Optometry Facebook Ads
Have you ever run a Facebook Ad before? Want to know how you can get a bigger return on your next Ad?
Online ads are similar to fishing. You need to know where the fish are biting. And what bait to use.
Imagine fishing at a quiet location, with one type of bait. You wait for hours. Without even a nibble. Then pack up and head home.
Next day, you come back with multiple bait types or lures. Suddenly you’ve had two bites in ten minutes.
The same with online ads. A strategy helps you grow your online success. And grow your appointments and dispensing.
I heard a great podcast episode about online ads, and the importance of having multiple offers to different groups of patients/customers. In a nutshell, it involves creating a Grid (or System) for your ads, running the ads, and then increasing the most successful ads.
It’s called Perpetual Traffic. Feel free to check out Episode 33. It was awesome! I wanted to share this with you in an optometry setting.
Lets take an example of an optometry practice which wants to promote eye testing for teenagers.
What are the different people groups that you want to target? You may want to target Parents, Classroom Teachers, Tutors or Integration Aides, Educational Psychologists. You may want to even target the students themselves. (Facebook allows students who are at least 13 years of age or older to join.)
In this scenario, your goal is to increase appointments for high schoolers. This is the same across all groups. However, the messaging is different. For example, typing a Vision Report for a parent is different to writing to an Educational Psychologist.
What are the types of messages that online audiences like? In the podcast, six types of effective messaging were shown:
- Ownership– what will they have (that they didn’t have before) e.g. vision questionnaire audit,
- Feel– how will this make them feel differently e.g. boost your confidence in your next maths class, by improving your vision
- Average day– how will your patient’s day-to-day life be made easier or better because of better vision?
- Status– how top eyesight can you become a grade A student at school?
- Proof & Results– 150 students at a local school had vision screening. And we identified 30 students who may have borderline vision.
- Speed & Automation– How to make your homework faster and more comfortable
Lets say that you create a 10 minute quiz about near-related symptoms. For example, ‘how often do you suffer headaches?’ and rate from 1–5, where 1 represents no headaches, and 5 is all the time. Adding up the results gives the student a score. Scoring below a threshold prompts an eye examination.
How would this quiz be used across other groups?
- For parents, ‘Is your teenager struggling? Take our 10 minute quiz to find out if it could be eye-related.’
- For classroom teachers, ‘How well do you know the top 10 symptoms of poor eyesight in class? Take our 10 minute quiz to find out’
- For tutors, ’Is your student struggling to stay focussed? Test your knowledge of the top 10 symptoms of eystrain and headaches.
- For Educational Psychologists, ‘how well do you know the keys to visual information processing delays? Take our 10 minute quiz to find out.’
Tailoring your messages to different groups/avatars allows you to reach them more effectively.
In creating a system of ads, it’s important to write down what you would say in each offer. You could save this in different files (or different Evernote Pages).
After you have different groups of people to target, with different messages to present, it’s important to know where your audience hangs out online. This is called Avatar Research.
Perhaps your students like to spend time on Instagram, your parents on Facebook (and Pinterest), your Teachers on LinkedIn. Ask them what they read, whether it’s blogs, magazines, books or newspapers.
When you have this, you can create pictures or videos for each ad that you want to run. (Don’t let this scare you though- you can easily find a graphic designer online to do this for you. Or you can create them yourself. I love using the free iOS app called Adobe Post.) Since you have detailed information about your target audience, your message and where they like to hang out online, all the hard work is done. You can expect some great designs to come (or have some inspired moments if you create ads yourself.)
Finally, you can run each of the ads, and see which offer is most effective. For example, students may respond best to the offer about comparing their vision symptoms to a Grade A Student. Knowing that this boosts your appointments, you can show more of these ads to students in your area. Similarly, you can see which ads are performing best for Parents, Teachers, Tutors and Educational Psychologists.
This system (or thought process) may sound like work. However, you can apply it all for any future ads that you run. This may be with Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, or even offline ads. It also works for non-ads, such as posts on your work Facebook Page.
Next time you run an ad, or go fishing, don’t just use one lure. Try multiple types. See what works. Then enjoy the satisfaction of a good catch!
