Inside: Learn more about your Facebook audience to make them into more loyal patients.
Your Facebook page is a great place to connect with patients, but if that’s all you’re using it for, you are missing out on its true power.
Business owners on Facebook have access to all sorts of tools that let them get to know their audience — what they like, what they don’t, and what they expect from a local business.
For independent pharmacy owners, these insights are an invaluable tool that can help them refine their marketing strategy. Page Insights and Audience Insights can help pharmacies create content they can be confident their users will engage with and target their advertising to save money and get the biggest return on investment.
Facebook Page Insights
When you run a business page on Facebook, you have access to a feature called Page Insights. If you are looking at your pharmacy’s page while logged into an administrator account, you can access Page Insights through a tab at the top of the page.
When you click over, you’ll see a whole new world of information. Page Insights contains two years of data on who is engaging with your page and what kind of posts result in the most engagement.
Metrics you can use to improve engagement
When you open up your Insights tab, you’ll see a page summary with all sorts of stats, including:
- Actions on page
- Page views
- Page likes
- Reach
- Post engagements
- Messages
- Videos
Each of these stats has an accompanying graph, so you can see how much they’ve changed over time. If your social media strategy is working, these graphs should be trending upward or remaining about the same from week to week. If they show a decrease, it could be a sign that something about your social media strategy is off-putting to your followers.
To help you figure out what’s working and what’s not, Page Insights show you information on your most recent posts. You can see:
- Organic reach
- Paid reach
- Post clicks
- Reactions, comments, and shares
- Hide, report as spam, and unlikes
You might see that posts with infographic images perform better than posts with links, or that users tend to engage more when you ask a question. On the flip side, you might see a certain post prompted people to hide the post or unlike your page. Determining what kind of posts your audience finds the most compelling is important because it creates more organic engagement.
While Facebook engagement might seem trivial in the grand scheme of your pharmacy business, in the long run, it can make your pharmacy more visible in the community.
Facebook pages with high organic engagement — that means likes, comments, shares, and tags that aren’t paid for — are more likely to show up in Facebook users’ News Feeds. If you have lots of people engaging, it won’t just show up in the News Feeds of the people that already follow you, either. By using Facebook well, you have the opportunity to reach entirely new prospective patients.
Beyond your individual posts, Facebook Page Insights lets you measure how users are interacting with your Facebook page. When they click on your website, call-to-action, events, or directions, you’ll be able to see it. By knowing where users are gravitating, you can focus your information in the right places.
Audience Insights
When you want to drive organic engagement, Facebook Page Insights is the most valuable tool in your arsenal. If you’re also using Facebook for digital advertising, then you have another tool to help make your marketing efforts more effective.
Located within Facebook Ads Manager, Audience Insights helps you get to know users better. It helps you learn as much as you can about the people who you’re trying to target, ultimately resulting in a higher return on investment for your Facebook ads.
If the promise of detailed information sounds great, but the idea of invading users’ privacy seems a little creepy, don’t worry — all the information Audience Insights provides you is completely anonymized.
Metrics you can use to refine your audience
When it comes to digital advertising, a bigger audience isn’t always better. That’s why Audience Insights lets you pick between different audiences to analyze, including:
- Everyone who uses Facebook
- Users connected to your page
- A custom audience
After you’ve selected an audience, you can get demographic info like age, gender, education, job title, location, and relationship status, and other personal information, like interests, political affiliation, and hobbies.
With all this information, you can filter down to the audience that you really want to connect with your digital marketing campaign. Since you’re a local business, you don’t want to waste your advertising dollars trying to market to people around the world — with Audience Insights, you can make sure that your ad is being seen by local residents who might actually stop by the pharmacy.
Depending on the type of campaign you are running, you’ll want to focus your energies on even more detailed audiences than just “local.” If you’re introducing a line of CBD pet products, for example, you can focus the ad campaign on young people who are interested in animals.
Or, if you’re wanting to increase patient loyalty, you can run an ad campaign that exclusively targets people who have already liked your Facebook page.
When you filter down your potential audience, your campaigns have the potential to be more effective, because you can cater specifically to their interests. And, because you’re only trying to get the ad out to a small number of people, the cost to run the campaign is lower.
You have to be careful not to add too many filters, though, because it has the potential to create an audience so tiny that it won’t be able to make an impact.
Using Audience Insights, you can learn more about your potential patients and customize an ad experience for them, giving them what they want and bringing in more business to the pharmacy.
An Independently Owned Organization Serving Independent Pharmacies
PBA Health is dedicated to helping independent pharmacies reach their full potential on the buy side of their business. The company is a member-owned organization that serves independent pharmacies with group purchasing services, expert contract negotiations, proprietary purchasing tools, distribution services, and more.
PBA Health, an HDA member, operates its own VAWD-certified warehouse with more than 6,000 SKUs, including brands, generics, narcotics CII-CV, cold-storage products, and over-the-counter (OTC) products.
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