Since starting out in 2001, there are now over 1.65 billion active Facebook users across the world. Speak to your friends, your family or your colleagues and the chances are a lot of them will be using Facebook. So how does this apply to your aesthetic practice? We take a look at the importance of having a Facebook Business Page for your aesthetic clinic and outline some tips and tricks to maximise your efforts.
What is a Facebook Business Page?
A Facebook Business Page allows you to extend your clinic services to a wider audience as well as engage with your current clients. On your Facebook Business Page you can add your contact details, create a portfolio of before and after photographs, gather reviews from your clients and much more. It’s purpose may be slightly different depending on your circumstances:
- If you are just setting up your aesthetic practice and don’t have the money to invest in building your own website, a Facebook Business Page can act as a website on your behalf making it a great place to start connecting with potential clients.
- If you already have a website but are looking for ways to boost your marketing efforts and reach a wider audience, Facebook may be just what you’re looking for.
Benefits of a Facebook Business Page for your Aesthetic Clinic
In an industry obsessed with talking about our looks and the latest celebrity treatment Facebook becomes a fantastic platform to discuss, inform and advertise our services. The main benefits include:
- Brand Awareness – Allowing your clinic to be discoverable on Facebook means you can build your brand and reach a wider audience
- Engagement – Stay connected with your current clients by asking them to like you on Facebook. The people that like your Facebook Page are interested in the services you provide so it is an extremely targeted form of advertising
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – We won’t go into this in detail (we’ll leave that for another blog) but we do know that Google takes social signals into account. So if you are seen to be active on social media this will help your business rank in Google when someone is searching for your brand
- Know your audience – Integrated into your Facebook Business Page is Facebook Insights so you can begin to understand what your customers are interested in, what they’re liking, sharing and talking about. This means you can adjust the content you’re posting so that people become more engaged over time.
Creating a Facebook Business Page is a cheap and easy way of marketing your services to potential customers. If you’re not tech-savvy then don’t panic because Facebook has a fantastic support network meaning you’ll be able to get your page set up in a matter of minutes.
Click here to see Facebook’s guide to setting up your business page
So you’ve set up your Facebook Business Page, you’ve entered in your clinic information, now what?
Build your Audience
As we said, Facebook allows you to reach a wider audience but most importantly, it allows you to reach the people who are actually interested in having cosmetic treatments.
Your first step is to like your business page yourself and share it on your personal Facebook account (if you have one). This means if your friends are interested in having non-surgical treatments they can like your business page and stay up to date with what’s on offer.
The second thing to do is invite your current customers:
- Add links from your website to your Facebook page
- Include your Facebook page in email correspondence with clients
- Include your Facebook url on all print advertising
- Basically just shout about it!
Top Tip
If you have a list of clients’ email addresses you can actually upload these into your Facebook Business Page so that they get notified that you are now on Facebook. Nifty, eh? Find out more here.
Now for the fun part…
Start Posting!
Start posting updates, before and after photos, client testimonials, treatment videos, upcoming events, offers, news articles, anything you can think of! Just test a few different types of posts and see what works and engages your customers. We’d recommend posting a couple of times a day so you’re consistently reaching out to your audience.
Importantly, it’s not purely about the content that you post. The aim of your Facebook posts is to engage your audience and start a conversation. That means you need to make sure you get notified when someone comments on a post or sends you a direct message. We recommend downloading the Facebook Pages app on your mobile device and turn on push notifications so no matter where you are, you can respond to your clients.
Top Tip
Use the 80:20 rule. You don’t want to bombard your potential clients with information about you. You want to be informing them about treatments, the benefits they can get, any informative blogs you have and industry news: ‘What’s Kim Kardashian had done this month?’, ‘Has Katie Price had any more procedures?’ This is what people are actually interested in. So try and keep 80% of your content informing your patients and 20% of your content about your clinic directly and the services you provide.
Facebook Advertising
If you notice that a particular post you’ve sent out is receiving a lot of engagement you can do something called ‘Boosting a Post’. This means you pay a set amount of money to reach a larger audience such as friends of those who liked your page. It’s inexpensive, extremely targeted and you can turn it on and off with the click of a button.
Facebook advertising is an amazing tool to reach a specific client base. You can create targeted adverts that reach people based on things like gender, age, location and interests. Let’s go through an example. Say I wanted to advertise that my Birmingham-based clinic now does the 8 Point Facelift.
First thing I would do is choose my objective which in this case I want to be clicks to my 8 Point Facelift website page. I would then work out my audience, let’s say:
- Gender: Female
- Age: 35 – 60
- Location: Birmingham + 40km radius
- Interests: Beauty Treatments, Skincare, Facial, Anti-Ageing
I would then set a budget and a timeframe for my advert. So I want to spend a maximum of £3 per day and just run it continuously until I decide to turn it off. (You can adjust all of these settings at any time so they’re not set in stone).
You will then need:
- A compelling image – in this case it could be a before and after photograph
- Some text describing the treatment
- The url of the page you want them to click on to
Then voila! You now have an advert that will appear in the Facebook newsfeed of potential clients who fit your 8 Point Facelift profile in your local area. And hopefully that will start generating traffic to your website! Easy as that!
Important
With Facebook there are a few things to be careful of. If you are posting Facebook adverts, they will decline your ad if you can see the injection in the picture. Also be careful when advertising the word Botox. As it is a POM you can get reported for discounting and advertising Botox treatments. So just be vigilant.
We hope if you’re considering setting up a Facebook Business Page this has offered you some insight into how it can benefit your aesthetic clinic and some tips on how to maximise these benefits. If you have any questions on setting up your page or any other elements of marketing your practice please don’t hesitate to contact us.
P.S If you’d like updates on what we’re up to here at Cosmetic Courses you can like our Facebook Page here!
