While many of the steps involved are standard for a Facebook ad campaign, we recommend paying close attention to the guidelines below, which have been informed by our experience building and managing Facebook ad campaigns for clients in the pharmaceutical space.
-
- Know Facebook’s Terms. First and foremost, you need to be familiar with what Facebook allows marketers to say in ad copy and imagery, even if there are some special exceptions for marketers in the pharma and medical space. (Check out their advertising policies here.) This is also likely to change over time, given that Facebook is a rapidly growing platform, so pay close attention to new updates (and consider following Facebook’s advertising blog).
- Know the relevant FDA regulations intimately. It goes without saying that you need to be deeply familiar with the federal regulations surrounding the product or treatment you’re advertising. If in doubt, consult with your client- they’re typically the best resource there is, and will be well versed in the legal constraints associated with their particular product. However, they may need some coaching as to how this is applied to online advertising, so be sure you’ve done your homework on Facebook’s policies first, and strike a balance that fits within the legal constraints but still allows you to effectively convey your messaging.
- Know the language surrounding the condition or treatment. This is another no-brainer – in order to write compelling copy to a hyper-specific audience, who typically have a very detailed grasp of the specific terms and general language used to describe the condition in question (especially for those it directly affects!), you need to be fluent as well. Familiarize yourself with everything you can about the product, consulting your existing brand guidelines and building on existing advertising messaging if possible.
- Keep messaging consistent with the rest of the brand’s online (and print) presence. Subtle differences in copy can put off customers, especially given the sensitivity of most medical topics. You don’t want to seem like just another advertiser selling something – your responsibility is to be an advocate for the brand and what its product or service potentially offers patients with a particular condition. On social media, users are especially sensitive to off-brand or artificial-sounding messaging, both because of the attention-light nature of news feed scrolling and because that feed is personally curated, unlike a television program or public billboard. If it puts it off, they’ll ignore it or hide you, and that’ll quickly be reflected in ad performance.
- Build off the lessons learned from the brand’s organic social media presence.Facebook pages and groups naturally offer a wealth of information about what users are seeking from a brand and what they show up to talk about. This will help you find the optimal place to intersect with that conversation by advertising potential answers to their questions. And it goes without saying that your advertisements, which are usually explicitly tied to a Facebook page, should be consistent in terms of voice and appearance. If you’re unsure how consistent you need to be, consult your brand style guide and try to apply it as closely as possible to your ads.
- Take advantage of interest targeting. Again, this is one of the most powerful advantages of Facebook over other advertising platforms. While it does tend to be slightly more expensive to advertise to smaller audiences, the advantage is a much higher likely conversion rate – and given that the value of a new conversion may be quite high, it’s well worth the additional spend (which is commonly much lower per thousand impressions than other advertising formats).
- Don’t make people feel singled out. It’s a difficult line to walk, but there is a difference between the feeling that a brand is using your personal information (acquired from your behavior without even entering it explicitly anywhere) to sell to you, vs. an advertisement that seems to offer an avenue for help or advice that may not be clearly available elsewhere. And if you can use both the qualitative feedback from your organic pages and the insights you may have gained through AdWords or SEO keyword research, you can probably find exactly which questions people in your target audience would like answered – and you can offer that before they even need to ask.
- Avoid ad fatigue. This is another huge potential pitfall for advertisers. Facebook users, especially those in a narrow target audience, tend to become unresponsive to ads very quickly if they are oversaturated with the same messaging in a short period of time. People may still feel they’re being singled out, or may otherwise find the redundant advertising annoying. Since marketing these days is so user-driven – where the goal is to earn clicks from people already interested, as opposed to the traditional method of showing ads to a wide audience in hopes that some of them will respond to it – most users have relatively high expectations for the paid content they see in their personal feeds. If they don’t click on the ad the first few times they see it, it probably means they never will, and you risk burning them out on your brand name by continuing to push ads they don’t find relevant to them. While this already seems relatively intuitive – especially to those of us that regularly use Facebook, and consequently see a lot of ads every day – it’s also supported by real user data, in my experience. Earlier in the year, we launched an ad campaign targeting a narrow age range of people whose Facebook behavior had demonstrated interest in a fairly rare disease (~1 out of every 4,000 people worldwide). For the first two weeks of the campaign, the ads performed remarkably well. After that point, we experienced a clear dropoff in ad performance, to the point that we nearly paused the campaign on the spot. Since we had pre-approved alternate ads, using slightly different imagery and messaging – to combat this very problem – we replaced the current ads with those and closely monitored performance. Even with different ads, the campaign’s audience was so fatigued that performance continued to drop off at the same rate. Ultimately, we relaunched the campaign using a Lookalike Audience based on our first audience – and this campaign vastly outperformed the first. (More on Lookalike Audiences below).
- Let Facebook do the work for you. As it turns out, Facebook’s algorithmic methods for predicting user intent and behavior are even better than the hyper-specific manual targeting options when it comes to building a promising audience. Because a Lookalike Audience may be based on a larger number of shared traits between users – those that Facebook finds to correlate with the same interests – you’re much more likely to find an audience likely to convert. Ultimately, it can be difficult to predict exactly which interests or demographic traits similar Facebook users share – even with an intimate knowledge of the audience – so often it’s best to simply take advantage of the power of Facebook’s own algorithms in order to reach the largest percentage of interested users.
- Use Power Editor. I wrote a post a while back about just one of the many reasons to use Facebook’s Power Editor rather than its simplified Ad Manager interface, and there are plenty more. Essentially, if you’re a serious advertiser, Power Editor is the correct tool to be using. The interface is quite similar to AdWords, so it should be relatively easy to pick up, although it still has its quirks – and Facebook is constantly updating the UI and functionality of its entire advertising platform, so be sure to keep up on changes.
- Use Facebook’s Ad Feedback. Facebook’s built-in analytics provides some (though not much) insight into how users are reacting to your ad. Still, you should take advantage of this, and try to use it to inform the qualitative changes you make in ads going forward – although, as always, take it with a grain of salt.
[contact-form-7 id=”2616″ title=”Download Whitepaper”]
In short, Facebook advertising offers huge potential for advertisers in the pharmaceutical and medical space, perhaps more so than other verticals where brands may be quicker to adopt new technologies. Now is the time to adopt or accelerate your use of this rapidly growing platform, and deliver your message to the people who need to hear it.