As a result of the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies have created smaller physician networks, and for many patients, it comes as a surprise that the hospitals and physicians they’re accustomed to visiting are no longer in their networks.
Likewise, physicians are surprised that they are no longer in as many networks as they used to be.
Similarly, many larger academic medical centers find that they too are losing connection with patient populations due to these restructured networks.
Reconnecting with and engaging these more narrow networks is often a local or regional challenge, and as an urgent care or local comprehensive medical care facility, it is critical to have a strategy in place to connect you with ideally suited patients who are frequently in need of a trusted source of information, now, as they transition to the new healthcare landscape, and throughout the many changes in their life.
One of the most effective strategies a local medical practice or comprehensive medical care facility can use to accomplish this starts with a strong presence in the Facebook community, powered by Facebook’s many cost effective advertising opportunities.
Facebook has over 1 billion active users who spend more than fifteen minutes every per day catching up on the activity in their Facebook networks.
In the United States, 75% of the overall population is using Facebook.
Consequently, 75% of your potential patients are on Facebook, and you can connect with this target audience by providing them with educational, interesting and relevant content through your Facebook page.
Having an appropriate Facebook presence, through which you provide value while actively engaging your local community, is the basis of any successful Facebook marketing strategy.
Once you have an appropriate Facebook page for your practice or medical center, Facebook ads can be used to affect discovery of your practice or medical center.
Using Facebook’s tremendously flexible advertising platform, you can build an audience for your page by targeting specific geographic locations and various demographics of the users you want to reach.
This pinpoint targeting will in turn drive the right traffic to your website landing page with just one click.
With Facebook’s 94% targeting accuracy, you’re guaranteed to reach the right people. You can track how each ad’s performance using Facebook’s analytical tools and then optimize future advertising based on these results.
Facebook ads can also be used to target specific conversions for your website such as page views, sign-ups and leads in the form of inbound phone calls, emails, form submissions and email addresses.
They can also be used to increase the size of your Facebook community by being designed to get your medical practice, urgent care or comprehensive medical center more page likes.
By getting more page likes, the traffic to your page increases, triggering an increase in the quality and quality of leads. Businesses with over one thousand Facebook connections experience 22 times more traffic compared to those with fewer than a thousand likes.
Localized or regional medical practices and facilities should be using Facebook’s advertising tools as a component of any outreach effort to connect with local patient populations.
Facebook ads can save budgets as much as 71% over traditional advertising methods and can produce a 3 times or greater return on your ad spend.
Once you’ve taken some time to identify your target patient personas, you will be able to create successful ads for your medical practice, urgent care facility or regional medical center.
Capitalize on Facebook’s hyper-local advertising capabilities and start engaging your patient population today.
