Social media is reshaping the aesthetics industry faster than you think. Here’s how to maximise your clinic’s awareness, engagement, leads and patient retention.
Your potential patients aren’t just finding your clinic based on their friends’ recommendations – they are finding you after Googling their location and seeing you are nearby and then reading your patient reviews. They could have found you on Instagram and liked your patients’ before and after pictures or maybe they just felt your business matches their lifestyle goals.
Social media is helping your potential patients decide very quickly with multiple proof points that your clinic is the best around for their specific requirements. So you need to show that you are the best at what you do and have the proof points and loyal followers to match it.
Your ultimate business goal is to achieve engagement, awareness, leads and patient retention from social media activities. To achieve these goals, you’ll need to make sure your activities are efficient and focused on specific business goals. Here are the methods you should be following to achieve success using social media.
Save time & be efficient
Social media management can consume a huge amount of time, and people can get easily distracted by ‘feel good’ engagement that doesn’t really drive business. To get the best results, you need to use best practices and tools to make sure no time is wasted.
There are lots of online tools that can quickly identify trending topics, giving you the inspiration to create content ensuring your social networks are filled with compelling posts that people want to read. You can also schedule your posts so you only have to dedicate one morning a week to social media. Hootsuite and SEMrush are both great online tools for identifying trending topics and for scheduling and monitoring posts.
Gain visibility into key business metrics
As you manage social media activity and experiment with different strategies and promotions, you’ll soon be able to see which tactics work – for example, the types of posts or campaigns generating the most engagement and follow through.
Analytics and metrics are core to developing an understanding of which activities are driving your business forward the most. Ensure you have Google Analytics set up to be able to monitor traffic to your site, its source, and which keywords and phrases people are using in their organic searches.
Specific social media goals
Grow social following and fan base
Growing a following will help increase your reach across all your social media activities. It will increase the potential for virality to occur on popular posts, exponentially increasing your audience.
- Create posts, marketing callto- actions, and other ways to encourage your target customers to follow and like you.
- Partner with brands you stock and social influencers who can bring your services to life.
Increase engagement
A high-quality, targeted follower base will be open to engage with you, but finding the right types of posts and carefully planning an appropriate mix of promotional versus informative posts will be critical to increasing engagement.
- Create and curate content which is relevant to your fans and ask them to engage. Increase your visibility to your target market by consistently sharing relevant content. There is no better way to showcase your expertise and position yourself as an authority than by creating and publishing valuable content that solves a problem for your target demographic.
- The content you create for your blog can take many forms. It can be written, audio, video or graphic. Whatever type of content you create, the key is to be consistent. Before and after photos speak volumes, and positioning your staff as key influencers in the aesthetics space will help fill appointment books.
- By consistently sharing highquality content, you will help your network of followers to become familiar with you. Over time, they will come to know, like and trust you – the all-important factor in increasing lead generation and a loyal network of followers who look forward to seeing your posts. Convert followers into leads Sometimes followers aren’t ready to buy just yet, but moving them along in your sales funnel is your goal. Encouraging fans to register for a blog, free download or event or webinar can grow your leads and increase your options for contacting them later.
- Set up and promote your lead generation pages and links to your ecommerce store or booking engine on social media.
Get patients through your doors
Converting a social follower to an actual patient is the ultimate goal, and all of your social activities are designed to move followers down that path. Special offers on social media can lead to more patients. Better yet, when happy patients share their experience of your clinic or post reviews, conversion rates can snowball.
Roles & workflow
If you’re doing social media in-house, make sure your team’s roles are clearly defined – there should be designated staff members for creating, approving and publishing content to ensure quality, timeliness and efficiency.
Where should you be posting?
I’ve specifically started with LinkedIn because not many aesthetic clinics are taking advantage of this social media platform. A huge amount of your target audience are active on it daily. If want to target high net worth individuals who need to look the part in their job then get on LinkedIn and start connecting with them. You can even target those who work close to your clinic or practice. With the surge in video conferencing it’s never been more important to look good up close. Set up a company page and share your posts via your own professional profile and encourage your team to repost to their profiles, too.
Post beautiful pictures of your clinic, promotions, influencers who visit your clinic and standout before and after photos. Look at others’ pages to keep competitive and keep your content fresh and innovative.
Post the same content as Instagram but you can be a bit more descriptive and have a longer dialogue with followers.
Medium
Set up a Medium account, which is a content syndication platform. Write and post articles about new treatments or trends in the industry. Promote your Medium article on other social media channels by posting a link to it. Being on Medium and using keywords that people commonly search for relative to the article you posted and relative to your business and locality will gain new followers, shares and customers. You should also copy your Medium articles and post them to your blog page on your website.
YouTube
Post videos showcasing your team, an FAQ series of videos, or a conversational educational video on trending or most popular cosmetic procedures.
Google Business page
Now you can add links to articles and posts about your clinic to your listing on Google Business. It’s the first thing a prospective patient will see when they are looking for your services in their locality. Put your best foot forward. Ensure they can book from a link on your Google Business page to make it super easy for them to visit you.
Many of these platforms are interlinked so when you post on one channel it automatically sends posts to another if you have allowed it in your account settings.
Call 0406 939 601 karen.messitt@instigate.com.au www.instigate.com.au
Karen Messitt
Karen Messitt is Managing Director at Instigate, an advertising and digital marketing agency that provides strategy, concept, creative, production and management of campaigns, social media and digital marketing.
