July 8, 2014
Just four months ago, Brazzell Marketing Agency published an article titled “In This Digital Age, What is the Best Way to Reach Doctors?” Through a process of elimination, we demonstrated that personal contact and direct mail were not only the best ways to reach a local group of doctors, they were virtually the only ways to reach a local group of doctors. Well, that information has already changed. Facebook recently launched new ad targeting capabilities that will allow adroit advertisers to target their ads specifically to certain health care professions. Those professions include doctors, nurses, and social workers. So now, you have a new and exciting medium through which you can deliver ads designed specifically for doctors. A budget of only $259 is a realistic budget to make a targeted Facebook campaign work (including design fees). For professionally designed and implemented campaigns, simply contact Brazzell Marketing Agency at (866) 272-3799 or email Results@BrazzellMarketing.com to get a conversation started.
Advantages of Facebook Advertising to Referral Sources:
- Remarkably Low Cost: When Brazzell Marketing Agency sets up Facebook advertising campaigns for clients, we are achieving a cost per impression of about $0.004 and a cost per click of about $0.85. If you mail 1,000 brochures specifically for doctors, you will typically pay $1,200 for the whole project. That’s a cost per impression of $1.20 for doctors. If you pay a community liaison $50,000 annually to visit referral sources and they make a marketing impression on 300 referral sources per month, that’s a cost per impression of $13.89 not counting any sales collateral they may have handed out. So the Facebook advertising to doctors may be the lowest cost per impression available to local home health agencies and physical therapy practices marketing to medical referral sources.
- Real Advertising Impressions: Even though they are not the same thing, people often like to compare Facebook advertising with search advertising. One of the many disadvantages with search advertising is that the ads tend to not support the brand or any sales message a consumer would be able to associate with the brand later in life. Facebook advertising is more like traditional newspaper advertising. You get to present a proper ad with images, color, logo, fonts, and a moderately sized sales message. Even though you are likely to get a useful number of clicks on the ad, even doctors who are not clicking on the ad are seeing a real ad that can tout a sales strength and be remembered in the future. Facebook is simultaneously click advertising for immediate action and traditional advertising for affecting the memory and long-term behavior of target audiences.
- Getting Past Gatekeepers: A home health community liaison or physical therapy sales rep can be the hardest impression to get past a gatekeeper, because gatekeepers seek to protect the time and productivity of decision-makers. Effectively designed direct-mail campaigns specifically for doctors can be effective at opening doors that were previously closed, but even mail gets screened to a large extent by gatekeepers. Now consider Facebook. It’s direct to the user. When your ad distributed only to doctors registers ad views and clicks, you know a gatekeeper was not screening that. The doctor accessed it personally.
- Ad Effectiveness Testing: Depending on how you set up your advertising, Facebook lets you design multiple ads and try each of them under your one advertising budget. Likewise, Brazzell Marketing Agency will design multiple versions of Facebook ads for the usual one-ad-design fee. The system will track which ads are getting the most clicks, and start showing those ads more often than the ads which are less effective. However, the system will also rotate your various ads with one person. So if they don’t click on your most popular ad, the system will then show them your second most popular ad to see if they respond to that. You will find that running several ads gets more clicks than running just your most popular ad. This system of ad testing and rotation very much maximizes your overall budget effectiveness compared to other media that can’t or don’t offer this sort of automatic effectiveness enhancement. It’s often difficult to predict exactly which design will prove most effective. In one case, we designed the exact same ad with the difference that one had a blue background and the other a red background. The ad with the red background got triple the click -through rate. In another case, among several ads, the one that used the most straightforward and least-hyped language proved the most effective. However, we are currently running an ad set where the most-hyped language is proving most effective. We are finding that the trick is to design a variety of ads thinking of the different personalities who may be reading them.
Disadvantage of Facebook Advertising to Referral Sources:
- Don’t over-interpret this, but Facebook can only give you a limited penetration into your local medical-referral-source market. A whopping 58% of Americans (of all types) use Facebook. That’s impressive, but that still leaves 42% who don’t. In addition, only a percentage of doctors will have input enough information into their personal Facebook profiles to enable Facebook to identify them as potential referral sources for home health or physical therapy. Because of the limited penetration into the medical-referral-source target audience, Facebook advertising would typically be a supplement to the sales and advertising plan of an established home health agency or physical therapy practice. For a more central, well-established marketing plan for established agencies and practices, see our Referral Doubling Strategy. Limited penetration doesn’t mean don’t use the Facebook advertising. It only means recognize the limitations as you allot your advertising budget. However, for a start-up agency or practice that could not afford deeper market penetration anyway, a Facebook marketing plan targeted to doctors and other medical referral sources could be a good choice as a central component of the advertising strategy.
If you would like to explore the idea of a Facebook advertising campaign targeted very specifically to local doctors, medical referral sources, parents, senior citizens, or some other specific group, please contact Brazzell Marketing Agency now: Contact Us