Facebook Ads: Take Your Social Strategy to the Next Level

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast. The only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: Hey, everybody, really excited to have you on Ignite today, I’ve got Landon with us. He’s our Director of Paid Social Advertising and Cardinal, comes from some of the biggest agencies in the country, but most importantly comes from Cardinal. We’re going to talk about how he’s helping healthcare marketing groups grow. Today, we’re going to focus on organic social versus, or plus paid social.

Landon, we got a lot of prospects coming to prospective clients, medical practices, healthcare orders coming to us and saying, I want you to evaluate our organic social posts, or I want to do more on social, are they paying attention to the right things? Does that need to be done? Is it paid social or bust? What’s your feeling?

Landon Daugherty: Yes, I think there’s a lot of conversations around that. I think for larger brands, that it’s important to have a solid organic strategy, just to make sure that you are part of the community and make sure that the users are really building that loyalty component of it. When you think of gaining customers, and you think of the bottom line, paid social is more important than organic, and that is for especially small businesses and businesses that are trying to attract customers and really get conversions on the bottom line.

Organic is definitely a part and it can have a role in how successful your paid social is, but it’s really building the brand from the organic side of thing, and then capitalizing on that from the paid side, that’s really how you looked at it.

Alex: If I’m a small business, you’re saying it’s focused on the paid?

Landon: Yes, definitely, I would focus on paid. Paid in the sense of using brand awareness, because really what you want to do outside of– Really we at Cardinal, we steer away from boosting posts as much as possible because really boosted post is really just reaching a small percentage of your already engaged audience. Whereas if you put that into a paid promotion, and use the brand awareness objective, you’re reaching almost 100 times what you would have got from your boosted posts.

Really, for small businesses, that money is best a brand awareness campaign, target as many people as you can, get the maximum out of reach, really inform people about what your brand has to offer, and then you can capitalize on those audiences later, whenever you have a product that you want to push and get conversions from. There’s definitely a marriage between organic and paid where organic plays a great role is that if you have limited creative on the paid side, you can look at your top-performing organic posts, and repurpose those into a paid promotion.

That’s the way that we boost posts at Cardinal is really utilizing the top organic posts, do the same, create insane copy, push it to a more engaged audience through the paid side, and really just capitalize on that already engaging ad unit to a new audience.

Alex: Okay, that’s really smart, so that’s the extension of boost, but so organic, it’s almost like the foundation of the home, you need it, because when your potential patients or the patient’s sister or whoever is checking you out, you have to look like you’re you are a real business with real people doing nice things, beautiful facilities, nice providers, good video testimonials of everybody. We need to have that stuff, but once that foundation is set, and you have enough of a keep it trickling in, but it’s not a method to increase net new patient volume. It only– [crosstalk].

Landon: It’s got a lead generation. Yes, it’s not a lead generation driver, it’s more of a community engagement when that loyalty component of the brand, to making sure that your brand image is at the par, and you’re engaging with people that are already familiar with your brand. You really want to use paid to get those incremental customers and really move the bottom line, but at the same time, have your organic strategy that nurtures your already bought-in users and make sure that they continue to be part of your brand for the foreseeable future.

Alex: Very good. We get the question all the time, we got a 30 location site group right now that wants us to really evaluate the organic presence. They have all the video facility testimonials like they’re not posted, like guys, that’s enough you need to go to the paid side, and they are spending a lot on pay. That’s where they need to dump in the extra dollars, like more organic content’s not going to really move the needle once you have enough of that foundation set.

Landon: Correct.

Alex: Okay, all right, I got you and I loved your idea over the form of boosting a post is really taking the organic content creative that works really well and then running an ad set. Landon, are you always uploading different things like their patient lists? Are even allowed to do that with HIPAA? What are we allowed to do? What are you doing for our groups?

Landon: Yes, really, if they do have a CRM system where it anonymizes a lot of the personal information, then we can use that. Really what we do is we rely on sort of the funnel system that we have in place on paid to really nurture users throughout the journey. That happens with putting a small percentage of your budget to brand awareness, utilizing only video creative, and then with those video creatives, you’re getting video engages that third percentage level.

Facebook allows you to track users that have watched 25%, 50%, and 75%, or 100% of your videos. Obviously, those are users that are at different stages of their journey, so we use that in our targeting. We run a brand awareness campaign, see people that have watched at least six of our videos, those are engaged users. We funnel those down into conversion driving campaign, and that’s how we lower CPAs for all of our clients is really building a funnel structure that we can continually hit our consumers until they’re ready to purchase.

Alex: You do the best you can with the top of the funnel awareness you’re like, interest in activities if you’re going for orthopedic surgery, or like interested spot, if you do the best you can that’s, it is what it is, and then they watch how much we cut out 75 seconds a minute, 75%. What is the–

Landon: It’s usually 50%, so 50% is their margin, and really with brand awareness campaigns, those are campaigns that we try to get within or under 60 seconds. Really, our targeted range is 30 seconds to 60 seconds for brand awareness campaigns. Then we target people that have watched 50%, so either 15 seconds or 30 seconds of those videos, then target those users because they are already familiar with our brand.

Really, you use brand awareness to fill out what product they would be interested in, so you use a lot of different creative in your brand awareness. If you have a whole different product line, you have specific videos for all those products within your brand awareness and you really find what resonates with your user before you target them and your conversion. It’s really about pre-qualifying your users to make sure that you have the highest conversion rate on your bottom line.

Alex: Different than Google search. You know creative matters more lately because the landing pages matter the messaging has to be [unintelligible 00:06:46] creative-driven on Facebook and you really start at the top of the funnel to grab people that hopefully trickle down into your furthermore complex, more difficult to get a direct CPA and understand exactly how to increase lower budgets are going to affect CPA. Man, it’s an art what you’re doing, Landon. It’s art.

Landon: Yes, it’s always a battle trying to get clients to buy into porting out it’s a small percentage of our budget for brand awareness. Really, what you have to do is just show the conversion rate percentage increase on the bottom line from enacting that strategy, because really, you just have to have that initial buy-in and then once you have those users it’s a constant funnel that just builds itself month in and month out that you can capitalize on.

Alex: Alright healthcare marketers, you heard it from Landon brand awareness matters, don’t measure everything against the CPA. You’ve got to run a portion of your budget and accept that it will feed your funnel and make everything downstream more efficient. You have to accept that Facebook is not Google, it’s a different beast, and sometimes a better one, so you just have to play the game differently, it takes a different mindset. I love it Landon, hugely informational. Can’t wait to have you back on Ignite. Thank you for sharing all your wisdom with us.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing, subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review, for more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.

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