Instagram… Facebook…. Twitter…. Pinterest…. Everyone reading this is probably familiar with one of these social media platform names.
Why are you familiar with it? Who told you about it? Do any of your friends NOT know about these social media platforms?
Social media has become one of the best ways and honestly the most budget friendly way to interact, communicate, brand yourself, and market your dental practice/ business.
However, I still come across dentist who either understand this and then neglect it or just ignore it in total. Social media creates opportunities! Ignoring social media marketing is like ignoring the phone when it rings in your dental practice! Someone out there is looking for you on social media; you just need to be found!
Now, I know many of you understand that social media is something to take into consideration when you are advertising and marketing your dental practice. However, what I want you to understand is that the majority of you (business owners) are marketing on social media all wrong.
IS THIS YOU?
So you decided to be on Facebook and created a business page or a business profile. Once you did this you got really excited and posted something like “New Patient Special blah blah blah” on your feed and hoped people would come to it.
However, you noticed you didn’t get much traffic, if any, on your post. So you tell yourself “don’t worry I just need to be consistent and then eventually people will start to notice my post and people will want to come and visit my dental practice because of what I am saying on Facebook, it just takes time”.
So you continue to post your “New Patient Special” and dental related things but you start noticing nothing is really coming out of it. Now your consistency starts to die. You feel like Facebook is probably not the best platform to advertise your practice so you do the EXACT same approach on Instagram or on another social media platform.
NO!
Why would you use a failing technique on another platform? You just witnessed, first-hand, how NOT to market and advertise your practice. You literally saw NO new patients come in this way so why would it work anywhere else?!
Now, let’s break down what you did wrong into 5 steps
- You didn’t do your research on which social media platform your target market is mostly on. You’re trying to attract patients who need dentures, why are you marketing that on Snapchat? What’s the ideal patient you are trying to attract and which social media platform are they mostly on?
- Your content is barley content. Did you just post something up to post it? Was there any research done behind the post you posted for your audience to be intrigued and moved by?
- Do you even have an audience? Even if your posts are one of a kind, just because it’s amazing does not mean it is easy to find. Who is looking at your stuff? Is your audience the type of patients you want in your practice anyways?
- The times that you schedule your posts. Are you posting during the times your target market is offline or not on social media? Are you posting around the times where everyone will less likely engage in your post?
- How consistent are you with your posts? Consistency is great but are you being annoying? Are you just posting to post without any true value?
Ask yourselves these 5 questions and think about it in depth and you’ll realize this takes much more work than just posting up your “New Patient Special”. However, if this is done right, the reward is MUCH greater.
I have seen dentist who only market and advertise through social media (which by the way boosts up your website ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) and have received an influx of new patients every month! This is their only medium of marketing and it produces fantastic results!
Now obviously doing social media marketing on your own is a lot, and I mean A LOT, of work. I only stated 5 key points you need to be looking after. There are many more with much more depth!
However, just because it is a lot of work does not mean you should neglect it! Hire someone to take control of this if you have too, but just get the ball rolling on your social media marketing ASAP!
If you are thinking of hiring a social media marketing company, do your research before just hiring any company. One I can recommend to you is www.ddsconnections.com. They solely work with dentist and their track record proves their success. Check them out if you’re thinking to outsource your social media marketing (which if you are a dentist, you’re WAY too busy and should really be outsourcing your social media marketing).
Be sure to mention “the dental marketer”, where the red arrow is pointing, so you can receive a FREE 2 week trial on behalf of me!
Hopefully this has helped you guys and gals understand and take a deeper look at why it is CRUCIAL to have a working social media plan that produces results. So go get started!