It’s not unreasonable to say that in the aesthetics industry, whenever someone mentions social media, we instantly think of Instagram. It’s definitely the place where most aesthetics practitioners hang out..but is it where most of your potential patients are hanging out? 

Facebook is the most popular social media network for men and women aged 35-44. Yep, older Millennials love a bit of Facebook. Most likely because they were the early adopters of it and they’ve kinda grown up with it. They’re also, most likely, to be the patients with peak interest for antiaging treatments, so are you doing enough there, have you thought about giving advertising a go?

Why should aesthetic practitioners use Facebook?

As well as being another great channel to show people who you are, promote your clinic, your treatments, show off your work and engage with patients old and new, it provides big opportunities for you in terms of digital advertising - and it’s not as hard as you think and it doesn’t cost as much as you may expect. You can spend as little or as much as you want to reach new audiences and attract new patients

How do I do Facebook advertising?

It’s not as difficult as you might think and you don’t need to pay someone else to do it. You just have to have a little bit of confidence to give it a bash and an idea of what you want to say! It’s worth acquainting yourself the ASA guidance for non-surgical aesthetic treatments and keep in mind that it’s illegal to advertise prescription-only products - so no making adverts for Botox!

Create a Facebook business page

If you haven’t already, set up a Facebook business page. This is really a bit like creating your website so use your branding and aim to make it look professional with good quality images - a blurry, grainy photo of your clinic and a pixelated logo isn’t going to give your patients a great impression.

You can create a business page by clicking on ‘pages’ on your own Facebook profile. 

The good thing about creating a business page is that you can you get access to data and insights which tell you how well your posts perform and create adverts and  ‘audiences’ who you can target so you’ll be able to promote your clinic to a wider audience.

Facebook is good for non-surgical aesthetics clinics, as it’s allows for deeper content and the sharing of information and links to other content - whereas Instagram tends to be shorter, sharper and snappier.

Put some money behind it 

It can feel quite daunting to think about spending money on Facebook advertising but it isn’t just for big businesses. You’re not tied into any contracts, you have full control over how much you spend, whether it’s just 50p or £500 a day. You can pause it at any time too or just stop completely if you feel it’s not working for you.

Think about what you want to say

You can either boost a post you’ve already done or create a specific advert, but the main thing to consider is what your objective is from the content you are going to spend money on - ‘what do you want to get out of it?’ Do you just want more people to be aware of you or do you want people to click on your website? Do you want people to know something about you? Do you want to tell people about a treatment offer? Do you simply want to educate patients?

You can even create ‘campaigns’ where each campaign has a theme and then a number of adverts within each campaign. All of the adverts share the same objective of the overarching campaign.

Decide what format your ad may be

Okay, it’s getting more technical now but there are different ways in which you can present an advert.

• Single Image - create a number of adverts using single images

• Video

• Carousel - an advert with two or more scrollable images of video

• Slideshow - a looping video with up to 10 images 

Things you might want to promote: a new treatment, a treatment taking place, before and after images (make sure you have the patient’s permission!) your clinic space, skincare products you offer, open evenings/events or even yourself!

Decide who will see it

Facebook is pretty great as it has so much data on the people who use it, so you can really drill down on the types of people who you want to see your advert. 

There are a number of ways Facebook allows you to target different audiences. 

Customer audience: allows you to target existing customers, perhaps people already on your email database

Lookalike audience: Facebook will show your advert to people who resemble your current patients.

Gender - perhaps you want to appeal to the guys only - this is a great way of making sure as many men see your advert as possible.

Location – ask Facebook to show your advert to people only in your town or city

Interests - You can show your advert to anyone who has told Facebok they’re interested in health and beauty, surgical treatments, celebrities, fitness

Behaviour - allows you to target by past behaviour such as shopping behaviour, the phone they use, items they are looking to buy

Life events – for example you may wish to target someone who is about to get married or go on holiday

How many people see your advert in these different categories will largely depend on how much you spend. 

Money, Money, Money

As we’ve mentioned, it doesn’t really matter what your budget is. Big or small. But the more you spend, the more people you are likely to reach - but you can even spend as little as £1 a day and make some impact. You can set your limit by the day or give an overall spending limit.

Call To Action

Alongside the actual imagery you use in your advert, you’ll be able to add additional copy. It’s advisable to always include a call to action, ‘Book now’, ‘Find Out More’, ‘Click Here’ so you can identify direct results. There are various buttons available to help you achieve this. 

The scary science bit

Once you’ve launched your advert, you can see how it performs and tweak it, if necessary. This is what is known as ‘optimisation’ and there are thousands of marketing execs paid handsomely to do this day in, day out for their clients!

The key metrics to get your head around.  

• Cost-per-click – this gives you a monetary value of how much each click (engagement) costs; typically, the smaller the number, the cheaper the click

• Cost-per-conversion – similar to the cost-per-click but depending on what you have defined as a conversion –e.g an email, a booking, a phone call

• Impression – the greater the number, the more people who have seen your ads

• Unique link clicks – this shows the number of clicks from unique visitors. This metric counts people, not actions

Facebook provides you loads of bits of information such as audience demographics, and how long on average your content was viewed for - which all helps you to decide how successful your ads are performing. 

Give it a go!

If you’ve got the budget to try Facebook advertising it’s worth trying it. As with all marketing, it will be more successful if you’re consistent and keep your adverts refreshed with new imagery and copy.  Don’t be afraid of just going in and trying it out, you can’t really break anything. We do concede that it’s sometimes not the most intuitive system to use and Facebook tends to use terminology that is confusing, but there is heaps of guides and tutorials other people have done on Google and YouTube etc that can help you. Just remember, you can’t really do anything damaging (unless you make a really bad advert!) and if you don’t try you don’t know! Or…. you can just join GlowdayPRO and let us do your marketing for you ;-)