How to Drive Organic Growth on Social Media
#ClinicalPractice #Technology
FREE is everyone’s favorite word! Organic social growth is social media growth without paid advertising. With the right strategy, you can grow your business by effectively utilizing social platforms without a large marketing budget!
Organic growth through social primarily focuses on building awareness of your brand, promoting the products and services that you offer, and improving customer experience.
Social platforms are a great way to retain customers by making them feel like they are a part of the community. It’s important to listen to your customers! Use their feedback to help identify areas of improvement and reply to those that leave comments on your posts. Improve patient experience with how-to videos, answer commonly asked questions, and monitor direct messages. With social media, you can nurture your relationships which will lead to increased customer lifetime value.
There are also many opportunities to build awareness of your brand and even attract new customers. Every 1 in 3 patients uses social media to seek health-related information.1 With an active social media strategy, you will be able to reach prospects that have not heard of you before. And although social media does not directly drive sales, it helps you connect with customers, generate interest, and drive leads to your practice.
It is extremely important that you have a strategy in place so that you can fully take advantage of the growth opportunities that come from social engagement. Here are 6 organic social media tips to help boost growth:
- Target the right platform: Having a presence on multiple platforms will ensure customers will be able to find your practice no matter which they prefer to use. Facebook and Instagram are used the most by consumers when looking for practice information.
- Encourage current patients to follow your practice: Ask your patients to follow you on social media! You can do so by word-of-mouth, sending a follow up email after a visit, or by using QR codes. QR codes are a great free resource to use, you can include them on any marketing materials and display them around your office! One free online QR code generator is QRCode Monkey.
- Use Visuals and Post Unique Content: Good visual content is key. People process and retain visual information better than text. If you are having trouble coming up with content, here are some ideas to get you started:
- Make sure to incorporate videos. You could introduce “Meet the Team” or “Meet your Audiologist” segments, show what a day in the office is like, talk through and show how a hearing test is performed, or show features of how a product works.
- Rotate posting pictures and infographics. Using different images helps keep and grow the interest of your followers. You could share images of new products, the staff at your practice, or post about an event you are having. Infographics are a great way to spice up your feed. Some infographic topics you could use: healthy hearing tips, signs that you need a hearing test, how do hearing aids work, tips to protect your hearing aids, etc. Check out Canva, a graphic design platform, for easy design help.
- Use the right Hashtags: Hashtags are a great way to make your posts more fun AND get you more views. On social media, hashtags act as free marketing campaigns. From a search perspective, if a patient searches a term that you used in a hashtag, your post is more likely to be viewed by them. Using hashtags is easy and an excellent way for users that don’t follow you to discover your content.
- Be consistent with your strategy: Sticking to your plan and remembering to post everyday can be tricky. There are many social media management tools, like Hootsuite or Buffer, that you can use to plan out your content in advance and schedule posts.
- Ask your Sales Representative or Account Marketing Specialist for one of our Phonak Marketing Toolkits! These contain brand and product related content, including social posts that you can use to post on social media!
Social media is the perfect way to build relationships with your current customers and show new customers how much you care for patients. AND with a consistent strategy, you can achieve social organic growth!
Sources:
- “How Modern Health Care is Being Revolutionized by Social Media [Infographic],” SocialMediaToday.
Amanda recently joined the Sonova family in 2021. She graduated from Purdue University with her bachelor’s degree in marketing and is passionate about collaborating with hearing care providers to better marketing efforts.