VMP 294: Why Most Veterinary Practices Shouldn't Run Facebook Ads Even Though They Work

Brandon Breshears 00:00:00  Chances are you've probably run Facebook ads for your veterinary practice, and I have probably 99% probability that you either don't know how well they did or they didn't do good, because Facebook ads are actually pretty difficult. And I think Facebook ads has been. And when I say Facebook, by the way, I mean meta, which also includes Instagram threads, WhatsApp, basically all of the different placements that meta has. So I use that because I'm an OG advertiser. I've been running ads on Facebook since I think 2010 or 2011. I can't remember my ad account ID is only seven numbers long, so it's I've been running ads for a long time there. So today's episode we're going to be talking all about meta ads, the opportunity that exists, the problems that exist there and who should be using them and running them. We're also going to give a masterclass in the different types of ads that they have, and the different applications that you're going to want to use for each of them. This is not going to be a cheerleader episode for meta.

Brandon Breshears 00:00:58  There are a lot of difficulties that you need to overcome in vet med that are specific to veterinary practices, and I see this happen all the time. But this is not a cheerleader episode by any means. I actually think most veterinary practices should not be running Facebook ads on meta, because they have the improper expectations and they really don't know what they're doing with their ads there. So we're going to do a deep dive. I'm going to share with you everything that I know about them that's relevant. I think in today's market, I'm sure this is going to have more relevance in the future, too. So if you're listening to this in the future and you say, oh, it's not August of 2025, it's okay. I'm sure that at least for the next 3 to 5 years, that we're going to be able to use this episode for meta, just because the writing on the wall is very clear as to where the different products are going, whether it's Instagram or Facebook. So let's think about Facebook and Instagram and really start off from a higher level.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:00  Facebook is kind of in a weird place social media wise. I would say it's still a social media network in that you have your friends that you follow. You have the groups that you're in and you interact socially. definitely. Older demographics are still using Facebook. and actually, I think it also depends a lot on your market. So I live in a rural market, I'm in the middle of Idaho, and the local businesses here don't use Instagram. It's all on Facebook and that's where all of the engagement goes. People will use Instagram. But I think in more rural markets, Facebook is a lot more prevalent. in urban markets it's Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat and stuff. So I think you need to, number one, know who you're trying to target. Know where people in your area are spending time online. The practices that I see doing a good job on Facebook ads also have a really solid Facebook and Instagram content strategy. So if you don't have a Facebook or Instagram content strategy and you're not regularly posting, and it's not just regularly posting, but you have to be getting engagement on a regular basis, whether that's through Facebook groups or Facebook posts or just content that you're posting.

Brandon Breshears 00:03:14  I think you should probably not be considering meta as an ad platform, unless you're regularly seeing good engagement organically. The overall theme that I really want you to think about is that the benefit, in my opinion, for Facebook and Instagram is if you have something that works organically and that you post it, it gets comments, engagements and appointments and then you turn that into an ad. It's going to work amazingly well. So Facebook is not a platform that we try ads first. And then unless we know the market really, really well, we know offers. We know what works. If you haven't tested that before, the method that you need to follow every single time is post organically. Look at the results and then if it works, pour gas on the fire. And that's as simple as it is. Facebook and I keep using Facebook Interchange here. But Facebook as a platform, they have been doing, I think, some amazing additions to targeting options. they have tons of data. They had a big problem with the iOS 14 update, which was back in 2020, where we lost a lot of pixel data, and ad targeting really fell off.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:27  But they've been doing tons of improvement, and I don't know if you've noticed too. But every time somebody if you're on on the app on Facebook, for example, they're looking at all of the comments and they have AI summaries for those comments. So they know contextually what every post is about, who's engaging with it, who's reacting to it. And so they have so much native data that targeting is excellent. I think Facebook and Instagram and meta as an ad platform is incredible from an e-commerce standpoint. but we're not in e-commerce. We're in local service as the category for veterinary hospitals. And so since you're not selling a pair of sneakers online, you can't track that conversion process natively. It is pretty difficult, in general, to scale up campaigns that are going to consistently drive results on Facebook. Now, there's going to be exceptions to that rule. There's certain types of campaigns that I really like, but those are dependent upon CSRs picking up the phone and calling and having a scripting system in place that you're going to then use to acquire new customers, that there has to be a closing process.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:35  So it is a good way to generate sales leads. It's not a great way to generate appointments. And when I say not a great way, it will work, but it just is. How much is it going to cost for these results to happen? And any time I'm thinking about running ads on a placement, we have an opportunity cost of dollars just because we don't have an endless budget. So especially with private practices, we have limited budgets. We need to allocate those budgets to the things that are going to do best. In my opinion, based on my experience for the average veterinary practice. And this is just average, right? Not the ones that are incredibly good at content on either Instagram or Facebook or things like that. It is typically better spent on other placements. Now there's going to be exceptions. We're going to run over those what those are. But I really want you to think about Facebook ads as amplifiers, and not so much as something that's going to save you and, you know, jump up and generate a whole bunch of clients for you.

Brandon Breshears 00:06:35  So for these reasons, I think most vet practices probably shouldn't be jumping into Facebook ads. I think that you should be considering them if you are good at the content. But let's talk about when I know for sure Facebook ads are a bad idea. So I think the number one thing that you have to think about is as an ecosystem. Facebook. Instagram. Meta. These are very top of funnel platforms and looking at different platforms from the type of commerce that happens on those is how you should probably approach it. What do I mean by that? So I would call Facebook and Instagram. People are hanging out there looking at content. They're consuming content. They're checking up on friends and family on Facebook. And that's kind of what the younger people do to check in and see what's up. and then more people just consume content. Instagram I don't think that's a social network as much. There's commenting in social engagement there. But Gary Gary Vee I think coined this term is called interest media rather than social media in that the content that you're seeing now on Instagram, especially with reels and scrolling through, if you click on a reel and you watch it and you scroll up, the next one is for somebody that you don't know or you're not following, and that is far more engaging.

Brandon Breshears 00:07:48  So the interest focused social is Absolutely the future here. It may change at some point, but especially with TikTok, it's like the TikTok ification of the internet, and it's far more engaging to be seeing things that you're interested in, rather than your relatives posting pictures of their babies and things like that. So that's, I think, why Facebook should be considered more top of funnel. So if you're creating content on there, and I have episodes specifically with like Ariel Potter where she talks about this and also, the an episode that I did with, Joe from Gary Vaynerchuk ad team is his lead ad buyer. All of the content and conversation that we spoke about, I think that was about a year ago is 100% applicable too. So be sure to listen to Joe. He talks about that in great detail. And that was a really, really fun conversation. But most practices don't have like actual business marketing infrastructure in place. You don't have a CRM, you don't have a lead funnel, you don't have nurturing sequences.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:57  And are these things that you should be doing? Absolutely. I wish you would. And I'd also wish that you would go and do regular working out and eating healthy. And like all of us, like we all know what we should do, but most practices simply just don't have the time for it. And so being realistic, if you have the ability to set up a CRM and automation funnels and follow up funnels and sending out newsletters regularly and all of the things you know you should be doing. If you have the capacity for that, then this is probably a better option because again, we're taking people from the top of the funnel, meaning people that don't know you exist and helping them to get to the place where they then can become a client. So first we have awareness, then we have a valuation, and then we have conversion. That's the funnel. And we drive people from not knowing you to knowing you, from knowing you to considering you, and then from considering you to setting up an appointment and coming in.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:50  And so that takes work and time. And so again opportunity cost here. Do we want to target people who don't necessarily know that they should be doing like, you know, coming in for a wellness exam with you? They're not on Facebook or Instagram looking for a place to take their pet. They're looking for basically entertainment. And so you have to drive them down the funnel. And that that takes work. I'm not saying it doesn't work, I'm just saying most practices don't have the bandwidth to do it. So again, allocation of resources, figuring out where we should run ads. The other problem that I think a lot of practices face when it comes to Facebook and meta ads, is that they just don't have a compelling offer. you know, we're here for your pet. We'll treat your pet like family. Like that doesn't necessarily mean anything. There's also a lack of creative with, like, user generated content for testimonials and referrals. And there's just the offer and then also the content that it's going to take to create some.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:52  something that's going to compel people to become a client. Now, if you're like being referred constantly in Facebook groups or you see people talking about you sharing your posts and you have goodwill built up, then you could do some different strategies. We'll talk about those here in the future. But the overwhelming majority of offers that that practices post were open come to us. It's not compelling. And unless somebody was looking at that and then their dog in front of them eats a box of chocolates. Your your ads are just simply not going to convert. and that's to say that most practices when they're running ads, the goal of the ad is to generate conversions. It's not to just generate awareness, but rather they want to get appointments coming in the door if that's the goal. Probably not. Not the best, because you're going to have to have something that's going to be compelling enough to get them to come in. The next thing that's difficult is that there's no tracking. Typically. So you don't have call real numbers set up.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:59  You don't have attribution and pixels set up properly, or you don't have conversion API set up all these things that help us to figure out what is converting, especially on site. iOS 14 came out back again in 2020 and that update said Apple said to Facebook, we're not going to let you track people's behavior off of the app because at the time, Facebook was tracking every single activity that happened on the phone. If you were buying something on Amazon, Facebook knew about it. If you spoke about something, Facebook knew about it. Those were like the Wild West days of Facebook ads, and it was amazing. I loved it as an advertiser, and I again, I'm probably running somewhere in the ballpark of maybe $110,000 a month in ads for clients right now on Facebook. And I love Facebook ads. Right? So I'm not trying to say that they don't work. I'm just saying that probably better allocated towards other things. So tracking is difficult, especially if you're doing it DIY. If you have a professional setting up for you, you can definitely get tracking set up.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:02  But if you have not ever done it before, you don't know what a conversion API is. You're not tracking offline conversions and sending those back into Google. I'm sorry, into Facebook. It's it's difficult to do. Other reason why I think Facebook ads are a bad idea is a lot of practices, because it's easy to set up Facebook ads or boost posts. People kind of approach it as like a one and done mentality. it is really, I think, a system that you have to set up and think about. You have to consider all of the component pieces that you need for conversion tracking. funnel nurturing, follow up and follow up is very important and very heavy. And so it's not a silver bullet. You can't just run a campaign And expect that the the clients are just going to flock in for sure. I think there are. Now, having given you all of those kind of gloomy pictures of why Facebook ads are a bad idea. Here's why I think they might be a good idea.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:03  Here's where scenarios that I've seen a lot of success with. Even with no CRM structure in place, even with no nurturing and funnels. and even with not necessarily super compelling offer, here's situations where I see them work pretty well. So practice launch or grand opening typically. Again, if people don't know you exist, they can't do business with you. So if you have a grand opening, if you have a launch, if you have any special events, that is an offer that's relatively compelling because there's something new. People love new. And so targeting in your area generate buzz, generate urgency. If you're a new practice and then you're able to take appointments, that actually is a good enough offer to get people. Because there's curiosity, there's newness, there's novelty. People want to check it out. Basically, that curiosity angle gets people to book appointments. So kind of along those lines of practice launch or grand opening, we also have event based campaigns. So things like, anniversaries, open houses, community events, any type of community type events that you're doing in your practice that also good at generating, results.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:20  I think two if there's overlaps with with audiences that are active. So let's say you're doing like a doggy five K where like instead of just doing a normal five K, you do it with your dog and it's with the run club in town. Like that's a perfect example of some type of event based campaign. I also think that ads work really well when layering a really strong organic strategy. So if you have people in practice that are spending time and energy putting into organic Facebook, adding ad spend to it makes it work even better and basically building up warm audiences. Showing these warm audiences offers building engagement, audiences and look like audiences and all the cool tools that we have within the targeting aspect of Facebook and Meta. I think that's really good. The other thing, too, that I think it works really well, is if you do have some type of an offer that's compelling that your clients love using Facebook and Instagram to amplify that offer that you know is proven and that works. And there are absolutely offers that we know in certain markets work really well.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:29  but if you don't have that proven and you don't have the customer feedback to know, this is really valuable, people are going to like this. People want this. it's difficult for sure. And so I think it's incredibly important that you really think about the type of traffic that you're targeting on Facebook and Instagram. With Google, we have keywords and intent. So typically when it comes to advertising, you have two different ways of reaching people. And then there's overlap between these. But you can target people based on behavior. And typically behavior we can assign a intent to. So if somebody looks up the word urgent veterinary or emergency vet near me or vet open, now we know that this phrase that they're searching has a specific intent by it behind it. With intent you have informational, you have branded and you have transactional. So typically we want to be targeting transactional intent just because it's the easiest to convert. So somebody needs and wants your service. They search they do something. There's an activity that we can align that intent with.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:36  And so we target those people. Then beyond that we have demographic targeting. So the characteristics that make up people we have demographics and also psychographics. With psychographics, it's things that are more qualitative. Demographics are just more facts, like college, graduate, income levels, things like that. So across Instagram and Facebook, we have more of the demographic based targeting. People are not using Facebook and Instagram to search things to find services and businesses. Now they might go into Facebook groups and comment like, does anybody have a good plumber to refer me? Does anybody have a good vet in town? Things like that. Now there's intent behind that, but we can't necessarily target those intent based things. within Facebook and Instagram we do have target of the search placement. So if somebody goes into Instagram and searches for something, you can target different keywords there. But it's still not great. People aren't typically going and searching Instagram and trying to find vets that are posting there. And that's not typically how people are are making those buyer decisions.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:46  they're on that placement. So beyond the two types of targeting. So the intent based or demographic based targeting. We also have to think about the type of traffic that we are targeting. We typically only have four different types of target. We have cold traffic people who've never heard about you. We have warm traffic, people who've engaged with you and your page on Facebook or Instagram. Then we have converted traffic, which are people that are have booked or engaged with your your page somehow. And then we have that at that point they become a lead and then we have the conversion which they've actually come in for an appointment and they're now a client. When we're talking about the value of each of these, the most valuable section, what I would say would be your conversion audience because you can communicate with them, stay top of mind, build relationship, Get more compliance. Make them aware of additional services and products that you have. It's basically people already know, like and trust you. And so at that point it's like they already know, like and trust you.

Brandon Breshears 00:19:52  Let's sell more things to them. when we have people that are in the conversion layer where they've become a lead, for example, so they've maybe called and set an A point but not come in, maybe they've filled out a lead form or something like that. This is actually a very risky stage because Facebook then especially if you've run a person to the ad platform at this point, they can then be shown ads from your competitors. And this is notorious in Facebook and Instagram. It's actually super, super annoying in my opinion. Like for example, click on an ad for whatever's in your feed, whether it's like running shoes or solar panels or HVAC companies or plumbers or business coaching. If somebody clicks on an ad and they convert and engage, Facebook says this person's in market starts showing them only this type of an ad. So you're going to have all of your competitors now targeting this super hot lead, which is in in Facebook's mind, they're like, this is a person who wants to buy this thing.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:56  Let's sell all the different ad space to them. And so what that does is it requires, again, an ecosystem where you have great follow up and engagement with your leads to make sure that they then convert because they're going to get hammered with your competitor ads in general. So I think that's really, really important to consider. So if you're running campaigns where the target is lead generation, you're going to have some really, really stiff competition when it comes to getting them from that lead to then the actual client base. And that's definitely important to think about. And again, that's, I think partially why I don't really suggest super often that this be the primary strategy for client acquisition. If you can build an amazing mousetrap and and capture these people, then it's super rare and very, very valuable for your practice. But it's going to take a lot of work. Next we have warm engagement and retargeting kind of moving back up the funnel. So people who have engaged with your brand and basically you can show them ads that are going to help to warm them up and hopefully get them in to come to an appointment.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:06  At this stage of the funnel, they're not being overwhelmed by competitors, generally speaking. And so I think you can actually bypass, based on the objective of your campaign, having your ads show to competitors. And at the very top we have cold traffic ads, and it's actually really easy to get engagement and build a following and, and get people to interact with your business. And I think that for generating awareness, especially for events and open houses, grand openings, this is actually a good placement. So for awareness type campaigns, Facebook is good. But if your primary goal is generating clients, it's not as direct response. So it's more of a branding place. So I'm hoping this is making sense and resonating. But I think it's incredibly important to stress that creative that converts is really the key to making sure that you're attracting the right types of clients, and that the call to action is strong based on the goal that you have. I think this really goes back to the the importance within social platforms for running ads.

Brandon Breshears 00:23:15  Creative is the targeting. I think you need to think about it that way. And that's why I say if you have organic content that does well, taking that organic content and using it as ads is a recipe for success. If you don't know what's going to work, then I think there's some ways to get to the heart of what will work, and I'll share those with you here really quickly. But when we're doing social, we want to be generating some type of emotion emotional response here. So we want to help people to feel trust in your practice. They we want to help people feel like you care about them. Want to hopefully generate some urgency. Hopefully be funny and entertaining people on Facebook for some type of a response when it comes to consuming content. So here, I mean some some really easy type of reels and content that you can try out and see if it works and gets good engagement or like myth busting type reels. funny behind the scenes stuff. if you can also like especially for awareness campaigns, client testimonials, especially if it looks like they generated it, those user generated content is what they call it UGC style.

Brandon Breshears 00:24:31  those typically work the best. Now, if you don't have content and you just want to run ads and you want to get people coming in. kind of the easiest way, I think, to figure out what's going to work quickly is to start with maybe 5 to 7 different hooks. And a hook is an interesting way to capture people's attention. Have it be relevant to the offer that you're looking for them to take, and it reels them in so that you can then keep them engaged for that piece of content, because it's a little bit difficult to produce videos for most practices. Usually I suggest starting with the static image, and each of the different images that you test is going to be focused on a different hook or different angle that you're trying to attract. You publish a campaign, you see which one works the best, and then use that angle in maybe video production or additional types of creative. But basically we're trying to find topics here that are going to resonate with the clients and generate the right type of traffic that is going to be relevant to the specific offer that we're looking to target.

Brandon Breshears 00:25:32  Whenever we're thinking about what kind of ads we should run, we need to think about first what is the end desired outcome, and then basically map out each step that we need to take from getting somebody on Facebook who's a stranger to then getting to becoming a client. So each step map it out, figure out the easiest way to get them to go from again, stranger to hopefully a client or customer. And that's if your goal is to generate new clients. If your goal is to generate engagement, for example, and build your following, build awareness for your campaigns, which I think is a great use for Facebook and Instagram. then I think your measurement for success would be which posts get the most engagement? If you're on Instagram a lot, you'll see that most practices well, the popular practices that I see, they're doing a really good job at creating engaging content, and it really follows a lot of the trends and things that are happening. But a lot of times those trends don't necessarily have a transactional value attached to them.

Brandon Breshears 00:26:33  So for example, I mean, there's just tons of different video topics. If you go on Instagram and look at the the vet med reels that are doing well, you're going to see trends that that are good. I think that the name of the game when it comes to organic is following the trends as often as possible so that you have good engagement and your videos do well. You're targeting the right types of people. But then once you have something that can be pivoted from like a trend, you can tie it directly into an offer. Then I think that that makes kind of the perfect storm for us to use in an ad situation. So we need to have something that's going to work creative wise, targeting the right people, calling out the right audience, and also link it to the right type of an offer or the right type of conversion action that we're looking for. And again, conversion within marketing doesn't necessarily mean that they have to come in. It could be a top of funnel conversion which would be getting views.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:37  It could be a middle funnel of conversion, which means getting follows or building on email lists, and then bottom of funnel conversion, which could be people coming into the practice with. I think one of the major benefits specifically within meta is that you don't have to have a massive, massive budget. You can have smaller budgets and then basically micro test things to see how they work. I've even seen budgets as low as like $5 a day. Be pretty successful in ad spend, but with the lower ad spend and also the increased frequency that people start to see something, it takes more work. in the asset creation side of creating ad creative, that's going to actually continue to generate response and get new clients in the door when it comes to budgeting in terms of ROI. If we're trying to drive new clients in the door, we really, really need to make an offer that is so good that people feel stupid for saying no to it. Like, if you can build out some type of an offer that a pet owner would seem like, oh my goodness, I get all of this.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:39  That's amazing. I'm going to do it. We have to think about what is that for your market, for the offer that you're trying to do, and how can we make it look as valuable as possible? and, and really help to, to grow that. I think when you are setting up campaigns, if you're looking at the bottom of the funnel for a cost to acquire customer, you need to make sure that you are able to measure how much it's costing you. And so you need to have tracking in place. Typically I like to do lead forms. when it comes to direct response. So people will submit their their contact info, it'll be related to a very specific offer. And then you're able to track and see of these people how many actually physically came in. What was the total cost? How many clients did we get? And then that is the cost to acquire customer. If you can figure out what your average transaction value for this group of clients was. You can then apply that total revenue and divide it by the cost to acquire customer.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:41  And that is your return on investment. So for example, if it took $20 to generate a customer and you made $200, it would be a basically a 1,000% return on investment, right? You make ten times the revenue and that doesn't include cost and things. It's just cost to acquire customer, which hopefully the goal for meta ads in particular would be to do breakeven or better so that it's not costing you anything to get people coming in the door, and then you're going to convert these people to a lifetime customer, and the lifetime value of that customer is going to help you grow your practice. Now, every time we launch a campaign, there's really three things that we can do. So you're going to launch a campaign. It's going to go to learning phase. And learning phase means that the algorithm is figuring out who to show the ads to You. When it's in learning phase, you're seeing what your cost per acquisition is or your cost per conversion, whatever that conversion metric is. And when you go to create Facebook ads, it's actually labeled really nice.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:44  You have the top of funnel. So that's the awareness engagement type of ads. You have the middle of the funnel which is going to be messenger or leads, things like that. And then bottom funnel which is conversion. With veterinary medicine, it's difficult to run conversion ads because you have to have conversion pixels set up to run those. And it's just pretty difficult, especially if you have online booking. if you had call rail setup, you could run conversion ads, theoretically. But, most of the ads that are going to do best for veterinary hospitals are going to be in that top and middle of funnel conversion actions. There's actually going to be cases, too. one thing, and this is a really important tip, if you're running Facebook ads, don't set clicks to website as the desired conversion effect. And the reason for that is there's just so much bot traffic that you're going to get. If you look at Google Analytics within Facebook ads, so seeing the traffic that came from those clicks. The cost per click might be really cheap, like $0.07, which sounds amazing.

Brandon Breshears 00:31:46  But if you look at the time on site, average time on site is typically 1 to 3 seconds. And so most of the traffic, especially for the campaigns targeted at website clicks, are going to generate poor results for you. So it's, I think, very, very important that if you're running campaigns on Facebook, you're targeting people that are looking for engagement. So people that are going to like the posts, comment the post, things like that and have a relevant offer within that so more people will see it become aware of the offer, the grand opening, the event, or, you know, whatever you want people to see, you're going to get much better quality traffic. That's not bot traffic, and you'll be able to start to build relationships that way, with either clients or potential clients. So I like the engagement ads, I like the lead ads. And those are my favorites for Facebook. With leads, you get to see the name, phone number, email, and any additional questions that you create with those lead ads, though again, it's incredibly important the time to contact.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:44  The longer the lead goes without being contacted by CSRs, the less likely is you're going to convert these people. So make sure that you have solid follow up in place if you're going to run lead ads. But whenever we run a campaign, we really have three different options that we can do. We can either pause campaigns, we can scale campaigns, or we can scrap them. Pause is typically done when you've had a campaign that's been successful. The frequency has gone up, meaning that people have seen it so many times that is no longer being effective. So it's time to deposit, switch out creative, test something new, and then bring it back once. So every time you're creating an ad, you're testing it to see if it works. So pausing it makes sense. When the frequency hits typically above six, we get what's called ad fatigue. People will see the ad too many times and it's just is kind of an annoyance at this point. So it's time to swap out creative, swap out to a new ad and test something new.

Brandon Breshears 00:33:39  You can see the frequency in the reporting dashboard on meta, so that you can know exactly what's going on. Scale is when you have a big enough audience and their cost per action is good, so you can add budget to it if it's working well and the audience is big enough to keep scaling that up until you start to reach ad fatigue. And Facebook actually does a very good job about doing that. When you're inside of Ads manager and you hover over it, there'll be a little notification icon and it'll said it'll say ad fatigue, is happening. So that's something that's really important. And then scrapping campaigns, if you run campaigns typically for 2 or 3 days and you're not seeing any engagement on the ads, you're not seeing leads, it's time to scrap it and and retool it and reset it. But putting more budget behind something is not going to help it to convert. you just. You can't polish everything to make it work out. It needs to be reset and retried. And most especially if you're just starting out with this, most Facebook ads are going to fail just because you're not necessarily sure how to frame offers and content in a way that's going to get the engagement.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:49  So this takes time and practice. And so obviously, if you're looking for help with this, you can reach out to me, happy to help. but absolutely, if you're if you're doing this on your own, it's going to be a learning process. So expect that if something's not working within 2 or 3 days, it's time to scrap it and move on. So let's real talk real quick, talk about some of the things that work well and some of the things that don't work well. So I mentioned practice launches and open houses and things like that. If you're running an event where you want people to show up and become aware that either you have a service that's new, a practice that's new, something that is new, that you're introducing into the market. Awareness campaigns work great. I typically suggest running different types of awareness campaigns for anywhere from 3 to 4 weeks, especially before practice is opening. So if you're launching a practice, doing a build up of awareness month before launch is helpful. It'll get people that are interested and see the building and are driving past it.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:49  But it is helpful to have something new again. That novelty is is really, really important to highlight because people love new things. They want to try things out. And so it's human nature that something new is going to generate curiosity and be compelling enough for people to take action. and I think the four week before is something that's really, really helpful. I think that the novelty aspect is also going to work well for new offers, that you have new equipment, that you have new services that you have things like that within Facebook and Instagram. I'll give you a quick example. One of, my friends, Michael Shirley, who's been on the podcast a bunch. We talked about this on a previous podcast episode too. I'll have to link it in the show notes, but we talked about his grand opening. He got a new location. He built it. It was beautiful. Michael's really good at social media for his practice as well. But we did a grand opening campaign. We ran ads both on YouTube so that it was more of a social Google side of things, but also Facebook and Instagram, and it did incredibly well at getting people to become aware of the fact that they were opening.

Brandon Breshears 00:36:59  He did an amazing offer that he created. I always give him credit for it, but it was the vaccines for life giveaway. And basically, if you came to the event and you went to all of the different stations, I think there was 12 stations and each station, they highlighted some product or service in the practice. That was cool about the practice. They had to go get all of those things, and then they could submit that proof that they had been around and seen all of those things. They were then eligible to win vaccines for the life of a pet. I've done variations of that with other practices and lunch since then, and generally it works really well. there's different ways that you can form that give way, but I think there was something like 360 to 400 people who showed up to Michael's grand opening, of his new location, which was a huge success. And Facebook and Instagram was a big part of that. So events, things that are interesting, compelling offers, those types of of campaigns work really well.

Brandon Breshears 00:37:58  I have a bunch of other types of of ideas around those things, but you have to be creative in really explaining the value that you're offering to the pet owner to get them to take action, because, again, they're not on Facebook and Instagram to go find a new vet. So it has to be compelling enough that it's going to make them say, yes, I'm interested in that. Another a really good case study, around ads that worked really well, especially from the awareness campaign style was we launched a an ad that had done really well organically. So this doctor she owns practice. She added, emergency services to her practice because she's in kind of a more rural area in Texas. It's not necessarily super rural, but it's more rural. And so there wasn't any emergency centers close by. I think it was an hour and a half or two hours to the nearest emergency. So she started adding after hours emergency. She posted it. Everybody was sharing it because there was a huge need for this service in the area.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:58  So we ran campaigns, with that successful post that had all of the positive social engagement, and it did incredibly well and helped to fill those appointment slots. So that's an instance where there was a huge need. The offer was, hey, we are filling this need. This is a service that's not available anywhere else. And so that did incredibly well. I also think that if you put the time and effort into building out, email nurture sequences really worked on providing value that's just beyond being open. So providing like courses, resources, things like that. And I have a really great CRM tool that can help you with that, that I have for clients that they're using it for all kinds of really cool things. But if you have the ability to create funnels and follow ups and send out emails on a regular basis, I think Facebook could be an excellent opportunity. But again, you have to nurture people from this top of funnel mindset to actually becoming a client. And that's done through providing value, being consistent and showing up in a way that's going to represent the brand properly.

Brandon Breshears 00:40:09  So based on all of this detail, I still think Facebook is a good platform, but you need to have realistic expectations as to what it can do for you. If you run a Facebook ad, it's not going to generate a windfall of clients unless it is for a compelling offer that's actually going to drive people in and get them in. So you have to be willing to do the work. So let's think about this from kind of a litmus test, whether you should be running ads or not on Facebook. The first thing that I would want to recommend to you is that are you solving a short term awareness problem, or is it a long term growth problem? I think Facebook really quickly generates short term awareness with that long term growth problem. You have to have the systems and tools in place to make sure that that's being done properly. again, I totally think you should be posting on social channels. And this is not against posting. This is about running paid ads here as a placement. The second thing that I need you to think about too is do you have the patience for optimization? And then also do you have the budget for experimentation? Because it's going to be a lot of experimenting and it's going to be a lot of testing.

Brandon Breshears 00:41:20  You have to create a bunch of ad creative. It's not something that's super passive. generally speaking. And then the third thing is if you want to generate clients from Facebook and Instagram and you totally can. Again, we sell tons of stuff on Facebook and Instagram, running tons and tons of ads I probably have. I have millions of dollars in ad spend that I've managed personally, but you have to be able to follow up, and especially with the ecosystem that's in place right now, in that if somebody clicks on a conversion ad for your veterinary practice, they're going to be shown every other competitor. You have to be willing to follow up and you have to do it quickly. So if you're not willing to do a quick follow up and your CSR teams don't want to do outbound calls for people who have opted into things, it's probably not the best placement for you. So I've actually gone through and made a downloadable Facebook ads checklist for veterinary practice. It helps you to figure out the strategy that you'd want to do.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:16  You can download it free. I'll put a link in today's episode that you can, download it for free. It's PDF and I think it works really well. If you have any questions or need help, or are you thinking, hey, I would like to run Facebook ads after all of these things that you've said, like it would work for my practice. you're always welcome to reach out to me for a free 30 minute strategy session where we can talk about Facebook ads, do some deeper dive case studies and reviews. But if you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. Be sure to go snag that Facebook Ads checklist. It's at Virginia marketing podcast. It's going to be on episode 294, and if you have any questions, always feel free to reach out. I hope you're having a wonderful day and I'll see you on the next episode.

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