain, and build a relationship.

The critical part here is to get her contact information at all costs. That means you need to do whatever is necessary to get her to part with her closely-guarded email address and/or phone number.

You know how you hate to give out your contact info because you don’t want spam and sales calls?

Exactly.

Your prospects hate it, too. So you need to put together the best “ethical bribe” that you possibly can. It has to be so good that they are willing to put aside those “what if they spam me” thoughts and give you their info.

Have you ever heard marketing gurus say that you should give away your best stuff for free? That’s ultra-important on Facebook where there is so much noise.

If you give away your best information – stuff you could probably even put in a book and charge for – then people will give you their all-important contact info. And there’s NO relationship building until that happens.

Just as important as starting that relationship, though, is how you are starting the relationship. The thought that you hope is going through her mind is “Wow! . . . If the information they give away for free is this good, just imagine how amazing their procedures are!”

You’ll be tempted to pull back, and think that you can’t possibly give away some of these important differentiators. You’ll be worried that people will take those and run and you’ll never hear from them again.

Some will. Get over it.

But many won’t, and those are the high-quality prospects you want anyway.

Oh, and don’t even think about watering down your offer and the information because “my competitors will steal it from me.” We wish we had a dollar for every time we’ve heard this, and it just makes us want to scream.

Some competitors will steal it from you – just like they can if they request an info packet through the mail or get their friends to come in and pose as prospective patients.

As above, get over it. There’s plenty of secret sauce that you have that they can’t as easily steal, right?

If you can double or triple your consultation flow, who cares! Besides, most of the idiots out there stealing information never wind up executing on anything anyway.

Here are a few specific, winning offers that you can tailor to your practice and specialties:

• A personalized “after” rendering of the outcome you can expect from your desired procedure
• “Ask The Surgeon” (free call-in hours [or Google Hangout] each week – get your questions answered with 0% pressure)
• Free Book Download

Ninja Tip: You can also offer to ship a physical copy of your book/booklet/info kit to your prospect if she covers the cost of shipping. You aren’t doing this because you need the $5.80. You are doing it because this is a way for your hottest prospects to identify themselves to your staff for special care. And once someone has spent even a tiny bit of money with you, they’re more likely to spend more.
• Checklist Download (“11 Questions You Must Ask Your Surgeon,” for example)
• Free Consult Day

And here are a few more general offers that have historically worked very well once customized:

• Webinars/Hangouts
• Video series
• Live events/demos

The bottom line is that you want people to dip their toe in the water so you have a chance to build that relationship. You want them to give you their email address.

You’ll then create an email “autoresponder” series where you write a whole series of emails just once. (This is a specialty of ours, let me know if you want a couple of the documents we’ve written to help you get started.)

Then you let that (inexpensive) autoresponder technology – with no additional staff time – automatically send out nurturing emails in sequence to build the relationship and turn it into a consult. (When I say “inexpensive”, that means like $19/month, from a 3rd party we aren’t affiliated with.)

And worst case, if they don’t give you their email address, you want them to feel good enough about what you offered to at least “Like” your page.

That way you can still get your valuable, content-rich posts in front of them, build the relationship that way, and still have a chance to get them into your email series at some point.

Oh, and to finish on the “offer” part – they aren’t going to even think about your wonderful offer unless you grab their attention. On Facebook, that means an eye-catching image in your ad or post.

Image best practices would require an article on its own. But here’s a ninja tip that hardly anybody is executing on:

Don’t use the same pictures that everybody else is using.

Don’t use the stock photos with the beautiful models. (And especially don’t use the ridiculous before-and-after images that Allergan supplies!)

Use pictures that mirror what real people on Facebook are already sharing. Candid/”behind the curtain”/in the moment pictures work very well. We’ve even had great success with hand-drawn, non-professional images. Again, this is “un-marketing” and more personal and attractive to people.

And use a filter – even a $5 app on your iPhone will do – to put a subtle white frame around the image, with slight corner rounding. All of that will attract the eye, make it seem more personal and less threatening.
 
 

Engaging with Your Perfect Surgical Prospects

Since we talked a bit about it above, let’s consider the comparative value of different ways that prospects might engage with you.

It would be great if somebody came to your front desk staff, whipped a calendar out of her Gucci bag, and asked if she could book a consultation. Right.

So moving on to the highest-value “likely” way that somebody will engage with you – the phone call.

Nobody will argue that that’s what you want most (assuming your front desk staff is superb, but that’s the subject for another blog post.) So go for it and make sure they can easily reach out and call you.

What we find, however, is that most practices significantly underestimate the value of an “opt-in” (somebody who fills out a form on your website.)

That happens for a couple reasons – first, it’s less personal and it just doesn’t seem as good as somebody calling you. It isn’t.

But handled correctly, it’s pretty close.

When you have a well-thought-out automated system (the $19/mo. mentioned above) that handles the relationship every time, that’s huge. That system doesn’t forget, or get delayed because it gets too busy or has a vacation day. And it turns leads that are slightly lower-quality into strong leads.

In fact, even though phone calls start out stronger, if they don’t result in action soon, then email leads handled well quickly eclipse them. (Assuming you don’t have a strong phone-to-email nurturing strategy in place.)

To restate from above and close out this section – you’ll ultimately settle for a Page “Like” if you have to, but that doesn’t mean you stop doing everything you can to get an email opt-in or phone call.

When you can pull somebody off of Facebook to your website, you’ve gotten them out of the Facebook “noise” with videos and pictures of cats and dancing babies.

Makes it a little easier to get them to focus and engage with you when you aren’t competing with the virtual equivalent of a county fair.
 
 

Putting it All Together

Sure, there are lots of different ways you can move forward from here. In fact, we are working on a “Paint By Numbers” guide where we’ll go through everything mentioned here step-by-step.
This means not just a generic walkthrough, but the conception and implementation of a real-world campaign and associated strategy. It’s yours for the asking – just email us and tell us you want it, and we’ll send it to you as soon as it is done next week.

But don’t wait! Time is of the essence on this, and you need to stake your claim before the surgeon down the street beats you to it. This article has given you all of the critical areas to think about and focus on, so please go execute.

Once you’re moving forward with Facebook, let us know how things are going, and we’ll send you some feedback or help get you past roadblocks.

Finally, if you show us that your Facebook campaigns are running, I’ll send you our Facebook Advanced Strategies guide for free. In that guide you’ll find out more about:

• Custom audiences (huge)
• Look Alike audiences (even more huge)
• Power Editor tricks
• Remarketing
• oCPM
• Custom landing pages with game-changing, prospect contact information pre-filled in for you – they just need to click the button to submit it. Trust me, this is big.

Again, there’s a ton more information you can gather out there to do a “perfect” job with Facebook advertising.

Don’t wait for perfection.

Start executing with what you just discovered above, which will put you ahead of 95% of Facebook advertisers in general, and 99.5% of your direct competition.

If you’re tempted to put this “on the stack,” and look at it again “soon,” just remember . . . TWO TRILLION INCHES!

Scott Harvey
Honest PPC(sm)
(800) WEB-6006

Sales Pitch Alert: Seriously, if you made it to the bottom of this report, you owe it to yourself to set up a Strategy Session. Did I say no obligation/no hard sell? $100 donated to SmileTrain in your name if you didn’t get value – no – if you didn’t get substantial value out of the call. Click Here to schedule your Strategy Session now.