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In this episode, Barbara and Neil discussed: 

 

  1. Neil explains his255 method for Facebook and Instagram ads: two campaigns (warm and cold), five audiences, and five ads to systematically find winning combinations and scale. 
  1. They discuss how Facebook charges per 1,000 views(CPM) rather than per click, and what that means for setting and spending a daily budget. 
  1. Neil shares the story of launching Scotland’s biggest health and fitness exhibition, nearly failing, and then saving and scaling it purely through Facebook ads. 
  1. They compare Google Ads vs. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads for physicians, recommending Google for high-intent cold traffic and Meta primarily for remarketing, then broader cold traffic once scale is needed. 
  1. They cover practical advertising guidance for doctors—starting around $20/day, using metrics like link click-through rate, balancing warm vs. cold campaigns, and choosing a proven ads expert with a strong track record and longevity in the field. 

 

Key Takeaways: 

 

“Facebook and Instagram and Google, TikTok, LinkedIn ads, all the ad platforms they learn really really quickly, and where the the best leads are, and if you spend $20 per day for five to seven days, you’ll have really good data as to which audiences are working well, which ads are working well, which ones are not, and you can start to make adjustments from there.” – Neil Shoney

Connect with Neil Shoney: 

 

  • Facebook:  www.facebook.com/neilshoneymac 

 

Connect with Barbara Hales:  

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT 

 

Chapter 1: Introducing Neil Shoney and the Promise of Scalable Ads 

0:00 | Dr. Barbara Hales 

  

[0:00:01] Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have with us a very interesting character by the name of Neil Shoney. Neil is an ad strategist and go-to expert for service-based businesses that want a simple, proven, scalable Facebook ad system that consistently brings in premium clients. With 13 years of running ads and over 3,000 service providers helped, Neil is known for turning complicated advertising into clear, repeatable frameworks that work across different service industries. Because, unlike almost everywhere else you turn, Neil does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. After managing high-spend campaigns in the UK and US, Neil shifted into coaching full-time and created a library of 36 proprietary frameworks, including his 25-5 method, that helps service providers install a functioning, profitable ad system in days, not months, that they can turn on or off like a tap, whenever they want new leads. His clients span over 62 niches, with 21 of those niches hitting six-figure months through ads. Welcome to the show, Neil. 

[0:01:44] Neil Shoney: Thanks much for having me, Barbara. Appreciate you. 

[0:01:47] Dr. Barbara Hales: Could you explain the 255 method? 

  

Chapter 2: The 255 Method—Two Campaigns, Five Audiences, Five Ads 

1:51 | Neil Shoney 

  

[0:01:51] Neil Shoney: Sure. The 255 method is at the heart of it, just a testing method for running advertising. So the majority of the time when a practice runs advertising through Facebook and Instagram or any other ad platform for that matter, they typically run what I call a one-one-one method. That is one campaign going to one audience with one ad, and there’ll definitely be people listening right now who are just like nodding along with bigger eyes, going, “That is exactly what I’m doing right now. I see it all the time, and what you have in that situation is you’ve basically taken your best guess at every single step of creating that campaign. So you’ve written the ad copy, and you’ve hoped that it’s going to be great. You’ve chosen your image or your video, and you hope that it’s going to be great. You’ve chosen your audience, and you hope that it’s going to be the right one. But with the Shony 255 method, we do it this way: first, we run two campaigns rather than one. First of all, you’ve already doubled your chance of finding a winner because not both of them have to be winners. You can find a winner and a loser, and then put all your eggs into one winning basket. Those two campaigns that we split out-one is for warm, and one is for cold. That’s people who know who you are and people who don’t know who you are. That’s the first step that a lot of practices get wrong. They only target people who have never heard of them before, who may not even be in the market, and yet you could put a very small amount of ad spend behind people who have already visited your social media pages, your website, etc., and simply get back in front of those people and have really, really high conversion rates. So the first step there is two campaigns rather than one. The second step of the 255 method is where the first five comes in, and that’s five audiences rather than one. And so, quite simply, instead of, you know, saying people interested in this one thing and taking your best guess, you get the great opportunity to choose five different interests that somebody might have, or five different demographic targeting tools that we can choose from, and you don’t have to be right 100% of the time. You actually only need to be right once out of the five. Now, when we set this up, we hope that all five are fantastic. That’s great for scale. But if four of them are, you know, they just don’t work. That’s absolutely fine. We can turn off those audiences. We found our winner, and we can push all the budget towards the winner. And then the final step of the 255 method is the final five: having five ads rather than just one. And there are two reasons for this. Number one is it’s also great to find winners and losers inside your ads, and you know the things that don’t work. You can turn them off. People never have to see them ever again, and you can push all the budget towards the winners. But there’s a second reason as well, and you’ve probably experienced this yourself, Barbara, and so will so many people who are listening right now. Is that you show any level of interest in something that you see via an ad? You might not even click through to the website, but if you stop scrolling, you hit the see more button, you read it, or you watch the video, and then you start seeing the ad over and over and over again. That’s Facebook basically saying this person is interested in this, but they didn’t take the action that the advertiser wanted them to take, which is to click through, request a callback, book an appointment, whatever it may be. Now, if you set up your ads the way that 98% of people do, a 111 campaign, then Facebook’s only option is to show the same ad to the same person over and over and over again, but if you have five ads, they’ll show them ad number two, then ad number three, then ad number four, and it helps to re-engage people and get more people to take action. 

[0:05:53] Neil Shoney: So it’s a testing method to find winners and losers, and rather than just, you know, throwing something against the wall, and it’s either going to stick or it’s not. It gives you a much higher probability of running a successful campaign. Mathematically, there are 50 variations there, so there’s 50 chances to find a winning variation, and it allows for a lot of scalability because if you have multiple audiences that become successful and multiple ads that are successful, then there’s a lot of opportunity to increase the spend on the front end to get much more out the other side. 

[0:06:27] Dr. Barbara Hales: What a great idea! So, do the clients get charged by Facebook for someone clicking on View More, or only if they click through? 

  

Chapter 3: How Facebook Bills and Neil’s Origin Story with Ads 

6:45 | Neil Shoney 

  

[0:06:45] Neil Shoney: Actually, with Facebook and Instagram, the way that it works is you’re charged per 1000 views, so it’s not charged based upon clicks and not clicks and things like that. As Google says, they are cost per click, and you know you’re charged whenever somebody clicks on the ad; technically, Google is still doing cost per 1000 views. They’re just choosing to send the billing notification once somebody has clicked. So it’s smart marketing on their side because they get to say You only pay if somebody clicks. People are going to click, so you’re going to pay anyway. But with Facebook, they have a cost per 1000 views, which is different for everybody. It depends on the ad, how many people you’re targeting, and who’s inside those audiences. But technically, you know, you set a daily budget, so it could be $10 a day, it could be $100 a day, it could be $1,000 a day, depend upon the size of the business, and you’re going to most likely spend what you set as a budget, as long as there’s a big enough audience there for Facebook to target. 

[0:07:47] Dr. Barbara Hales: How did you get into this originally? 

[0:07:50] Neil Shoney: Well, I actually 1314 years ago, something like that. I started Scotland’s biggest ever health and fitness exhibition, and I came straight out of university. I’d studied sport and exercise science. I always knew I was going to be entrepreneurial, and I just thought everybody would buy into my idea: a huge event at Scotland’s biggest venue, with a break-even of about 4,000 tickets needing to be sold for the weekend. I just thought that everybody would hear about it and think it would be incredible, and I ended up signing my life away with no money in the bank, hundreds of 1000s of pounds, or hundreds of 1000s of dollars, I should say, of contracts to be able to put on this massive show. And about five months into advertising, we’d sold around, you know, 50 tickets at $12.50 

[0:08:48] Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s pretty scary. 

[0:08:50] Neil Shoney: Yeah, it was pretty scary. We were about four and a half months out from the show itself, and everybody was knocking their doors down for outstanding invoices and different things, and to be honest, going to Facebook ads was like a last roll of the dice. I’d already done everything that everybody does in the marketing space when they’re bootstrapping, which is posting lots on social media, cold outreach, finding email addresses on Google, sending emails to personal trainers and all sorts. No matter how hard I worked, nothing was clicking. And when I ran Facebook ads, I ended up doing something very similar to the Shony 255 method. And I think it was just a bit of luck that I went down that route of being like, “Oh, I can test out different audiences. I can test out different ads. That’s how that feels safer. So I just did that. That was the way that I set them up in the first place, and I ended up spending. I think it was around, you know, like $50 or something in the first few days, and I had returned somewhere in the region of I think it was 150 Or $250 something like that, in sales, and it was just this like penny drop moment where I was like, “Wow, I can track how much money I put into this thing, how much money comes out the other side, and if I know how much I need to put in to get something out, something specific out the other side, I can basically choose how many tickets I want to sell, as long as I have the cash flow, of course, to be able to reinvest into the ads, and that’s what we did. And we ended up not just selling, you know, more tickets, but we ended up almost hitting our target for tickets sold four and a half months later. The show was a big success. We ended up scaling it over the next four years, and then selling it to the country’s biggest event organizers. And we never ran TV ads, billboards, or radio advertising, as all of these big exhibitions do. We just ran Facebook ads, and that was it. So I never planned to teach anybody Facebook ads. I just tried to use it to save myself from a terrible situation. 

[0:11:05] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, what a great story that was. Thank 

[0:11:09] Neil Shoney: you. 

  

Chapter 4: Google vs. Meta Ads and Leveraging Instagram Targeting 

11:09 | Dr. Barbara Hales 

  

[0:11:09] Dr. Barbara Hales: When it comes to physicians, is it better for doctors to use Google Ads, Meta Ads, or both? 

[0:11:18] Neil Shoney: I would always lean into Google first if you’re doing cold prospecting. People who don’t know who you are, because of course people are going to go to Google or AI now as well. But Google’s still the frontrunner by a long shot. People are going to go to Google to find the providers that are close to them for the specific problems that they have, and so albeit that Google Ads cost significantly more to get in front of 1000 people, it’s so high intent that if it’s set up correctly, then you end up getting a very high percentage of people who click on your ads going all the way through to creating a booking with Facebook, the the next best step, or Facebook and Instagram, we should probably talk about them collectively because it’s the same ad platform. The best thing you can do if you’re on a low budget and you’re sort of just starting out with advertising for your practice is use it first and foremost for remarketing, so you can take your Facebook pixel and drop it onto your website. You can also create audiences of anybody that visits your Facebook or Instagram page, which some people may do before deciding to book with you as well. And we can create these audiences of people that already know who you are, and we can advertise to those people. And so, if you wanted to make the best use of your ad dollars, it would be Google first. It would be Facebook remarketing second, and then I would use Facebook and Instagram more broadly for cold traffic as your third step. So that would be once you already feel that you’ve already significantly scaled the first two; that’s where you go to find more customers at scale. 

[0:13:12] Dr. Barbara Hales: When someone advertises on Facebook, does it automatically go to Instagram as well, or do you have to request that? No, 

[0:13:20] Neil Shoney: No, automatically. You would actually have to uncheck some boxes to stop it happening. 

[0:13:26] Dr. Barbara Hales: Why would you want to? 

[0:13:27] Neil Shoney: No, you wouldn’t. 

[0:13:31] Dr. Barbara Hales: And people on Instagram would see the ads even if they don’t follow you. 

[0:13:36] Neil Shoney: Yes, absolutely. So anybody who is within your targeting can see your ads, so you can target people based upon, of course, age, gender, location. Which, of course, location is going to be very important for local practices. But you can also do some targeting based around certain things like their interests, and you know some things as well, like you can target people based upon not just whether they’re a parent or not. You can target them based upon how old their kids are. Like Facebook has a lot of data, and it feels accurate, and there’s a lot that you can do with the targeting tools. 

  

Chapter 5: Budgets, Metrics, and Warm vs. Cold Campaign Strategy 

14:19 | Dr. Barbara Hales 

  

[0:14:19] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s a great idea. When a physician is considering ads, let’s say it’s a new practice, or he is providing a new service or a product that he didn’t have before, what do you advise them to spend on a daily basis for their budget? 

[0:14:39] Neil Shoney: So I actually suggest that everybody starts at just around $20 per day with any campaign, and that may sound to some people like, oh, it’s just plain small. The reason I say $20 per day is because Facebook, Instagram, Google-they learn so quickly. If you’ve ever been told by an agency the reason. The reason that you’re not getting results is that you’ve not spent enough, or because Facebook and Instagram take a really long time to learn. It’s actually their calling card: they don’t know how to get you results. Facebook and Instagram and Google, TikTok, LinkedIn ads, all the ad platforms they learn really really quickly, and where the the best leads are, and if you spend $20 per day for five to seven days, you’ll have really good data as to which audiences are working well, which ads are working well, which ones are not, and you can start to make adjustments from there. As soon as you have a positive ROI, that is the point at which we start the scaling process. So we don’t go with the mindset of your budget for the month is you know $2,000 So let’s figure out how much we need to spend per day to spend $2,000 The target’s not to spend $2,000 The target’s to find winners that bring in more revenue than you spend, and then you can start to scale towards spending $2,000 and that that’s the safest way to do 

[0:16:08] Dr. Barbara Hales: it. How can you differentiate between not getting responses because people aren’t interested in you versus it just not being a good ad that needs to be changed? 

[0:16:19] Neil Shoney: Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things. There, there’s a million different stats on the Facebook Ads dashboard, but there’s one that most people don’t even know exists. But it’s actually almost the tell-all of whether the ad is resonating with people or if it’s a landing page issue, like getting people to take action when they actually get to your website, and that is link click-through rate. So there are two. There’s one that’s just click-through rate, and there’s one that’s link click-through rate. That one is what percentage of the people who see your ads actually click the button to go to your website, right? So it’s not, you know, hitting the like button, commenting, or seeing more. That’s click-through rate. Link click-through rate, however, is people actually clicking to leave Facebook after they’ve read your ad. Now, if it’s over 1%, we typically say there’s nothing wrong with the ads. The ads are doing their job. It’s getting people to stop scrolling, to read, and to leave Facebook. If you’re not getting inquiries on the next page, we then focus on the page and how do we get more people to take action there? If, on the other hand, you’ve got an ad that is, you know, 0.5%, then we’re quite far off where we need to be in terms of the link click-through rate. Then that’s when I would look at the advert itself and say, how do we get more people’s attention? How do we get more people to take action from the ad? 

[0:17:53] Dr. Barbara Hales: Are ads best for cold prospecting or remarketing to people who hit my website? If both, how can this be maximized for the biggest ROIs? 

[0:18:07] Neil Shoney: Well, both of them have their place in terms of what we would want anybody to be running. You know, like one month after working with us, for instance, we would want everybody to be running both, because there’s your warm campaign, your remarketing, which is fantastic for a small spend and a high ROI. That’s amazing, but there’s only so many people in there, so there’s only so far you can scale with that. And once you’ve kind of maximized that side of things, if you want to grow faster and acquire clients faster, you have to go out into the cold market. You have to go out and find more customers that may be out there. So, in terms of what’s more important, I suppose to start off, if you’re not advertising at all right now, I would say the warm side of things, the remarketing. But if you’re really serious about scaling, then both of them are very important to make scale happen as quickly as possible. 

  

Chapter 6: Small Budgets, Getting Help, and Choosing the Right Ads Expert 

19:12 | Dr. Barbara Hales 

  

[0:19:12] Dr. Barbara Hales: What would you say to someone who says to you, you know, I don’t really have a budget, you know, so I haven’t been advertising, and you know, is it worth it? You know, is it definitely going to work, or am I just going to be throwing money in the air? 

[0:19:28] Neil Shoney: Well, a couple of things. The first thing is, you don’t have to start off with a high budget, like I was saying. You can start at a small budget. You can see what happens with the ads. Just like my story with the events business 14 years ago: if it hadn’t worked, if I hadn’t sold tickets in that first week or a week or two weeks, I wouldn’t have continued spending money on it. But because I spent a small amount of money and made significantly more back, it gave me the. Opportunity to scale into that thing. The second thing is don’t go into it without some sort of guidance. And I don’t even mean that you need to work with somebody like me. Like you can go onto YouTube. Like you can go onto YouTube and at least get some tips and direction around how to do certain things, like for instance, some people right now will be going. How do I set up warm retargeting? How do I set up these warm audiences? I’ve literally got a YouTube video inside the ads dashboard where I set them all up. So, like you, you don’t have to go into this completely blindly, even if you don’t want to invest in, you know, courses and agencies and things like that. So do some research. Don’t just throw something against the wall and then determine that it doesn’t work. There are things that need to happen to make advertising successful, but a lot of it’s out there on YouTube. 

[0:20:56] Dr. Barbara Hales: As a doctor, if I was looking for somebody to just do it, I didn’t want to get involved. I just want them to do it. How? What criteria do I use to pick the right one? How do I recognize who is you know going to do it for me versus someone who you know read a course last weekend and doesn’t really keep doing? 

[0:21:18] Neil Shoney: Well, track records are really a really big thing. How long have they been doing it? It’s a massive one. So I mean, we have just an absolute crazy amount of testimonial videos, and if anybody ever goes through, like, my Instagram or whatever, every few days it’s another testimonial video or something that a client sent us or whatever it may be, and we’ve done that for like 10 years here, just like churning it out. So when you go on our landing pages, it’s sometimes like 120 videos that are on that page. So, like, what type of results have they got for clients is number one, but the second one is how long have they been doing this for? And the reason why that’s so important is Facebook and Instagram are changing all the time, and so if they only had the ability to be able to run advertising successfully in a pocket of time, when they had a system that worked with the Facebook algorithm today, for instance, as soon as Facebook announces two months from now that they’ve changed the algorithm, are they going to be savvy enough to be able to do the appropriate testing to figure out how to continue having their clients win in the new environment? So time in the game is also as important as the results that they’ve been getting most recently. 

[0:22:37] Dr. Barbara Hales: It does seem so unfair, though, that you know, like if we catch your game, you’re going to change it. 

  

Chapter 7: Regaining Targeting Control, Video Tips, and How to Reach Neil 

22:41 | Neil Shoney 

  

[0:22:41] Neil Shoney: Yeah, they do it all the time, and they’ll always tell you that it’s because they want to help you. They don’t. They want to find plenty of ways to get you to spend more money. So that’s what the most recent algorithm update was all about. It was, hey, you don’t need to think about targeting anymore. Just let us choose the targeting, and we’ll find the right people for you, and that’s going to really help you get results. It hasn’t played out like that at all. What it turns out is that Facebook has lots of inventory for people you’re not trying to get in front of, and now they have permission from you to spend all of your ad dollars on those inverted commas, low-quality leads, if you will. So there are ways that you can take back control of your ads. There’s a button. This is probably one of the best tips I can give anybody on this podcast, by the way, because a lot of you are running localized businesses. So there are two big reasons. 

[0:23:42] Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, because the next question I have for you, so you could put it in there, is for someone that is, you know, has heard you and said, okay, you’ve convinced me. I’m going to dip my toe in the waters. What are two helpful tips that you could give to our listeners that they could implement right away? 

[0:24:04] Neil Shoney: So this is the biggest one for anybody that runs a localized business in general, which is when you’re setting up your adverts, and you get to the second step. There are only three steps: campaign, ad set, and, for ease of understanding, that’s your audience who is going to get to see your ad. And then there’s a third step, which is setting up the ad itself. That’s the thing people are going to see. That middle step, right now, it looks like there’s not too much that you can do there. You set a minimum age. You don’t set too much targeting in terms of locations; you can technically set a locational target in there, but it feels like you are being relatively pinpoint about who is going to get to see your ads. But you’re not. What is actually happening there is you are giving face. A suggestion, and that is very dangerous for a local business, because when you say I specifically work with women between the ages of 30-five and 50-five in this 10-mile radius, they can show 20% of your your ads to men, and they can show another 20% of your ads to 18-year-olds and 70-two year olds, and they can also show your ads outside of that 10-mile radius. But there’s one button at the bottom of the page that you’ll see, which says “Further limit the reach of my ads. The wording is almost comical because it’s like, how much do they not want you to hit that button, right? So that they just can spend your ad dollars however they wish, right? But if you click on that button, it gives you the ability to go into everything I just said there: gender, location, age, and uncheck a box that says “use as a suggestion. When you do that, you take back pinpoint control over who can see your ads, and for local businesses, you might even find that it raises your cost per lead. Right, that’s not a bad thing, because what is the point in having low-cost leads if there are a bunch of people who can never work with you, who can never walk through your doors? So it’s not always that it’s more expensive. I’m just saying that technically it could happen, but I would rather have great leads, great quality, my target demographic, than a whole bunch of leads that would never buy from me. So that’s really important. The second thing is for these types of businesses, video is really powerful, and it doesn’t even need to be, you know, really high-quality video with transitions and a filming crew. I mean, it can just quite simply be a little bit of B-roll of, you know, somebody in the practice, which can obviously be set up. It’s not like you have to start recording your sessions, but just having that type of B-roll catches people’s attention. There is a great place for images inside your five ads, but videos work really, really well for localized businesses and service-based businesses. 

[0:27:21] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, those are really both great bits of advice. The next question I have is for someone that wants to take a course from you or get advice from you. How can they reach you? 

[0:27:34] Neil Shoney: Well, there are a couple of ways. The first way is to quite simply go to Instagram and go to Neil Shoney Ads. So it looks like “Neil’s Honey Ads,” unfortunately, the way it sounds. But it’s Neil Shoni ads, all one word. And you can get loads of tips there and different things via the link in my bio. There’s a five-minute video that walks you through our whole system and how we work with clients. Or you could just send me a message there directly, or you can email me at neil@neilshone.com or neil@neilshoney.com if you want to sign up that way, and yeah, we can have a quick conversation from there. 

[0:28:17] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I really found this, you know, very educational. I’ve learned a lot. I feel like I know more, and I’m sure other listeners feel that same way. Thank you so much. 

[0:28:31] Neil Shoney: Appreciate you. Thank you, Barbara. 

[0:28:33] Dr. Barbara Hales: This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time.