More than half the world’s population is on social media (that’s a whopping 4.9 billion users!) and nearly half of all adults in the U.S. want to follow their doctors on social media. Inevitably, if you’re not promoting your medical practice on social media platforms like Facebook, Google Business Profile, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you are likely missing opportunities to reach more patients and grow your practice. Social media marketing can help establish your brand, increase your website traffic, and give you a new way to engage with new and existing patients.
Adding social media to your healthcare marketing strategy may seem daunting at first, and that’s okay! Consider this guide the first step on your social media marketing journey. You may not know the best ways to tackle the digital landscape and what types of content to create for these platforms, but you don’t have to do it alone. Soon you’ll understand the benefits of marketing on social media, how it can be an invaluable tool for your practice, and find a few helpful hints to get started.
1. Share Your Practice’s Story
When people search for a medical professional, they tend to choose someone they feel they can trust with their health. Telling your practice’s story is key to building trust with your current and future patients.
Your practice’s story doesn’t need to be complicated, just sharing details about yourself such as your expertise, your background, and your values can actually boost patient acquisition and strengthen your brand because potential patients feel like they know you. For example, you may want to share what led you to the medical field and why you chose your specialty over others.
You can share your story in your physician profile or social media’s ‘About’ Section. These personal insights into your practice add an element of authenticity to your brand, helping your current and potential patients feel more connected to you.
2. Target Your Local Audience
While a large part of social media marketing is establishing yourself online to increase the traffic to your website, you ultimately also want to convert those impressions into profits for your healthcare practice. In fact, social media can be an effective lead-generation platform, helping you reach new patients and book more appointments. Some platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, have built-in tools that let you target and advertise to specific audiences. These tools let you narrow your audience by interests, age, geographic location, and more. This ensures your ideal audience sees your content.
This comes in handy if, for example, your practice is based in California and you want to target patients seeking physicians in the Los Angeles area. By selecting your filters and narrowing down your target audience, you will reach the prospects near you who are more likely to book your services, instead of those who are further away and less likely to convert.
3. Improve Your Website Traffic
Posting often on social media serves as a digital reminder of your practice and in turn, will encourage people to visit your website. This is a significant part of the social media marketing funnel in terms of growing your patient base. Since social media casts a wider net, people may find your social media profile before hearing about your practice or seeing your website. Engaging social media posts can encourage idle internet browsers to learn more about your practice, visit your site, and become a patient.
One of the great things about social media is your ability to get creative. While you can simply link your website in your social media platform’s bio, you can also entice your followers to visit your website with educational, relatable, or engaging content. Be sure to include a Call To Action (CTA) on some of your posts that link to your website to make it easy for people to click through to your site directly. Over time, you can tweak your strategy by reviewing your social media analytics and seeing which posts perform best with your followers.
4. Advertise Your Services
While creativity may be key to boosting engagement, be sure to include the concrete information prospective patients need, like which services or products you offer. There are several ways to share this information with your audience that may attract more attention than standard ad content, such as:
• Discounts: Highlight any new client offers, raffles, specials, or discount programs
• New Services: Showcase your latest offerings as you expand your practice
• Education: Explain the science or benefits behind one of your services
• Statistics: Feature interesting or surprising facts and statistics that relate to your medical specialty (Pro Tip: Emphasize your most-performed service!)
Anything from educational videos to relatable gifs, and everything in between can be used to attract new patients, inform your audience, increase your credibility, and differentiate your practice from the competition. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your options, it may be helpful to use third-party sites, like Officite, to help you develop and implement a social media strategy designed to grow your practice. In the interim, pull some inspiration from our Downloadable Social Media Kit.
5. Boost Your Customer Service
Social media can be a great communication tool for building connections with your new and existing patients. If any patients have questions or concerns about your practice, they can ask via comments or Direct Messages and you can address them quickly.
In addition to sending personal messages to your patients, you can use your social media pages to monitor your practice’s reviews. Always show appreciation for positive reviews and do your best to respond to and resolve negative reviews. This is an important part of showing your community that you care about your patients and want to make their experience exceptional.
Social media is generally seen as a less formal, lower stakes form of communication, so it’s a great way to quickly and efficiently address your audience. You can save phone calls and other methods of communication for more formal matters, such as confirming appointments.
6. Inform Your Audience
The best way to establish yourself as a quality medical practice is to provide your audience with engaging and informative content that can teach them about your specialty. Highlight industry breakthroughs and facts that pertain to your field and explain how it relates to your audience. This will fortify your status in the medical community and show your audience that they can rely on you for relevant medical information.
Once you’ve proven that you are a trusted source of interesting, factual information, people will also be more likely to follow your social media profiles, visit your website, and book appointments.
Conclusion
Creating content for social media can seem like an impossible task, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it can be pretty fun! Don’t be afraid to show off your personality and prove that people in the medical field can bridge the gap between entertaining and enlightening content. Don’t feel like a social media guru just yet? With Officite’s social media package, we can create social media profiles for you, manage your existing ones, schedule content for you to post, and drive traffic to your website to grow your patient-base. Don’t let a lack of social media presence hold you back anymore, connect with our social media experts today.
About Us
Officite is a unique, all-in-one digital marketing service for medical practices. With both industry-specific knowledge and digital marketing expertise, we help practices grow their patient base with powerful websites, social media & reputation management, search engine solutions, telemedicine, and patient education. Officite automates your practice’s time-heavy processes (i.e. appointment scheduling, patient forms, etc.), so you can save your team (and patients) more time.
Officite makes marketing your medical practice easier, more affordable, and more effective by offering all of your digital marketing services under one roof. For more information, or to see a demo, visit officite.com
