Facebook Lookalike Audience

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In our last post about targeted Facebook Audiences we discussed the Facebook Lookalike Audience. In this post we will delve a little deeper into what actually is a Facebook Lookalike Audience, how to create them and what to do with them once you have them.

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If you haven't already created an Audience for your active patients and inactive patient lists, then we suggest you go over to the relevant blog posts here & come back to this one.

Active patient Facebook audience creation

Inactive Facebook audience creation

The aim of creating an audience full of your patients on Facebook is that you can communicate with them once they step outside of your practice. Education is the key to your patients understanding the condition you are treating. Understanding the condition you are treating is the key to seeing the value in your complete treatment programme. Without proper patient education, most people will stop coming to your office once the pain goes away or the function that was limited feels ‘ok’. You as a professional know that this is rarely the end of the healing process and will often recommend a longer period of corrective or rehabilitation treatment. If the value of this in the patients eyes does not outweigh the perceived cost, they will drop out when they think they are done.

This does not even consider maintenance or wellness care, which may or may not be an important part of your practice. Many of our clients have a large wellness patient-base of people that consciously chose to get their body checked by an expert on a regular basis… The most successful of those practices has patient education at its heart. Your educational efforts are giving your patients the opportunity to make an informed decision.

The problem is that this is hard work; it takes continued time and commitment from the practitioners and your support team. You need to start the process from the moment the new client walks in the door and this continues, drip feed fashion throughout the patient’s care. If you are a wellness practice that also advocates healthy living, diet, exercise, medication etc then you have EVEN more to include into those visits. Online and in particular Facebook educational programmes do not replace this in-house education, but it supplements it.

Every practice will also have a list of people that have not been to your office for sometime; we will call them inactive patients. You can create a separate list to send messages specifically to this group of patients from an educational perspective and also a welcome back message and call to action from time to time.

In this post in particular we are talking about creating a Facebook LOOKALIKE audience.

To do this you collate all the email addresses or phone numbers of your patients on your database and upload them to Facebook

You can create a Lookalike Audience in Ads Manager or Power Editor.

First of all you need to create a custom audience. For example, our agency always creates at least THREE audiences to start with. They are your ACTIVE patients, your INACTIVE patients and your ENTIRE database. When creating a lookalike audience you will use the entire database as it has the most information. Facebook will then go away and find all those people with matching details that are listed on facebook. You can use this entire database audience directly, but it will include both active and inactive patients, who really should be receiving a different message.

Once Facebook researches the habits and demographics of your entire database, they can create a Facebook lookalike audience of similar people in your area. You can then literally target your ideal prospective patient’s on Facebook in a way never been possible before. Gone are the days of paying for an expensive newspaper advert and then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

To get started creating a Custom Audience from your patient list, log into your ads manager:

1.  Go to your Audiences
2.  If you already have audiences, click the Create Audience dropdown and select Custom Audience. 
If you don't have any audiences, you'll see audience creation buttons, rather than dropdowns. Click Create a Custom Audience.
3.  Click Customer File
4.  Click Add from your own file

Then you need to create a Facebook Lookalike Audience in Ads Manager:

1.  Go to your Audiences
2. Click Create Audiences in the top left and then select Create a Lookalike Audience from the dropdown
3. Choose your source (any Custom Audience - including those based on an app, conversion pixel or Facebook Page)
4. Choose the country where you'd like to find a similar set of people
5. Choose your desired audience size with the slider
6. Click Create Audience

To create a Facebook Lookalike Audience from Power Editor:

1. Go to your Audiences
2. Click Create Audience at the top-right of the page and select Lookalike Audiences from the dropdown
3. Choose your source (any Custom Audience - including those based on an app, conversion pixel or Facebook Page)
4. Choose the country where you'd like to find a similar set of people
5. Choose your desired audience size with the slider
6. Click Create Audience

Note: It may take 6 to 24 hours for your Facebook Lookalike Audience to be created. After that, it'll refresh every 3 to 7 days as long as you're still actively targeting ads to that audience.

The way you should talk to these prospective patients is very specific. First of all Do Not SPAM them with daily consultation offers. It will annoy them and Facebook will notice. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a great book titled Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Where each Jab is a social media post educating, empowering or making your Facebook Lookalike Audience laugh. The Right Hook is a call to action or sales ‘punch’ and they should only be peppered amongst the Jabs. The key is to think like a prospective patient, what are their concerns, what are they thinking and what are they looking for. What questions do they want answered? Then become the authority on those subjects in your local community. This will make your Right Hooks so much more impactful.

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