From acquisition to repeat visits, the results of social media ad campaigns for physiotherapists can work…
But only when they’re done right otherwise all you’ll have to show for your £££ are some clicks, shares, and visits.
And NO new patients!
There are many reasons why clinics — especially those that manage their social ads on their own — find it difficult to run successful paid promotions. Today we’re looking at some key areas and how you can avoid making mistakes.
1. Not Understanding where social ads fit into your growth plan
The social PPC channel works in tandem with your overarching marketing strategy.
So you can’t just go ahead and launch a social media ad campaign — or a general PPC campaign, for that matter — whenever you feel like it. You need to be able to tell how — and if at all — it fits in your marketing mix.
For example, if you’re looking to boost your daily footfall by X% by the next quarter, a social media PPC campaign where you retarget the people who land on your website and belong to your target location but never turned into patients makes sense.
Perhaps you could use social media ads to boost brand awareness and break into local audiences, introducing them to your services and converting a percentage of them.
Alternatively, if you’re looking at better engagement and retention (instead of conversions), you might want to build upon social channels so they serve those touchpoints between a patient discovering you to returning for multiple sessions. For example, for a physiotherapist, this might generate 3 to 10 repeat appointments over a six month period.
The point is this:
Unless you know WHAT you’re trying to achieve with social ads, you aren’t going to achieve it.
2. Being poor at logistics
Your ad creatives (design and copy) and how you set up your campaigns (your account setup including how you structure your campaigns, ad sets, ads, audience targeting, bid management, etc.) determine how many (relevant) people you can reach with your ads, what it’ll cost, and your conversion/engagement rates.
When you screw this part up, you pay for it — both with your ad spend and with lost conversions.
3. Failing to optimize
Just like paid search advertising, social advertising can become more cost-effective and generate more ROI over time. Analyzing campaign performance is key.
For example, if certain targeting criteria don’t seem to be producing results, trying multiple versions and split testing can instantly boost your ROI.
Features like split testing are crucial. Here, you get to run different versions of the same ad to find the one that converts the best. This alone can stop you from spending on non-performing ads and improve your cost per acquisition. Facebook research suggests that split testing ads could bring CPA down by a whopping 72%!
Delving deeper into the data also helps because sometimes the ad campaigns are just fine, the real problem actually lies in the post-ad funnel. Thorough full-funnel evaluations can show where the leads actually drop off.
To use these optimization opportunities you need to understand what your social media ad metrics are actually telling you.
Looking for someone to actually generate ROI for your social media ads? Or at least look over what you’re doing and get (no obligations) suggestions for improvement? Get in touch.
