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Is Social Media Advertising Right for Your Practice?
Social Media Advertising can be a useful method of driving prospective patients to established and new practices alike. However, deciding when it’s time to include social ads into your marketing strategy isn’t always a simple task. Below you’ll find a few key factors to consider when deciding if social ads are a good match for your practice!
Your Online Presence
The very first thing you need to check before running social ads is to make sure that you already have a professional-looking business page on Facebook or Instagram. Even if you aren’t using ads to directly promote your Facebook or Instagram pages, any ads shown through these networks will include a clickable profile picture with your business name that will allow people to see the page you used to create them.
As such, make sure that your Facebook and Instagram presence is all updated, branded correctly, and ready to receive any leads that might come through ads indirectly.
Along the same lines, it’s important to have an updated website. An excellent website can provide great landing pages for ads to gather leads and additional traffic data. Plus, it can also give additional information to your potential patients regarding who you are, your available services, and offer an easy way to book appointments. What’s more, when using tracking codes and Facebook pixels you can always gather traffic data from your site and use it for retargeting campaigns later on.
Available Time and Budget
Any successful advertising strategy involves data-driven decisions. Thankfully, a huge benefit of social Ads is the additional data they provide on who is actually engaging with your content. This means your business can limit guesswork and adjust your campaigns based on hard numbers as your goals and results change over time. Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that will guarantee you results so your business needs to have the time and budget to test different approaches, offers, and audiences to optimize your results.
Business Goals
Social ads can be employed at any stage of the business cycle but you need to make sure you are using them correctly based on your practice’s unique goals and needs. For example, if you’re a new practice with little website traffic and no current customer lists, you might be better off creating ads to generate exposure to speed up the process of building your core customer base.
Likewise, if you already have a substantial customer list and have exhausted other marketing channels, social media ads can provide you with an untapped market to generate more new patients. Regardless of what your goals are, social ads are best utilized when boosting/intensifying growth. As a result, make sure you couple them with an organic marketing strategy for the best possible results.
In short, social media advertising can be an effective marketing solution for most practices. Just make sure you evaluate your existing social media presence, the time and money you have available to dedicate towards social media advertising, and a strong awareness of what you’re practice wants to achieve via social ads.
As always, please feel free to reach out to us with any related questions you may have!
—Jonathan Giraldo, SEO Specialist, Sesame Communications