Using Facebook to generate leads for your practice is both smart and cost-effective. As an advertising platform, Facebook is incredibly versatile and offers easy and affordable ways to target your ads and reach the largest audience possible, therefore setting up a Facebook sales funnel should be a priority for any medical practice.
However, a Facebook ad is only the first step in your sales funnel. If you want your ads to be effective, you need to use them as an entry point for new patients. Once they click your ad, the click should set them on a journey that ends with them making an appointment and coming into your office.
What are the Components of an Effective Sales Funnel?
If you want to set up an effective sales funnel on Facebook that will help attract new patients to your practice, you need to know what the components of an effective sales funnel are. Let’s look at them one at a time:
- An irresistible offer. The first step in any sales funnel is the irresistible offer. Often described in the headline of your ad, the offer has to target the pain of your patients. What do they hope to get from your services? What are the things that cause them pain or discomfort, and what can you do to relieve them? Those are the questions to ask when you are writing your ad. Your headline, and the rest of your ad content, should speak directly to your potential patients and be impossible for them to resist. For example, a chiropractor might offer a free guide to alleviating back pain at home. For someone with chronic back problems, such an offer would be irresistible.
- Easy contact information. If you are targeting mobile customers – and you should be – consider using Facebook’s “Call now” feature on your ad. It will display a button that allows mobile users to call your practice simply by pushing the button on their phone. Most users will probably want to get the free offer, but there may be a few who want to call you, too. Why not make it easy for them?
- A professional and compelling opt-in page. Once a prospective patient clicks on your ad, they will be re-directed to your website. The page you direct them to is your landing page, so it is very important that the information on your page be in line with what you say in your ad. You don’t want to run an ad directed at neuropathy patients and then direct them to page that addresses something other than neuropathy. You don’t have to have the exact same headline on your page that you have in your ad, but they have to be related to one another. It should be clear to the patient that they’ve ended up in the right place to get the irresistible offer you’ve promised in your ad.
- An easy opt-in process. The goal of your opt-in page is to get patients to give you their email addresses in return for your irresistible offer. You know that the people who click on the ad want what you’re offering, but that doesn’t mean that you can make the opt-in process complicated. Web users are notoriously impatient and are likely to hit the dreaded “Back” button if you give them a reason to do so. The easiest opt-in form is one that asks only for an email address. The user enters one piece of information in return for the offer. However, there is some benefit to personalizing emails – they tend to have slightly higher open rates than generic emails — so you may want to put two fields in your opt-in form: one for the patient’s first name, and one for their email address. If mobile marketing is part of your game plan, you might consider putting in an optional third field for customers to put in their mobile number.
- Immediate delivery of the irresistible offer. Some marketers will tell you to email your irresistible offer to the people who opt-in on your site, but the prospect of getting immediate access by being able to download the offer on your page is an attractive one to many internet users. If your offer is something simple, like a tip sheet or an eBook, let people download it immediately. It’s not any more difficult for you to do it that way, and it’s easier for them than it would be to wait for an email.
- Have a well-crafted series of follow-up emails on tap to send to people who opt-in to your list. This step is key because it is what will help you cultivate the leads you collect and turn them into paying patients. The secret to creating an effective email sequence is to focus on providing value to your patients. If every email you send is a hard sell of your practice, you’re going to end up with a high unsubscribe rate and a low return on your investment. Instead, think about what information you can provide to patients that would help them choose your practice. For example, you might highlight the treatments you provide for a particular diagnosis, share a video demonstration or a patient success story, or profile one of your staff members and talk about their experience treating patients. Any one of these options would provide significant value to your patients.
- End with a strong call to action. Even though your emails are intended to provide value to your patients, you should still end each one with a strong call to action. You want to remind patients that you are only a phone call (or an email) away, and encourage them to set up an appointment. If patients can book appointments online, you should link directly to your appointment page to make it easy for them to do so. It’s also a good idea to include your phone number in the email in case patients prefer to call and speak to someone before making an appointment.
The goal of a sales funnel is to take a lead and guide them progressively down the path toward becoming a paying – and hopefully a repeat – patient. As you can see, each step of the process helps provide patients with the information and incentive they need to trust you with their medical care. If you handle it properly, a significant percentage of your leads will end up in your office.
