How to run effective Meta ads for your TCM & Acupuncture Practice
Running ads in Meta Business Suite can be a full time job- literally.
To ensure you are optimizing your dollar spend, you should be monitoring your ad campaign analytics dashboard daily; However, the REESHI Team acknowledges that for all TCM Practitioners and acupuncturists this is impossible. So we want to give you some tools and tips to designing and running a successful (semi) hands-off ad campaign for your practice.
There's a lot of ground to cover so let's get right into it.
The Basics
1) You need a Facebook Business page to run ads. You can NOT use a personal account. If you don't have a Facebook Business page for your practice, you will have to create one. If you don't have a Facebook page, unfortunately there is no way to create a Meta ad, as the Business Page needs to be connected to a personal account. So the process from a high-level looks like this:
Personal Facebook Page --> Business Facebook Page --> Meta Business Suite Account --> Ads --> Create Ads --> "Automated Ads"
2) You need to have an established brand that is consistent across your Business Facebook Page, your website, and your socials (if applicable). You will use the same branding in your ad. It's important to note that your brand is inclusive of the colors, font, key phrases, and logo you will be using in your ad. If you do not have an established brand inclusive of these elements, we highly highly suggest you invest in building a solid, foundational brand before running ads.
If your branding is inconsistent, you risk your ad being rejected.
3) You need to have a branded website landing page that directly relates to your ad's message and intended purpose. This may be a different page than your homepage. If your ad's goal is to book more patients on the spot, then your ad needs to link to a landing page specific to booking; if the goal is to get more people in your community signed up to your monthly newsletter, then the ad needs to link to a landing page with a "subscribe" form embedded into it.
If the language and call-to-action, or CTA, on the ad is not similar to the language on the landing page it is redirecting to, you risk a chance of having your ad be rejected.
Note: the landing page must have a legitimate URL/domain
4) You need to have an specific idea of who you aim to target with the ad. Meta is really convenient in the way that you can select your audience by location, gender, age, occupation, and interest. At least know these key demographic labels before you consider running an ad campaign. Be as specific as possible! For example
"Women in California" is way too general of an audience
"Female teachers and bartenders aged 21-31 in San Francisco and Culver City, CA interested in yoga, fitness, pizza, and cats" is a highly targeted audience. Now Meta can best use your ad dollars to really nail down who to "ship" your ad to.
5) Meta truly wants to make you happy as a business owner using their platform (remember, a majority of their revenue comes from ads). They do this by (trying) to get your ad in front of exactly who you want it to be in front of. When your ad is successful and your objectives are achieved, you are more inclined to continue spending money on Meta ads. If your ads aren't working, you are going to get frustrated and spend your ad dollars elsewhere.
6) Set-up Meta Pixel on your website landing page. Meta Pixel is a piece of code you manually add to your website landing page (where the ad is directing to) to both inform Meta and you of who is engaging with your content and how.
Preparing for the Ad Campaign
1) Set your budget. Under the new Meta Business Suite ads manager experience, the budget is automatically set to "daily" so be careful to convert your monthly ad spend into daily ad spend! We recommend beginning with $5-$10/day for a week to see how your ad is performing, and based on the insights gleaned from that time period you can choose if you want to adjust the daily spend or not.
2) Write out a specific problem your practice specializes in solving. Many times practitioners keep their marketing and advertising efforts too broad. Yes, we know as a GP or TCM practitioner that you can provide many services! However, for the purpose of targeting in the digital era, you need to work with "the algorithm", not against it, and that means honing in on one specific problem per campaign. (You can run multiple ad campaigns at one time, too, but for the sake of this discussion, we will keep it simple and assume a single campaign)
Poor problem definitions are too broad. Great problem definitions help single out a specific problem a particular community is facing and establishes a connection with individuals in that community. You want your target audience to see an ad and think "HEY! That's speaking directly to me! I need that!"
For example
We help manage peoples pain = POOR
We help women manage their headaches = OK
We help postpartum women get their sense of peace and stability back through effective headache treatment = GREAT
3) Write out your target audience. We began discussing this in the 2) above and now we are going to expand more on it. For your target audience write out:
Gender Preference (if any)
Age Preference - don't select "all ages" here, truly hone down on who you want to target with this particular campaign.
Location - if you are an acupuncture clinic, you probably want an audience located close (<10 miles) to your physical office. This is a big advantage as your ad dollars can be spent targeting individuals affiliated with your direct community.
Occupation - are you targeting individuals with a certain occupation?
Interests - write down 5-10 interests your target audience shares. This may be a hobby, club, or community group. You can only select up to 10 when building your ad on Meta.
4) Choose an ad goal, round 1 -
As of June 2023, I recommend selecting "Get started with automated ads" as the goal for your first few campaigns. Right now this may make no sense, but once you click "create ad" on Meta Business Suite's Ads dashboard, this is the first prompt that pops up. Ignore the other items until you become more well-versed in Meta ads.
5) Create and/or choose your ad's copy and visuals. You can upload up to 6 short videos, photos, and copy variations for Meta ads via the "Automated ads" option. Meta is basically going to take care of your A/B testing for you (testing multiple versions of an ad to see which one performs better) on BOTH Facebook and Instagram, which is awesome! I recommend choosing your copy before choosing your visuals. If your visuals are grainy, unclear or unprofessional, you risk your ad getting rejected. If you don't have great branded content specific for a particular ad campaign, use a free visual database, such as pexels.com, to discover free images and videos that you can use commercially without a license.
An ad has five components essentially:
1. the visual - photo or short video displaying your service or your target audience
the text overlayed on the visual (optional, but encouraged) - short and sweet capture statement that effectively states the problem. This component should take some time to think of, as you have to say something meaningful with as little words as possible. Can take up no more than 20% of the visual or the ad may get rejected
The description - this goes beneath or on top of the ad and should state your offer/ CTA
The headline ( Business Name/ Offer Name)
The click-through-action (CTA) - what action do you want people to click on?
Using the postpartum sample from above, an ad creative breakdown could look like this
The visual - photo of new mom holding twins
The text overlayed on the visual - less pain, more joy
The description - Acupuncture for Postpartum Aches
The headline (Business Name) - Morning Acupuncture
The CTA - "Book now!"
or this
The visual - short slow motion video of woman receiving facial acupuncture
The text overlayed on the visual - we focus on the headaches so you can focus on being the mom
The description - Acupuncture for Postpartum
The headline - Morning Acupuncture
The CTA - "Book now!"
6) Choose an ad goal, round 2 -
Meta is going to ask you a 2nd time what your goal is, but with different prompts:
get more messages via Messenger, get traffic to your site, get bookings, etc. As a practitioners seeking new patients, you will most likely select "Get more bookings" or "Get more traffic", but ultimately the decision will vary based on your goals and your workflow.
Launch and Monitor the Ad Campaign
1) Once your goal #2 is set, you just indicate your daily budget and hit "promote now" and let the Meta Algorithm do its thing.
Note: some ads are going to be flagged for review. Sometimes there is an obvious reason for that, sometimes there isn't. But a review can take up to two weeks and you may receive a "this ad was rejected" notice at the end of that two weeks with little to no explanation. So build a time buffer into your ad campaign just in case! It is easier to push an ad early and "pause" it than to start a campaign on the proposed date only to have it sit in purgatory for two weeks and throw off the whole timeline of your campaign.
2) Once your ad launches, your Meta Business Suite ads dashboard will begin to populate the selected metrics - this part can be overwhelming and sometimes confusing. We recommend you let the ad run with no interference for one week. Then take a look at your dashboard and see how your ad is performing and if your goals are being met.
If you have the time to keep up with your Meta ad dashboard, I would review it daily after that initial one week run. You are spending $$$ on ads every day, so if one is not performing well it is important to notice ASAP so you can pause it, tweak the copy or the visual, and resume the campaign again. You will also be getting a lot of insights from your ad campaign, and it is important to review these insights to further optimize your practice growth strategy.
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Whew! Congratulations, we made it through. The REESHI team truly hopes your first ad campaign is fun, insightful, and wildly ABUNDANT!
Always know that our team is here if you are looking for a Meta Ads partner that understands your TCM & Acupuncture practice and can help work with you in identifying everything we have listed within this article. Reach out to our lead strategist, Carol, directly here with any questions you may have regarding a Meta ads partnership.