I own / operate physical therapy clinics in the Denver Metro area and have been effectively generating leads and generating new patients online for the last 3 years. And the cost of acquisition is surprisingly low (from as little as $0 if you do some of the things in-house to less than $100 for the cost of acquisition).

Though I can't say what your results might be - I have had no success with Facebook (ads or landing page) regarding new client acquisition.

If you are interested to learn what works for my business, give me a call to discuss.

Are you using an online booking tool? Full disclosure, founder of SImplyappointments.com , the reason I started it is because I hate using the phone and don't like playing phone tag to schedule a damn appointment.

www.simplyappointments.com we have a free plan. And yes of course there are other companies as well. So if you are not using a system to make it easy for your current customers and new customers I suggest you start investigating a system.

Aneil

I have no experience using Facebook for advertising purposes, although I mainly hear bad things. Social media marketing can be done effectively, of course, although whether that involves paid ads is a separate question.

My own approach for local lead gen would involve building out and optimizing the most relevant domains as property. Expenses in this area add long-term value.

Paid ads can be effective if you have a decent budget, but you should really be focusing on organic promotion for your business. You'll be able to pull in high quality leads by optimizing your website and landing pages, creating interesting and relevant content, and leveraging other important channels such as email marketing, your blog, and social media.

If you are looking to expand your Facebook efforts, there is a way to create a custom tab with an embedded landing page, but I'd say you're more likely to be able to drive traffic to a landing page on your own website than you are to get people to notice a new tab on your Facebook page.

Happy to chat if you'd like to discuss lead gen and balancing paid and organic efforts any further. I can also give you more info about HubSpot's marketing software if you're looking for a way to integrate your landing pages and email tools. Feel free to reach out either way!

Hi,
There's a few potential ways you could generate leads from Facebook but it's difficult to predict the results without doing any testing.

As you are looking to advertise a local business, the first and most important thing is to use the most precise targeting. Not only should you narrow it down by the city of yours, but also by the age and even sex of potential clients, based on your current clients profile (say women aged from 50 to 60).

Someone mentioned the problem of attracting fake followers to the page and there is some true in it, but it can easily be avoided with clever advertising. 1) you could try out advertising a Facebook Offer to people around your area, offering a big discount for first time clients - this will easily help you identify the leads coming from Facebook. 2) if you already have an email database of at least 200 clients, you can use it to create a Facebook Custom Audience and then a Lookalike Audience - based on the profiles of your current clients, Facebook will identify potential other FB users that should be interested in your service the most. 3) depending on the traffic to your website (at least ~1000 visitors/month), you can also install Website Custom Audiences - by doing this, you will be able to advertise (remarket) to every single person that visited your website, which is really powerful.

If you wanted to discuss it further, let me know and I'll be glad to help!

Best,
Adomas

The best method for social marketing is avoid Facebook like a plague. The amount of spam traffic it will generate is fantastic but as for real people in your office, not much. If you are looking for a single social network for a business page I would recommend G+. Not only will it serve a similar purpose to what you were hoping to achieve with Facebook but it will serve to improve your local Google directory results and it couples really nicely with a Google ad campaign. If you are looking for shell likes from India Facebook is your tool. If you are hoping for real bodies on the table Google is your tool.

Ultimately you are offering a solution to a problem (a pain-reliever to someone's pain). Focus on that! Your message must communicate these two sides of the relationship.

Once this has been clarified (try using a Minimum Value Proposition Canvas to work it through), your next challenge is to determine what is the most effective medium to deliver your message to your target audience. Check out the Book Traction for some ideas on how to determine this.

NOW you final step would be to try a number of limited test experiments with multiple messages (text & graphics) targeted at your audience on the medium selected through the Traction process. It might sound like a lot of preparation, but doing your homework will give you the best "bang for your buck".

My most important suggestion to you is to look for Steve Blank's "Customer Development" process - try Steve's course on Udacity "How to Build a Startup". I'd be more than willing to provide you more details on how this process could benefit your practice both short term and more importantly, build a more successful long term practice in your community.

Wishing you every success. Yoel