When the phrase “social media” is heard, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the thought of engaging with family, friends, or maybe a funny video that has gone viral. To truly monetize medical social media marketing and see growth in your practice, a few questions must first be addressed. Do you know how many unique visitors occurred to your website last month? Out of those visitors, how many of them derived from social media platforms? Do you know how much you invested in your practice’s medical social media strategy last month? If so, what is the ROI on those efforts? Do you have a posting strategy that is consistent and frequent? Additionally, the most important question to ask is, what is your process to contact, follow up and gain more patients profitably who choose to connect with your practice through social media? If the answer to some, or all, of these questions is no, then there is some work that needs to be done to improve your medical social media marketing strategy.
Creating a Daily Posting Strategy for Your Medical Social Media Marketing Efforts
The key to social media posting is to be consistent and frequent. The mindset of, “I don’t want to annoy my followers” is actually the opposite of what you should be telling yourself. With platforms such as Facebook, there is already something being done called throttling — meaning only about 30% of followers will be exposed to each individual post. Therefore, successful medical social media marketing requires more than just the occasional Facebook or Instagram post.
Taking this into account, you as a medical professional or practice owner need to determine what you actually want to accomplish with your medical social media marketing efforts. In other words, what are the business goals you are trying to solve with your posting strategy? The number one purpose of social media should be one thing — to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website and phones. In order to achieve this, here are some things to take into account as it relates to daily posting:
- Try to backlink social posts to a specific landing page on your website.
- Shorten URLs on posts using the Bit.ly. applicator.
- Focus on promoting your top revenue-driving treatments or procedures.
- Use education and special offers to increase connectivity with pre-patients, new patients, and existing patients.
- Incorporate personal and authentic content into your strategy (i.e., live videos, patient testimonials, staff, and office videos).
Through incorporating tactics like this, we can ultimately create the perfect blend of conversion-driven posts linked back to specific landing pages and engagement-driven posts that showcase what makes your practice truly UNIQUE. This is how to do medical social media marketing the RIGHT way!
Building Followers (Organic vs. Paid) in Medical Social Media Marketing
There are two ways to gain followers on social media: organically and also through paid campaigns. On the organic side, a simple and effective thing to do is to leverage your existing database to increase connectivity. Also, keep in mind, you are not invading their privacy by doing this; you are merely just exposing them to a new medium. Another great organic method is to ensure your staff is following your practice’s business page and consistently sharing posts with their own friends and followers.
Shifting over to the paid side, popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram allow you to “pay” for qualified likes based off of geographic and demographic information. On average, these inexpensive campaigns typically cost around one dollar per one like. On Facebook, for instance, there is also a way to leverage “like campaigns.” These campaigns are exactly how they sound — a way to simply get likes!
Additionally, marketing specific pages on your website through procedure promotions and retargeting are other avenues to explore. Retargeting works by creating a cookie to remarket previously visited pages on your site back to the visitor on other websites and social platforms. Have you ever been stalked by a pair of shoes you were looking at online? That’s retargeting.
Organic posting is much more cost-effective since — you guessed it — it’s FREE! In order to build followers organically in your medical social media marketing efforts, this is where those frequent and consistent posts come into play. However, keep in mind that you should not post just to post. Post with a PURPOSE!
Tracking the Traffic and ROI from Your Medical Social Media Marketing
The first question asked at the beginning of this article was, “Do you know how many unique visitors occurred to your website last month?” This is crucial data to measure when it comes to ROI. If you have a way to measure this already, give yourself a pat on the back. If you have a way to also measure where the traffic is coming from, give yourself two pats on the back. Once you have pinpointed where the most amount of traffic is coming from, you can start to reallocate your time and efforts into the right things.
Luckily for you, there are free programs out there that can help with this component of your medical social media marketing initiatives. For example, Google Analytics tracks site traffic, sessions, page views, and average time on site. This program can also track by source — so, where is all the traffic coming from?
Taking this even one step further, companies such as Crystal Clear provide practices with Google call tracking numbers. The power of call tracking numbers is they will show businesses exactly where the inbound phone calls originate from — further providing a true ROI on your medical social media marketing efforts. Crystal Clear also provides medical practices with a robust software CRM tool that tracks social media leads while also providing detailed reports. Through these reports, practices can gauge what social outlets are out-performing the others.
Equipping your practice with the right tools when it comes to your medical social media marketing strategy is paramount. Measuring your traffic will help put your practice in a position to win. After all, what you know in advance will help you plan in advance.
Our team of experts at Crystal Clear Digital Marketing would be honored to help your practice with your medical social media marketing. Please contact us today to learn more. We look forward to speaking with you!
