Move aside Google Adwords, Facebook advertising has arrived! For those of you who aren’t familiar with Facebook advertising, it has grown exponentially over the past year. Also, given that it is much less competitive than Google Adwords, people who are using it are bidding less per click and typically paying less compared to Adwords.
While many businesses have been successful using Google Adwords, as well as Facebook advertising, is it the right place for doctors or medical businesses to be advertising? The answer…it depends.
In this article we’ll stick to discussing how aesthetic practices should use Facebook advertising. Unlike Google, which allows you target your ads by keyword searches in a given geography, Facebook allows you to target your ads to people based on several additional dimensions, including:
1) Age: This filter is extremely important for aesthetic physicians who typically have a target market of about 30-65. Since Facebook is full of teenagers, and even children, this is a good starting point for doing advertising.
2) Geography: While your practice might offer “vacation packages” for people to fly in from all over the world to see you and have their surgery performed at your clinic, you’ll probably want to restrict this to the metropolitan of your practice.
3) Gender: In most practices nearly three quarters, or more, of the patients are women. While you don’t want to lose out on potential male clients, you may want to strictly target females.
4) Relationship Status: This is an interesting dimension to look into. I’m sure most aesthetic practice’s have a mix of single, divorced and married patients. However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to target “single” women in their 40s and 50s to really hone in on the recently divorced. Unfortunately there is no “recently divorced” status.
One other idea to consider in regards to relationship status is engaged women. You can tailor an offer directly to engaged women that showcases your services and how they can take advantage of them before their wedding. I’m not saying that you need to take the crass approach like the example above, but targeting engaged women could be very profitable.
5) Education: While you have to have a lot of money to afford cosmetic surgery, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a college or advanced degree. Also, people may not have their college education listed on their profile.  I would avoid narrowing the campaign down with this parameter.
6) Likes & interests: This is an interesting dimension, but you’ll probably want to avoid it. Not everyone fills out this information, and your ads will only show up for people who have specific “likes” or “interests” that you designate. Most people don’t blatantly promote how much of an interest they have in cosmetic surgery.
So is Facebook advertising worth it? It might be. Just like any form of advertising, you don’t really know until you try it. That being said, if you are going to invest your money into Facebook advertising make sure you take the time to know your target market and use that information when you set up your account. You’ll also want a compelling offer, a nicely designed ad, and a landing page to drive the traffic to in order to generate leads.
If you have any questions about Facebooks ads or getting set up on Facebook please contact TRBO ADvance today or call 877-673-7096 x708.
