Facebook Marketing for the Specialty Lens Practice

We optometrists spend a lot of time educating ourselves about new procedures, new technology, and improved techniques. In the end, it’s all for one purpose: bringing new services to our patients. Unfortunately, the educational piece is not enough. In order to be successful, practitioners need an effective marketing platform to engage and retain new patients. As marketing continues to shift from traditional paper (eg, yellow pages, newspapers) to online media (eg, Facebook, Instagram), practitioners need to adapt and evolve to remain visible in a saturated online market.

Regrettably, offering a great product or service is no longer enough to find and keep patients. With the countless disruptors in our industry, we have to do more to break through and stand out. This may seem a bit overwhelming for the practitioner without a million-dollar marketing budget, but, fortunately, online social media platforms can help business owners reach large audiences effortlessly, effectively, and economically. In the next few paragraphs, I will show you how to take your contact lens practice to the next level with a small budget and careful planning.

WHY FACEBOOK?

It’s important to understand the various social media platforms when you decide to get started with online marketing. Success can be found with many different networks: Pinterest hosts 250 million monthly active users¹; Twitter averages 6,000 tweets a second²; and platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok surpass the 1 billion user mark on a monthly basis.³

But who is the biggest player of them all? Facebook leads in both the number of active users and time spent on the platform.³ That doesn’t guarantee, however, that your marketing efforts will be successful there. In order to get the attention of an audience, we have to play the marketing game. Fortunately, Facebook supplies us with multiple tools to win at that game.

The best way to understand how to use Facebook effectively for your practice is to start by thinking how you use Facebook on a personal level. Think about it: Do you follow your dentist or primary care doctor on social media? Most likely not. Facebook is designed to connect you to things you may be potentially interested in. For some, that’s connecting with long-lost family or friends. For others, it’s keeping up with fashions, tech devices, or news.

To achieve a successful Facebook campaign, we have to pull the user away from those other things. This is done through distraction marketing. We need to become that shiny little object that catches their attention.

You might think, “The average person is not interested in the benefits of specialty contact lenses, no matter how I present it.” I beg to differ. Follow me as I create a simple campaign around myopia management while also tapping into potential patients’ interests.

THE POWER OF THE PLATFORM

The power behind Facebook’s marketing has everything to do with the information the company collects about its users. Facebook not only tracks a user’s demographic information (age, gender, etc.), it also collects financial status, where one went to school, political affiliations, websites visited, etc.

This can be scary for some users, but it is amazing for the marketer. I’ll show you how to apply this feature in marketing myopia management for your practice. But first, make sure you have a Facebook Business Account.

Once you log into your business account, you can promote your content. Facebook offers several marketing goals, but for the purpose of this tutorial let’s focus on the “Get More Bookings” tabs (Figure 1).

After opening this section, you can create your ad. You can write your message, post a picture, and set the location of your audience. There is a lot to be discussed here, but for the purpose of this article I want to jump ahead to targeting.

TARGETING VIEWERS

As I mentioned earlier, we use distraction marketing to grab users’ attention. We do this by taking advantage of what we know about their interests. Here’s how we can use the data Facebook collects to promote our myopia management practice.

Within the ad creation section, in an area called “Audience” (Figure 2), you can change the settings of your demographic and who views your ad. You can select people in your area and people who have previously liked your page, but let’s focus on your targeting ability.

Targeting opens up a world of information. With a quick scan, you can see the type of information Facebook is collecting. General categories include demographics, interests, and behaviors. Clicking around a little more, you’ll see that you can reach people based on their education, employment, household, activities, intents, device usage, etc. (Figure 3).

But how can we use all this to promote myopia management? Under the family section, the software catalogues parents with children of a specific age.

This creates an extremely targeted audience. Let’s take it a step further. Maybe your office offers myopia management at a premium price range, and you want to target higher income earners. What about interests? Clicking through this section, you can find and select interests that align with your ideal audience.

So what did we just create? An extremely targeted audience that includes high income earners who have children between the ages of 3 and 12 years and who are interested in becoming better parents. Your Facebook ad will be shown only to this audience.

As you move on to finish the ad, you will see that the pricing is reasonable. Facebook allows you to set the calendar of how long the ad will run and how much you want to spend per day (Figure 4). As you modify the numbers, Facebook tells you how many people your ad will reach per day and how many will likely click your ad. Remember, you pay only when a user clicks on your ad, not for the ad to be displayed.

For example, if we agree to spend $10/day for 10 days, Facebook projects to reach 230 to 664 users per day with about nine to 27 clicks per day. Do the math. This platform is connecting you with an ideal audience of 2,300 to 6,640 people, all for $100.

MARKETING SMART

Generating traffic into your practice doesn’t require a huge budget or time, just smart marketing, practice, and a little patience. The good news is that platforms such as Facebook offer multiple tools designed to ensure your success.