If you have decided that you want to try to promote your practice on Facebook, what is the correct Facebook advertising strategy for your therapy practice? What steps do you need to take to make Facebook advertising successful? How will you know if your Facebook advertising is effective?
Here are some practical guidelines for plotting your Facebook strategy.
Prerequisite: Build a Facebook business page
Your Facebook Page is part of your practice’s digital presence. It opens one more avenue to make your practice discoverable (when people search for you on Facebook, they’ll be able to find you). Even more important, your Facebook business page can help you get the word out about your practice.
Building a Facebook business page is not difficult. (If you are already a TherapyEverywhere client, it’s even easier. As part of your monthly Grow Package or Super Grow Package, TherapyEverywhere will design and implement your business page at no cost.)
Start promoting your Facebook business page in your own network
If you have already established a Facebook business page, the first step is to reach out to your network of friends, colleagues and relatives. Ask them to visit your Facebook business page, comment on the page and “Like” the page.
Do a sanity check – is your Facebook business page effective?
Once you have gotten a bunch of “Likes”, make a new post to the page and track how many people follow the post back to your web site.
If people are following the post back to your web site, it means that you have compelling content and it’s time to consider Facebook advertising. If you aren’t getting people to click through from your Facebook business page back to your site, your first step should be to improve your posts!
Setup your Facebook advertising campaign for best effect
Effective, carefully planned Facebook ads can extend your reach, drive targeted groups to your site, and help you grow your practice.
A poorly planned or executed campaign can drain your wallet!
Prepare at least two (preferably more) versions of your ad.
Geographic focus
There wouldn’t seem to be much point in spending your hard earned money on attracting people who are outside of your catchment area. However flattering it might be to have a following in Singapore, keep your ad focused on who is likely to be a client or a referral source.
- Focus your ad on people who are in your catchment area.
Interest marketing
When focusing your Facebook advertising strategy, consider custom audiences, interests, broad categories, gender and age.
Custom Audiences is an ad targeting option that helps you find your existing audience among people who are on Facebook. Then, Facebook can extrapolate to find similar potential clients for you. Custom audiences is a way to put big data to work for you.
Specifying interests is a way to reach people with an interest that’s similar to what you’re offering. Consider a therapist who offers counseling for children who are being bullied. It is likely that their parents will have expressed interest in a group or other content related to bullying.
Broad Categories is a blunt instrument that can be very effective. Imaging that your practice wants to attract clients to a parenting group. Reaching people who are parents is going to be more effective than reaching everybody.
Gender and age can be equally powerful. Are you seeking to attract retirees? Then set your age range to accordingly. Are you targeting women who have been in abusive relationships? Then, set gender and age.
Monitor your results – is your campaign effective?
Our typical suggestion is to run the campaign for 10 days and to measure the results on site traffic and on new requests for appointments. How many new visitors to your site do you get? How often do visitors from Facebook “bounce” from your site? How many any new visitors to your site do you get do you get?
Consider reaching out for help to experts who have run Facebook and other digital promotions for therapists. Your hard-earned dollars are too valuable to spend on advertising that is less than effective. At TherapyEverywhere.com we will be happy to provide a free consultation for Facebook advertising. Just fill out the contact form and click Send or call now.