Thanks Alan, and good morning everybody. A very warm welcome today from the sunny Canary Islands. So today I'm going to be talking to you about Facebook marketing blueprint for veterinary practises and groups that get results.

And that's the key here, it's getting results. Lots and lots of veterinary practises are using Facebook, and I'm delighted to see that. But very often in the community, I hear that Facebook is just for community building, and that's true, but there's far more that you can do with Facebook, and that's what we're gonna talk about today.

So our learning objectives from today is gonna be, you'll be able to state what the ideal, what the absolute blueprint for the ideal practise Facebook group should have on a practise or group Facebook page should have on it. We're gonna list the three stages of the marketing journey, specifically within Facebook, and we're going to, you're gonna be able to create different posts that are highly relevant to your target audience at each stage of the marketing journey. And I just had a little insight to the next, webinar that's coming up after this, and I'm fairly sure that you're gonna hear more of that as you go throughout the day.

So, with no further ado, let's get on. So why would you want to use Facebook to market your veterinary practise or group? I know that there's already a lot of veterinary practises using it, but maybe you're not aware of the total size of the audience both globally in the UK.

So there's now over 2 billion active users logging onto Facebook monthly. There's 1.15 billion daily active users, and the average time spent per visit is 20 minutes.

Now, that might not sound very much, but the average, that's the average time per visit and people visit multiple times throughout the day. Now there's 4.7 million pet owners that can be identified on Facebook.

And when I say identified, that means that Facebook ads, so, Facebook have, access to data that tells them when pets are insured, that, that tells them which owners have pet insurance, that tells them which owners are buying cat food, dog food, rabbit food. So they're able to see, and we, we as an agency and you as, as practises and groups are able to look into the Facebook ads manager and identify the size of your audience in and around your practise. And the other key thing to remember about Facebook is that it's an app on the phone.

Yes, people access it online via a desktop these days, but mainly it's on a mobile. And so when people wake up, generally, they set their alarm now on their mobile phone. So they set their alarm.

Wake up, a lot of people, the very first thing they do is open that Facebook app. As sad as that may seem, as addicted to social media as it may seem, that's just a fact these days. So some people are waking up with your practise, your messages in the palm of their hands.

So, before we go through what a Facebook page should have on it, I just want to talk to you about how is it that Facebook decide what you see, because as much as we love to think we're in control of what we see on Facebook when we're scrolling through our own news feeds, we're not in control of that at all, Facebook are. And that's done via something called an algorithm. So it's just, Some a programme that's written within Facebook that decides based on your activity, based on who you talk to, based on who you message, based on the links that you click, the types of posts that you like, the comments that you make, the shares that you do on Facebook.

All of that goes into some piece of software within Facebook, and they determine who it is that you see in your newsfeed. They determine if you're gonna see friends, if you're gonna see adverts, if you're gonna see posts from businesses, if you're gonna see posts from groups. So the algorithm is obviously a closely, closely guarded secret, and Facebook is almost becoming, getting your posting on Facebook is almost becoming like the days of search engine optimisation when you were when we're trying to optimise, our websites to make sure they're found in Google.

We now have to think about how does that work to make sure that our posts are seen on Facebook. And some of you may be aware that Mark Zuckerberg announced on the 11th of January this year that they still want to improve and they want to further improve the experience for their users. And in doing that, they've said that they're going to prioritise, posts from friends and family.

And I've often thought, I wonder if Facebook will become a pay to play platform, so where you can only use adverts. And right now, that's not true. For those of you who are using Facebook, you will be very aware of the fact that you're not reaching 100% of your audience.

I don't think we've been, been able to reach that now for 4 or 5 years. And you'll notice that you're reaching smaller and smaller amounts as a percentage of your total audience, your total Facebook page likes. And again, that's down to the algorithm and, and this kind of content that you're sharing and what, what engages your, your ideal audience.

So right now, it isn't a pay to play. It's, I don't think it will become pay to play immediately. I think it will be in the long future.

I think this algorithm change that Mark Zuckerberg's talked about, excuse me, will, reduce reach more, but there's ways that we can get around that. And we're going to talk around some of that today. So the first thing when we're looking at our Facebook page really is what is on it, because.

When people see our posts, they see our posts in the newsfeed. But if our posts are interesting enough or they capture their information, or, someone really wants to talk to you about something, they'll navigate to your page directly. Now, all of the screen shares that I've done are actually from a desktop, they're not from a mobile, but do remember that people will be browsing on mobile predominantly, so it's a good idea to go and check what does your page look like on, on a mobile as well as a desktop.

So the first things first are to make sure that you've got your profile picture and a cover photo or a video. Now, I'm not sure if you're aware or if you can see my cursor at the moment, but across the top here is called the cover photo or the cover video. You are now able to upload videos to that, and they can be up to 90 seconds long.

And if people are looking at your page, BTO works really well on Facebook because it's moving. So as you scroll through the newsfeed or you stop, if something's moving, it will make people more likely to stop. So we do recommend, where possible, that you change your header to a video.

And your profile picture should either be your logo, or we say a, a picture of your practise, but it's hard to see that on a mobile or a face of one of your key, key personnel, so like, head of clinic or your, your most popular vet that, that people know and will recognise. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, is a call to action button.

Now here you can see Mark Nelson's page, and down the bottom here, we've got a book now button. Now if you click the book now button, that will take you directly off to the book an appointment or to register for an appointment at Mark Nelson. Again, we're recommending that people make sure they use the buttons because of the mobile browsing experience.

You know, gone are the days where you need to find a Facebook page, click through to scroll through to the About Us to try and find the telephone number or try and find, an email address. Generally, the blue button does what you need it to do. So if you click on that, that will take you off to the website to book an appointment.

The other thing that makes a big difference, and remember this is about now your pages being seen and building like no trust, is to make sure you've got the grey verified page tick. There's notes that accompany this that you will all have access to. I'm not sure if they've been sent out yet, but you will definitely have access to them.

And in those notes that you've got, there'll be a blog to tell you how to verify your Facebook page. It's super easy. You do it within the settings, but a grey tick helps your practise to get found far more easily on Facebook.

And especially when people are checking in. So, and, and a Facebook check-in means that someone's in your practise right now and they want to tell their friends that they're in the practise. They click the check-in button and it makes it far easier to find the right page to check in on.

Now some of you may not be able to verify your pages because you might inadvertently have numerous pages based on the fact that someone might have tried to check in, whilst they're in practise and not been able to find your page easily. So they've actually created another place page. So you have a business page, but there's also place pages.

And what I recommend you do when you've got some time is to have a search on Facebook for the name of your practise and see how many times it occurs. Check under pages and check under places. And if, if you've got more than one, you can merge them together.

There's Button that says merge, merge accounts. Once you've only got one page, you'll then be able to apply for your grey verified page tick. And that just shows to everybody that Facebook have checked that you're in the location that you say you are, that you've got the telephone number that you say you are on the contact details.

Another area of the Facebook page, so I know you guys are gonna be looking at websites later this afternoon, and I never say only have a Facebook page, you must have a website because you own that. You don't own your Facebook page, Facebook D. But whilst whilst you've got people's attention within Facebook, it's a really good idea if you can to add a services tab.

And again, the services tab instructions are gonna be within the notes for this webinar. So do check back to find out how to do it. And, and within the services, you might want to tell people about, certain clinics that you run, certain areas of, of expertise that you focus on, particularly in practise.

You might want to tell them about. Events that you run. So you can have as many services as you like, and the amount of words that you can use are limited.

So you can only use 200 characters to describe each service. So I recommend you put the name of the, the, of the clinic. So let's let's, for example, imagine it's senior pet clinic.

What you would check within senior pet clinics. So keep that nice and concise within 200 characters, and then an image that grabs attention. Because very often, if we ask customers, do you know everything that's available within this specific vet practise, the likelihood is that they say no.

And that's because we're really busy in practise. We know that we want to treat the animals when we need to. We give a great service.

There's lots to focus on. And often, we can forget to let everybody know about all of the services that are available. So, just by adding the services tab onto your Facebook page means that when they come to browse, if they see a post from your, from your page that they really like and it's, it's incentivized them to click through to your page, then when they go through to the page, you've got that nice strong video or header across the top.

And on the header you could have offers that are going on or surgeries or clinics that you want to to promote more and then you've got your services tab. Coming on to what to post. Everybody loves animals on Facebook.

You know, cute puppies and fluffy kittens are the fodder of Facebook. And as, as veterinary practises, we can actually really leverage on that to get our names out there. But we only don't only want to do those kind of posts, because whilst that attracts audience, it doesn't necessarily attract an audience that will want to register with your practise that have got pets that will want to turn up and become customers and active patients in surgery.

So what else would we want to share on our veterinary practise page to make sure that we get good attention. So the first thing to do is to make sure that you've got a really good mix of the different types of posts. So, you know, if, if you take images in practise.

Make sure, and, and as long as you've got the permission to do so, make sure you're sharing those. But if it's all just images, you're building community and you're building really good feel good factor, but you might be missing other opportunities. So, a good mix of different types of posts, so that's images, memes.

So a meme is where you create an image with text overlaid, because they're shareable videos. And if you're gonna upload videos, please upload them directly to Facebook. If they're on YouTube already, you might want to find out how to get that, or if you haven't already got it, try and find a copy of it so that you can upload it directly to Facebook.

Because videos uploaded directly to Facebook get far more views than if they Facebook don't really want to send traffic to, to YouTube. So images, videos, memes, links to your website. So if you've got .

Sick pet helper articles. If you've got articles around pet health and how to maintain pet health, behaviour, a blog, anything about what you're doing in practise, links work really well too. It just needs to be a really good mix.

So if you're going to be posting images, you can use memes. Now, I'm not sure if all of you are aware of Canva.com.

You can use it for free, which is a great tool. There's a certain amount of free images that you can use, and you can also go and use images or take images freely with permission from UmSplash or Pixels or Pixels.com.

And you can import them into Canva and overlay text on top of them. So that's how you can create a meme. Obviously, getting photos of animals whilst they're in practise with, with the owner's permission is always really great.

Photos of your team too. People really, really connect with their vet. They get their favourite vet.

They only want to talk to their favourite vet. They love to know what their favourite vets are doing. And I'm not saying share their whole life story, but, you know, simple things like a photo of the bet and if they're involved in any fundraising, or the one particular thing that they were, really proud of doing that week.

So people really buy into the relationships that they've got with the team. And share viral content that you've seen on Facebook. Although, you know, if you see a post that you really like or you find it really funny, and you want to share that on your Facebook page, that's actually good.

Facebook like it when you share other people's content. But do check the name of the page first to make sure it's appropriate to share, and that it doesn't link back, back to a special offer of someone else's. Now let's talk a little bit about Facebook Live.

If you've got someone brave enough to go on camera, live streaming in your practise, I'd really encourage you to do that. This is one of the ways that you're going to be able to beat that pesky algorithm change that happens and it's going to happen. As a result of Mark Zuckerberg's announcement on the 11th of January, Facebook love live video.

And Facebook are launching their own TV style channels. It's already available in the US already. It's called Facebook Watch, and that'll be making its way to Europe and the UK over the next, few months.

And so Watch is going to be like TV programmes that you stream on your phone. But gone are the days when those programmes and those channels are just, from big TV production companies. You know, bloggers, businesses, anybody that have popular live videos and popular video content is going to be available within the Facebook watch tab of the app.

So the more that you guys can get comfortable with video, and the more that you can get comfortable with Facebook live video, the better that you'll attract more people to your page, more people to your, will get to know your brand. And of course, when you're doing your Facebook Lives, you can always put a call to action at the end where they can go and take some kind of, you know, click a link, get this special offer, learn more about this. So if you've got someone who's brave enough to go on Facebook Live, you could consider a whole series of how-tos, very short tips, you know, if you've got a nurse who has a particular passion for, for looking after, rabbits, you could get.

Them if they were comfortable to do, a weekly top tip presentation, you know, it might, it might not be more than 60 seconds, but it's the fact that you've gone live and therefore Facebook will give that more priority in the news feed, and that will get seen more than standard posts. If you're gonna be sharing links, share them to special offers, to clinics, to help pages, interesting articles. One thing I will say is, always make sure you've got a good mix of links, not just from your own website.

Facebook doesn't like it when all it it sees is promote, promote, promote. Facebook ads are for promote, promote, promote. They like to see a good mix of links.

And so, and so do your customers, actually. So, you know, if you've got latest pet health information or this specific, like, for example, lung worm Awareness Week or month, then link to other people's websites as well, as long as none of those links promote a special offer that you could be doing in practise. And as I said earlier, videos should be uploaded directly to Facebook rather than YouTube, Vimeo, because it reaches more people.

But more importantly, Facebook, Facebook are trying to take on every social media platform, right? They already own Instagram and they already own WhatsApp. They've created Facebook stories now, so that it's become like Snapchat.

And you can now create Facebook, sorry, Facebook video playlists. So it's very much like the YouTube experience. So if you start to use and post more videos, you can create them into playlists so that you can take your customer on a journey through video, and we'll talk a little bit more about the marketing journey soon.

And of course, you can share, viral content that you've seen on Facebook. Now, if you're thinking, how do I know that something's gone viral, if it stands out to you, it makes you laugh, it makes you smile, and it stops you, first off, you know that it will stop others. Take a look and see how many views it's had, how much engagement it's had.

If it's had a lot, you can share that. Or another really good source of knowing what's popular content for the veterinary sector, if you go to buzzsumo.com.

So that's B U Z Z SUMO.com. That will also show you, and if you type in veterinary or dogs or cats, it will show you all of the most shared articles.

And some of them might be quite old, but as long as the content is relevant and timely, And it's still true, it's OK to post their content. You'll see, certain content creators who actually go back to, to content they posted 5 years ago and find a way to resurrect that and freshen it up. So, I'm not asking everyone to be huge content creators because that's not what we're doing first and foremost.

We're in veterinary business, with customers to look after, patients to treat. But if we can just get a really good mix of stuff on your Facebook page, you will find that you'll get more views. So let's come on and talk about the Facebook marketing journey, because we can post on Facebook for likes, we can post on Facebook for engagement, and by engagement I mean where people are liking or commenting or sharing, but we don't, that doesn't necessarily have.

Monetary advantage to it. What it does do is it stays top of it keeps you top of mind, which is great. And, you know, the more that you share stuff that's happening in practise, and you can, encourage people to share reviews, you're building like no trust, but there is a whole journey to take people on.

The first is awareness. So the objective is to raise awareness of your practise. The second is consideration.

So that is to build like, no trust, and the third is conversion. So that's about bringing people to actually take action, come into practise, book an appointment, register their pet, book for a specific clinic, come and get your flea and worm treatments. So that's what we mean by conversion.

So within a conversion. Oh sorry, I've just got a bit carried away there. I'm into awareness.

So, as I said, the, the objective is to raise awareness of your practise. Excuse me, most people on Facebook will already know about your practise, so it's a good idea to use Facebook ads for this. Objective.

And you can target pet owners, so I just wanted to give you a a a a little snapshot of what it looks like in the Facebook ads manager. Because what we can do is we can target people based on the fact that they're pet owners. And the fact that they're dog and cat owners.

And you can go as granular as targeting people who only have pet insurance. How amazing would it be if every single one of our customers had pet insurance. And Facebook will never tell us who those people are, by the way, but they know who they are, and they will show the ads that you asked them to on that.

So what I did here was I just ran a little, survey just to give you an idea of the potential reach. This is a, Advert that was, that was created or an audience that was built for within a 5 mile radius of Mark Nelson's vet practise. And here you can see that there's 8100 people that we could be targeting there, and the budget was set at 5 pounds a day, so it was showing that for 5 pounds a day, we could reach 1600, up to 1600 people.

The other thing to think about with awareness. Is to make sure that we keep the copy simple. So awareness is just making sure people know that you exist, that your practise is where it is and what it is you do.

You almost need to become like Ronil to say what you do on the tin. You've already got people on your Facebook page that they know about you. This is a way to get more people to know about you that are not already on your Facebook page.

So simple copy is effective, and it just needs to be really short. So, just a simple image, letting people know what you do, where you have your practise locations. And of course, you can see that there's a little thumbs up there.

So that means that people will Not only click through, so if they click the learn more button, that'll go off to Mark Nelson's website, but if they click the little thumb button, that also gives you a new audience on Facebook. Next we move into consideration. So this is where all veterinary practises are really exceeding, and, and that's about building community, and it's about showing people that use your practise, your, your evidence in trust.

So, you know, having a smartphone at reception is a really good idea as long as people are happy to, to take images of, of puppies, kittens, regular customers, unusual pets that people don't maybe see very often, just to show that you're, you know, that you're caring and sharing. Your community. And that can be done through posts to your page or through Facebook adverts.

This is where we're really building like no trust. You know, so many people choose a veterinary practise based on recommendation. And so, if someone said, Oh, I think you should come and visit, you should go and visit a particular veterinary practise, people will look at their website, they'll take on board, but they take on board the feedback.

They will go and check reviews on things like the good vet guide, Google reviews, Facebook reviews. So we want to make sure that we've got the consideration element covered, that we're showing that we're really involved with our customers, but that we've got reviews that are available to see. So, for example, let's think for the trust element element, you could make sure that you've got your Facebook reviews clearly showing.

And if you get photos, if you receive gifts or cards from customers, as long as they're happy for you to, you could take photos and share those. If you win customer service awards, you could post pictures of those, images of animals in practise. For the like element, so this is where we want people to, like us, like, come and like our page.

This is where you can share viral content, keep people coming back to your page, introductions of your team, new team members, fundraising activities, products that are available for sale. People love to know that they can get everything in one place. And then for the no element, this is where you can demonstrate your area of expertise, specific areas of expertise, general knowledge around pets.

One of the most successful campaigns that we ran, I think it was started 5 or 6 years ago now, for a veterinary practise in Essex was called Ask the Vet. So they were the days when we didn't have Facebook Live, when it wasn't so easy to message the practise. When, when we did customer survey in practise, one of the questions, that we asked them was, was there anything else that you didn't ask your vet in consult today?

And everybody said yes. And the reason they said yes were that, that they were so concerned about taking the vet's time. So we created hashtag Ask the vet, and once a week we would have a live vet available to come and answer questions directly on the Facebook page.

So in the run up to that, we would, the day before, we'd say, OK, so and so's going live on our Facebook page. At 7 o'clock in the evening, come and ask any question that you want to ask. Now, we've had all kinds of posts from that.

People taking pictures of dog poo and asking questions, people taking pictures of, of skin on their, on their pet to say, Is this right? Is this healthy? And what happened was, after, after the vet events, there were always lots more appointments booked.

And that's because people were able to ask freely within the hour, and we did contain it within the hour. We said they're only available for the hour, submit the questions, wait for your response. But of course, most of that, you can't diagnose.

It's, it's quite difficult to diagnose in a photograph. So, you know, if there were concerns, the call to action was always come and book a consultation, and there was always an uplift of consults directly after and ask the, ask the vet event. Consideration or the no element is also about showing people latest health messages that are timely, supporting awareness days such as lung worm awareness, tips to keep pets at ideal weight.

Especially in January, we always think about, or, or people always think about their own weight. They rarely think about pet's weight, so that can get them really thinking about that. Instructions on how to determine if your pet's overweight, warnings about what foods to avoid, especially in the run up to Christmas.

So we've got awareness, awareness was where we, made sure that people knew that where our veterinary practise was and what we did. Consideration is building the community, the like, the know, the trust. And then we come on to the conversion.

And the conversion is where you give a clear call to action, such as book an appointment, register your pet at our practise, order your pet food, get your flea and worm treatments. You can use your Facebook page post to do this. However, not everyone likes, who likes your page will see your posts.

So if we remember back to the conversation we had earlier about who controls what you see in your newsfeed, and that's Facebook. Remember, Facebook is not gonna show 100% of your Facebook posts to your Facebook audience. So when it comes to conversion, that's where we recommend that you start to look at adverts.

Because they can really accelerate the results that you get. So when you're using Facebook ads, it's always advisable to send people to a specific page on your website or a landing page that only covers what you are promoting. Don't send people just to your your website homepage, because then they've still got to click around for what you're telling them about.

If you want someone to book an appointment or if you want someone to register their pet at your veterinary practise or group, send them to the page on your website where they specifically register to become, a patient at register their pet, to become a patient in clinic. Excuse me. Facebook ads really support your email marketing efforts too.

So if you want everyone to buy specific products in the run up to, for example, fireworks night. An advert that targets everyone who didn't open your email about it can make a huge difference. If you're sending out email messages, it's unlikely that your open rate will be much above 35%.

So that's still 65% of your audience that, that are not seeing your marketing messages right now. And what you could do is you can export those email addresses and plug them into Facebook, into the Facebook ads platform. And if you plug those into the Facebook ads platform, Facebook will then see how many of those people are using the email addresses that you hold to log into Facebook.

And then you can target everybody who uses Facebook to log in with the email addresses that didn't get opened in your email marketing campaign and tell Facebook to show them an advert. So, now that's gonna change slightly with GDPR, and I'm not gonna talk too much about GDPR right now. There are ways to make sure that you're highly compliant to GDPR where you can still use custom lists such as this, where you can export them out of your email platform and pop them into Facebook.

And imagine the difference that you would get if you're getting good return on investment from email marketing where you're getting people to take action. And an email campaign works really well, and only 20 to 30% of the audience are are opening that. Imagine the difference when you take that list, you plug it into Facebook and you show them the marketing messages on Facebook instead of in their inbox.

You will notice a big difference. Excuse me, I'm just gonna take some water. So there are a number of ways of using Facebook ads.

And this isn't, by the way, this isn't a pitch to get you to use Facebook ads, this is a suggestion based on using Facebook for more than just community building. So you always need to look at the, the temperature of your audience to determine, what it is that you're going to do with them on Facebook ads. And when I say audience temperature, I know it's cold in England right now, but I'm not talking about how cold they are.

I'm talking about how well you know them or how much they've engaged with you so far. So a cold audience is people that you don't have the contact details for. They're not yet on your database in terms of active, they're not yet on your database in terms of you've been marketing to them for a while.

They're not on your database at all. So you can find these people on Facebook by targeting them by their interests, their behaviours, and their demographics. So as you saw in an earlier example, excuse me, we were able to say to Facebook, Go and find people who have got pet insurance that are within a 5 mile radius of my practise.

Go and find everybody who's been buying cat and dog products that are within a 5 mile radius of my veterinary practise. So that's your cold audience. You have a couple of options with warm audiences, so warm audiences are people who you've already had some kind of engagement with or they've visited your website.

So you could target people who have visited specific pages on your website. So let's imagine that you have a, that you want to do, or you want to get more puppy registrations as an example, and you run puppy parties. You could get people who have visited, the puppy page page on your website and show just those people.

An advert. And the benefit of doing that is that you already know that it's warm audience. They've already been to your website, so they already know about your practise.

They're already interested in puppy stuff. So you could then maybe show them, adverts about, 6 month checkup or, vaccinations, but we must make sure we, we can't mention any kind of medication on Facebook whatsoever. The second type of warm audience you've got is a custom list, and that was the example I was giving you before, whereby you can export email addresses, that you've got in other platforms, you know, maybe your, your relationship, your CRM system or your appointment system, and you can put those into Facebook.

And then Facebook will tell you how many of that list. Of people who are using those email addresses, they won't tell you who, they'll just tell you how many, are using those email addresses. So that, and you can show an advert to those.

Or if you've got more going on in your Facebook page in terms of videos, so if you're doing Facebook Live videos or you're uploading videos directly to Facebook, you can target people who have watched the videos on your page as long as they're directly uploaded to Facebook or they're a Facebook Live. So let's imagine that you wanted to focus specifically on, Making sure that you're getting regular flea and worm treatment, visits and people purchasing. You could run a little series of videos that, you know, each doesn't have to be more than 2 minutes, that just give someone a, a, a hint and tip, you know, how to apply, the flea treatment or, or, you know, even how to give a cat a tablet as an example, you know, if they've got to take tablets.

And then if people will watch more than, say, 50%. Of that video. That means they're really interested.

If something, someone only watches 10 seconds, we don't know if they're interested. But if they're stuck around for 50 50% of that video, so they've stuck around for a whole minute on Facebook and watched your video, we know that they're a warm audience. So we know they're more likely to buy and, and take your advice.

So if they've watched that video, then you could run a, a, an advert to them, to a warm, highly engaged audience that's far more likely to take action. Excuse me. So I just want to take you through, a case study, for a vet practise that we ran in Essex.

I've, I've had to, change or block out their details, unfortunately, because we didn't get permission to, to use their name, but we can of course use the poster because we've blocked everything out. And this was, this was a vet who had a huge corporate open on their doorsteps, or they knew that they were going to be opening within a mile radius. It was a well established practise, and they were really concerned that they were going to lose people to the competition, to this new big corporate practise that had loads of, parking, lots of, you know, pet food and pet products to sale.

So, What we did was looked at, well, what would be the right patient or what kind of registrations do we really want to attract? How are we going to attract those? And how can we get to them before these, these big corporates?

Because if someone's buying a puppy as an example, or adopting a puppy, they will generally go crazy, buying all new merchandise. So new beds, new cages, new everything else. And they will naturally be drawn to these superstores where they can buy everything in one place.

And, of course, those superstores are really good at marketing their veterinary services whilst you're in there. So we wanted to make sure that we were getting to those people before they'd even started to buy the, the merchandise. And in doing that, we use Facebook in two ways.

Number one was, actually, I should have shown you the, the other way around, so I'm gonna fast forward the slide. The first thing we did was we created a guide, everything you need to know about getting a puppy. And we ran that to a cold audience, because the cold audience are people, they were interested in puppies.

You could, they were targeted by many, by many different options, but, but we could tell by their activity or we told Facebook by their activity, to show it to the people who were most likely to be getting a puppy. And it was a free guide, so all they needed to do was give us their email address, and they could download. It was a 16-page guide on everything that they needed to know about getting a puppy.

Of course, then that meant that we had their email address. With within that email address, once we'd captured that and we'd delivered the guide, we then created a full email sequence. And that full email sequence, was one of the reasons to choose their, well, we gave them 10 reasons to choose.

The, the specific veterinary practise that we were marketing. We gave them a special offer and a new puppy offer. We told them about new clinics that were going to be coming, and we told them about puppy parties.

So these were the people that were thinking of getting a puppy. They hadn't yet gone to buy the merchandise at the big corporate vet. We'd got their details now, and we were marking into them, which meant that we had far more chance of them registering with this practise.

Then go into the corporate. So that was one way of using Facebook ads was to find a cold audience. Targeted by their activities around puppies specifically, puppies for sale, and puppies for adoption, and we made sure that they saw the advert to download the guide.

The next thing was that we wanted to increase new puppy registrations again. It was good to go for, young animals, of course, because the lifetime value to, to the practise is much longer. And this time, this was done with a new puppy offer that was posted directly to the page.

It wasn't, an advert to start with. It was a post that's posted directly to the page. The reason for that is that people are on your page who, Who engage a lot, so they click like, they are brand advocates.

So if you create a post that's seen by lots of people on your page and they start to engage, they will also share and they will tag people in. So, part of this post said, Do you know someone who's getting a puppy? Tag them in below, so people Started to take them in.

People were seeing it. And as we got more and more engagement, we then decided, right, OK, that's, that's the advert that worked really well. Now, let's pay to get that in front of the cold audience.

So we started with, leveraging the power of the people who are already on your page to effectively do your marketing for you. But we're not saying, do the marketing. We're just saying tag in someone if you know that they want this.

And then we kept, then we tested the, the offer. Was it a good offer? Was it compelling enough?

Was the image right? Once the image was right, and we knew it was working well, then that's when we put some money behind the adverts to get out to an entirely cold audience. These campaigns generated over 50 new puppy registrations per month for a practise in Essex on a Facebook budget of just 150 pounds per month.

So if you consider that, that's cost £3 per puppy registration. And if you consider that the lifetime value of a puppy registration, that you can see that that's a massive return on investment. So, I just wanted to, to show you, in summary.

Because we're coming up to questions now. I just want to show you in summary that Facebook is a great way to get in front of a target audience. It's a great way to get in front of local people in your area that can become brand advocates.

It's a great way to build, like, you know, trust community. Lots of veterinary practises are doing that excellently. It's also a great way to convert people to become customers, increase your revenues, increase your bookings, increase your registrations.

So that's the end of my presentation. Have we got any cus have we got any questions, Alan? Caroline, thank you very much.

That was an excellent coverage of a, a really in that subject. I thought I knew a little bit about Facebook, but you've really covered a lot of territory there. Now, if anyone in the audience has any questions, there's a Q&A box at the bottom of your taskbar at the bottom of the zoom.

Panel, please just go in there, pop any questions in, and we'll cover those. We do have about 10 minutes, to cover really any discussion, that people might like. So please put a few things forward.

We're just waiting for anything to come through. Caroline, can I just ask one or two questions, just, move that forward, and this might seem a little panic. I was talking to, some of my group the other day and We we actually got on, we mentioned the term memes, and it was a bit of a quizzical around the room.

Can you just explain that quickly, what that means, because it may not be obvious to everyone. Sorry, I missed what you said, the term Meme M. M.

It's an image that has a, it's basically a piece of viral content, or you're you're creating it with the, with the aim of it being shared. So it could be a, and it's generally an image with text overlaid. OK, and I, I think everyone's aware of seeing them but may may not have made that connection with the name.

Yeah, another this and this might be a little bit of a deviation, but a question we constantly get when we get into marketing things is, People dealing with negative feedback on Facebook. I'm just wondering if if you've got any views on that that might be useful for the audience. We've we've firefighted many times on social media for vets and .

And trolls. Trolls are the worst, they, they're the boner and keyboard warriors are a nightmare. So there's two things to do.

If they are particularly vitriolic and they're not a customer of yours at all, obviously, the first thing to do is to delete and ban them completely. Don't give them any energy, don't answer them. We always check databases.

Is this person actually an active client? We do a little bit of, I call it cyberstalking, but that sounds really sinister. We always look at who is making that comment, where are they're based, what might their, motivation be for that.

And often you get keyboard warriors who, you know, it could be someone that's in the Midlands, and this person that's writing these awful comments is, is in Scotland. So we delete and ban. Now, what they can do, and what they very often do now is to go and write Facebook reviews if they're feeling particularly vitriolic.

And we will respond to those reviews. So if they've written this awful review, they've never been a customer, we will actually put that very clearly, before we delete and ban them, that, they're not a customer of ours, we're not sure why they're writing it, and, therefore, please disregard this review. So, people live in fear of reviews, you know, people look at numbers, but, but, but when people are really genuinely looking to, to choose a veterinary practise, and I do this on TripAdvisor, and I do this on all sorts, I look at the really good comments, and I look at the really bad comments.

And I don't generally look at the, the scores 23 or 4. And if the, if the good outweighs the bad, I generally take that as a, as a, a good thing. And if the bad things have got responses to them, I will also look at that.

And take that on board. So, so don't be fearful if someone writes something terrible. If they are, do a little bit of research around who's written that post.

If they look like they're not a customer in any way, shape, or form, then, and they're never gonna use you because they're based up in Scotland and they're writing awful things, delete and ban them. If they leave a review, respond to that. It's a genuine customer of a genuine customer complaint and things happen unfortunately, and people do, do have a means of, do need to complain and feel they need to complain.

It's, it's to diffuse the situation right away. So if they post something on Facebook, it's to act in a timely way. So, you know, and people often post at night, Ellen, because they know the pages aren't looked at very often.

So, you know, we normally recommend that someone has a quick check every, every evening about 9 o'clock. And if something's negative, it is to acknowledge it straight away and to take it offline. So to say, thank you very much for your comments.

We don't wish to discuss this because it's private. Please message us directly or please message us directly with a telephone number where we can follow this up with you offline. Excellent, I think that gives people a sense of setting up a Facebook policy, of course, which is probably important as part of the business, I'm sure you help people with that.

The, the other thing that comes up when we talk around social media marketing or online marketing is, A comment I get from a lot of my practise owners is, well, I'm too old, I don't understand this stuff. How do they build a marketing team around this? And often we suggest, nurses are often very good at this, and the receptionists take this on, age group, and interest, etc.

And of course, that falls into reasonable usage, but how would you set up a marketing team in a practise? How would I set up a marketing team in the practise, first off, establish who's interested. Secondly, I would establish, their grammar and, you know, you know, they're representing the business.

If they use social media well for themselves, doesn't mean to say they're gonna be great social marketeers, unfortunately. So it's about understanding. Who's #1, who's interested?

#2, what platforms do they use? Number 3, ask for ideas about how would they grow it, and see if that aligns with your brand, and your marketing strategies, you know, because having someone go and spam in every single local group, Alan, is not gonna do your practise any good. But unfortunately, I see a lot of that activity, .

So it's, it's understanding, you know, what are the parameters, asking them for their ideas, looking at their own social media profiles, are they acting responsibly, and then it's about ascertaining how much time can be spent. And what are the objectives and being really clear with them on the objectives. So if it's purely for community building, and then it's about making sure that you've got someone that's there looking for content and there's, and scheduling it.

So that's the other thing to bear in mind. It's not only the amount of time, but it's how organised can they be, and can They create what they need to create in an hour block or a 2-hour block. Because whilst it's great to take photos as, as and when on the go and post them straight away, there's better times to post.

So someone who's got an analytical mind is good at that because they can look at the insights, determine what time to post, So, so it's based on a lot of things, really. It's based on interest. It's based on how they conduct themselves online, that, you know, spelling and grammar are important.

They're, they're representing online. What are their ideas, and, and, and making sure there's a policy in place that they don't go off and spam everybody and, you know, and beg all their friends to like the page who haven't got pets. Because this is a real key, OK?

If you ask for likes, and they're from people who are never gonna do business, so they haven't got a pet, they're never gonna use that. That means Facebook see that they've got a page with loads of like and no one engaging. Then Facebook naturally show those posts to even less people.

So, so a short answer is someone who's passionate, who's really good at at the at the platforms, but they need, they do need to have an understanding of marketing and they need to have an understanding of the objectives and how Facebook relates to the business objectives. Does that answer the question? That that's me, thank you very much.

I'm just, I was just reflecting it's like anything in marketing, you need a strategy and then you need a a a way of implementing that that actually works to objectives. So same same answer, just slightly different process. We do have a process question come through, so the question the post that has a learn more button that goes out to a wider audience and the people who have liked your page, how do you do that?

That's OK, so you'll hear people talking about boosted posts on Facebook, and I'm gonna ask you never to boost a post. So when you have a post on your page and it says boost at the bottom, yes, that will get it seen by a lot of people, but it won't get it seen necessarily by the targeted people that you want to see it. So it's a really good way of lining Facebook's pockets, but not your own.

The way to do that is to go to the Facebook Ads Manager. So if you just Google Facebook Ads Manager whilst you're logged into your Facebook account, and as long as you've already got a Facebook page and you're an admin on that Facebook page, you can create a Facebook ads account. And link it to your Facebook page.

And then on that particular post, it's called post engagement. And you would go into the Facebook ads manager, you would choose your objective as post engagement. Get all your targeting sorted, you know, such as making sure they've got, pet insurance or they're obviously highly engaged in buying pet products.

And then when you get to the advert part, that's where you can create the words, the, the, the image and the and, and then you create a button and you decide where that button's gonna go off to. Excellent, thank you for that. On the, the question is great, thanks very much for the information, so it's good.

Of the people listening, if you'd just like to pop a comment in the Q&A, just some feedback for Caroline and what you found interesting, what was the most useful parts for you, I'm sure she'd appreciate, some of that as well. We've just got 2 or 3 minutes before we sort of need to hand over to the next speaker. But Caroline, thank you for, the clarity of that.

That was really good, walk through the, the processes we need. I've always said to people, social media is really a social platform, but of course, what, what they all now need to be is a selling platform as well. So making that distinction between the social engagement and the sort of Facebook ad commercial side of it is probably a useful distinction.

On that. I, you mentioned GDPR, and of course that's the hot topic at the moment as well. I realise you're not talking about that, but I presume we should encourage people to include their social media in that review as well.

Absolutely 100%. And specifically, if you're using Pixels on your website, You know, I mean, I'm actually looking at, this with my lawyer right now, and we're even getting to the stage of how granular we need to be on a Facebook post, and are we going to have to put any kind of GDPR statement at the bottom of, of specific posts that are, going to do data capture. So.

You know, absolutely 100%, you must have Cookies Policy on your, on your website. You must have, a Pixel policy on your website, so that covers off all the Facebook advertising side of it. And then data capture in terms of making sure it's compliant and that people are opting in.

Rather than have to opt out. It's, it's a bit of a minefield and, one that I still don't think everyone knows 100% of the answers until it really goes live. But it is about making sure that you've had the permission to from a marketing point of view, certainly that you must make sure that you can evidence that they have opted in and that you have permission, not just to email them, but to use Facebook pixels as well if you've got the pixel on your website.

Excellent, thank you for that. So the answer's short, that 10, quick question coming from German question from Germany. I've got 1 minute for this one.

Are you generally allowed to advertise in Great Britain as a practise, and thanks for the talk. It was great, very useful for my second business, which is dancing, which is great. General question, are you generally allowed to advertise in, in the UK as a practise?

Yes, is the short answer, yes, I think it is, it may be different in Germany than it would seem, but . Thanks for the question and obviously the real point is, if you need help with any of this, the address is on the screen there, so take advantage of that. And once again, Caroline, thank you very much for a brilliant presentation.