Facebook Adverts – Why and How!

Having a Facebook page for your practice is now as important as having a website. Facebook gives you a constant line of communication with existing and potential clients. It allows you to easily tell people about your latest offers or services and promote your speciality skills, knowledge and practice USPs! Veterinary Practices with a Facebook page reap rewards such as increased client loyalty, increased client spend and brand new clients too. But the big question; once you’ve got a Facebook page, how do you get people to find it and engage? We think that the most cost effective and reliable way of getting more clients finding and engaging with your page is by using Facebook PPC Ads.

Facebook Likes; why they are important

On Facebook only people who have ‘liked’ your page will see your posts. If I like your page, your posts will show in my Facebook Newsfeed alongside all the posts from my friends and other pages I’ve Liked. This is a compelling place for your content to be seen – it encourages me to think of your business as I would think of my friends and to engage with it in a similar way; instantly, socially, positively (rather than seeing you as a company trying to sell to me). Add to that that if I engage with your content, not only is my relationship with you stregnthened, but my friends will see my engagement too; I am spreading virtual word of mouth recommendations.

For this reason, you want as many existing and potential clients to like your page as possible. So that each of the posts that you take time to write, gets seen by the maximum number of people; making your page a more efficient business tool. 

What are Facebook PPC Ads?

There are two types of ways to advertise on Facebook.

1) Advertise to local pet owners (through targeted campaigns), via small static adverts with a clear call to action and an eye-catching (and relevant) image.

These ads will link to your Facebook page and aim to increase the amount of people who like your page (and therefore the amount of people that will see your posts). These ads are only shown to people who don’t already like your page.

Pay Per Click means that Facebook will show these adverts for free, but will charge you every time somebody clicks on them (see below for advice on managing your ad campaigns to get the best results and ensure clicks aren’t wasted).

This type of Facebook advertsing aims to encourage potential clients to find and like your page and then start engaging with you online, hopefully leading to visiting you offline and becoming a client.

2) Facebook is a competitive place, to prioritise which content to show, it uses an algorithm called Edge Rank. For example on my Facebook newsfeed I see a lot of posts from friends and pages that I interact with most, that use Facebook the most, or that have a generally large following. Therefore, for your content to get shown you need to:

• Post frequently.
• Get engagement on posts.
• Get likes on your page. 

To beat the algorithm, another method of Facebook PPC advertising is to promote your individual posts (to fans AND to non-fans) to better your chances of exposure and engagement. Remember; their engagement spreads your content out to their friends while reinforcing their relationship with you. As with method 1, this type of advertising also aims to increase page likes but is used primarily for increasing engagement.

This type of advertising is especially useful when promoting specific events or offers (see below for more details on how to choose which posts to promote or boost).

Our general advice when running Facebook PPC Ad Campaigns:

– Your Facebook page must deliver what you promise in your advert copy. Getting people to click on adverts on Facebook is relatively easy, ensuring people then like or engage with your page as a result is much harder. Being sure that what your page delivers is what your ad promises is vital to encourage costly clicks to become valuable page likes.

– Experiment with lots of varied ads and keep improving the ones that work best. Your budget is set so you can make multiple ads without increasing your spend. Closely monitor these ads to see which of them attracts the best quality traffic. Constantly delete / alter / improve the ads based on their performance.

– Don’t only create ads to encourage new likes. Also use the promote posts tool within the back end of ad management and the boost posts tool at the front end.

– Be tactical with which posts you promote; you should pick posts that have proven potential for virality. This will be through previous engagement of posts but it is worth also trying to promote more commercial information if you’re taking ROI into account.

– Make sure your ads are monitored at least monthly.

– Make ads current and topical; reflecting practice offers / new Facebook functionality / big news stories etc.

– Make sure ads are mobile friendly. A huge amount of people will only use Facebook on their smartphone so ads need to be compatible.

We Can Help

If you’re unsure of how to manage a successful Facebook Ad campaign, we are on hand! We can run your campaign for just £75 per month +your Facebook ad budget (paid directly to Facebook with no mark up from us). We send monthly reports which include all the statistics (number of clicks, number of new likes, spend, best performing ads, etc) plus our strategy for the month ahead. If you’d like to know more please just contact us and a member of the team would be delighted to talk you through it!