Does your practice have a strong social media presence? If not, you may want to seriously consider investing more in your social marketing channel. According to a 2018 Doctor.com survey, 63% of patients choose one provider over another based on a strong online presence. Whether or not you tend to use social media yourself, there really is no denying its value as a marketing channel when it comes to acquiring leads, building trust, and growing your practice.
Strategy 1 - Provide Patient Education through your Social Media Channels
As a healthcare provider, you answer questions every day from patients trying to better understand how to take control of their health. In fact, I bet it is safe to say that sometimes you even feel like a broken record answering the same questions over and over. Though the following advice will not remedy this issue entirely, you may find it useful to take some of these most common questions and answer them via your social media (and/or blog) in an effort to help educate the general public. This may help answer those recurring questions from those who happened to see your posts, but more importantly, these types of regular, engaging, and educational posts will help cement your status as a reliable source for this type of information. Even if a patient is not ready to be seen today, they may follow your practice based on one of your recent educational posts and keep you in mind for when they are ready to be seen. One way to help educate the public is to simply answer their questions. Simple enough, right? All you have to do is find a nice backdrop with good lighting and record yourself answering the questions your patients ask most frequently, and that’s it!
Strategy 2 - Get your own patients to help you create your content
Getting your own patients to create your content may seem too good to be true, but hear me out. While you definitely should NOT share your social media login credentials with patients to post on your channel, you can ask your patients for testimonials, reviews, or before/after photos you can use as great content to help promote your practice. This way, you are still the one posting the types of content people like to see but you are getting help from your patients to create it. By having your patients sign a HIPAA-compliant release form, you can now post quotes, images, videos, etc. to your social media accounts for purposes of marketing your practice. The truth is, even if you just use a patient testimonial or before/after photo once a week, that is one simple, effective way to keep in front of your audience with relevant content. If you spend a lot of time browsing practices’ social feeds with huge followings, you will find this is often a key part of their strategy; as their feed tends to be dominated by images, videos, and quotes from patients who all loved their treatments.
Strategy 3 - Consistency is Key
This may not come as a surprise to you, but the more you post to your social channels, the quicker you will begin to see the fruits of your labor come to fruition. Unless you boost your posts (which we will dive into a bit more in the next section), your content is likely only reaching a subset of your audience. This is a result of a variety of reasons including when you post, when your audience views their feeds, how many other people are posting at the same time, etc. This is why regularly posting to your social feed is a surefire way to improve your social footprint. Each time your practice posts you are increasing the likelihood that someone will see your content and the more often someone sees your content the more trust you build with them. While there is no “magic number” of posts per week your practice needs to adhere to, just be sure to post as often as you can knowing the more frequently you post the more quickly you can expect to see results. As mentioned in Strategies 1 & 2, Patient Education and Testimonials make great content pieces you can use to create low-effort posts regularly, so be sure to keep those in your back pocket whenever trying to decide what to post next.
Bonus Strategy - Boosted Posts & Paid Social Ads
The last (but not least) social media strategy to consider using is to put a little money behind your social posts; either in the form of boosted posts or social media ads. Boosted posts on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram will take your recently posted content and expand its reach by simply showing it to more people in your audience. This does not require the use of the Facebook or Twitter Ads Manager and is relatively easy to do (even for non-marketers). Boosted posts are an effective way to help your content find more eyeballs and will help increase your follower count and/or engagement (in the terms of likes, shares, etc.) with your posts.
While boosted posts are relatively simple to get started, paid social ads may require a little more work to get off the ground but are arguably much more effective at acquiring new leads (when used correctly, of course). By creating paid social ads, you can specify the type of audience you want to reach with a custom-tailored message advertising your practice’s brand or services. These ads then reach the targeted audience of your choice and are ideal for capturing the attention of prospective patients who may have had no idea they were even in the market for your service. Compared to other “top of the funnel” or “brand awareness” channels, paid social regularly results in higher conversion rates because you have better control over who sees your ad.
CONCLUSION
There are plenty of great social media tactics you can consider adopting as part of your overall marketing strategy, but at the end of the day, do whatever works best for you. Since nobody knows your practice better than you do, there is no one better suited to manage your practice’s social feed than yourself. With that being said, managing social media is often pretty time-consuming, so do not hesitate to contact us if you would like some help. Whether you want help creating posts for your practice’s social accounts, or creating social ads that attract new patients, our team of social media marketing experts can help you increase brand awareness and acquire more leads through this very lucrative channel.