Using social media well can help you grow your dental practice with a fraction of the marketing budget you would need for traditional dental marketing. Despite that, many dental practices struggle to use social media well. They might post for a few days and quit after not seeing results. Some spend months, still with no results.
If you’ve struggled to grow your dental practice using social media, you might only need a few small tweaks to your plan. Here are four simple steps you can use to achieve massive results using social media.
1. Set a strong foundation.
Too many dental practices sign up for social media accounts without a plan, goal, or foundation in place for achieving success. Without a plan, they end up becoming frustrated fast. They quickly run out of things to say and end up losing momentum.
To avoid this, plan a few ideas for how you will create content that dental patients are likely to connect with. What is your practice story? What are your core values? Why should they choose your practice instead of another? What can patients expect when they come to your office? What do you do differently? Are you committed to spa-like experiences? Do you give hand and arm massages like we do in my practice? Do you provide gourmet coffees and teas? Are you involved in your community?
Write down the answers to all of those questions. Be as specific as you can. Then, for each question, write down why that item is important to you and potential patients. For example, do you give back to your community? If so, write down all the ways you give back. Then, write down why you give back. Did you grow up in the area? Do you want to make a special impact on the neighborhood? Or, do you want to help advance a cause or solve a local problem? Write those down.
Soon enough you will have a long list of the things your practice does differently and the reasons why those are important to you. You’ll be ready to start posting, warming up your audience to get them engaged with, talking about, and interested in your practice. Many will start looking forward to your next post, even. And you will start building a group of raving fans online.
Way too many practices skip setting the foundation and creating content that builds relationships with potential patients. They jump right into sharing posts without any plan or focus. When that happens, performance suffers.
2. Regularly create sharable content.
With the strong foundation in place, you’ll be well on your way to sharing content people engage with, liking, commenting, and even sharing your posts on their feeds. Take a look at your social media accounts. How much engagement do you get? Do a lot of people like or love your posts? Do they comment or share?
If you can consistently create content other people share on their timelines, everything you do on social media will become easier and more effective.
To do so, focus on telling stories about your practice and how you’re impacting your community and patients. How are you serving your community? Share videos of you talking about what you’re doing and why. What experiences are your patients having? Share video testimonials and office tours explaining all the things your patients experience and why you do it. How is your practice different?
For example, one thing that makes my practice different is we have the kids go to the toy box before their appointment. This helps us gain trust with kids and gives the kids something to hold during their appointment. Kida love going to the toybox and enjoy coming to our practice because they get a toy right away.
When we talk about this on our social media pages, we share videos of us talking out what we do and why. These posts are highly engaging. If you have a similar policy, share a video of you talking about it and why. Do a video demonstration of your toybox showing all the cool toys you have. Ask a parent or two who you think would be open to it to record a short video talking about why they love your toy box first policy.
These types of post create emotional connections in parents who love the idea or who have experienced it themselves. They might share the post with “what a great idea!” or “my child loves going to Dr. Holmes and getting her toy first.”
3. Run social campaigns.
One of the best social campaigns you can run is a giveaway. Giveaways help you give back to your fans, patients, and oftentimes other local businesses.
With my practice, we love giveaways. We sometimes give away gift cards to local shops. Other times, we give free whitening. Sometimes, we even give away a full smile makeover to someone in need. When running a social campaign, ask people to follow your page and like, comment, or share your post to be entered into the content. Then, at the end of the day, you can pick a person at random to win the prize.
Only include a short statement about your practice in such a way that makes sense with the posts. For example, if you’re giving away a gift card to a local store, you can say, “At my practice, we believe in supporting local businesses in our community. That’s why we’re giving away a gift card to XYZ coffee shop, our favorite place to grab coffee on the way to work.”
By requiring people to engage with your post to enter and making a brief but strong emotional connection in your content, your social campaigns will help you build an even bigger, engaged social following.
4. Offer people the next logical step.
With a strong foundation, shareable content, and social campaigns in place, your audience will grow and the people who follow you will get to know, like, or trust you. That is a great place to be because it means your followers will be much more likely to become patients when you ask them to take the next logical step in the relationship.
While there are several ways to call people to action, one of the best ways to do so while achieving a high return on your investment is to place targeted ads for high-dollar services, such as dental implants.
Your ads can direct people to a landing page with offer details or a quiz to help them learn whether they are a candidate. From there, you can send them through a nurture sequence of call them to make an appointment for a consultation.
Are you ready to get more patients using social media?
If you have struggled to gain traction using social media, these four steps can help you grow your followers, build trust, and promote high-value services. If you want more help, you can find detailed instructions on growing your practice using Facebook. There, you’ll find additional information on growing your following, targeting the right audiences for your ads, and growing your practice using Facebook.
If you want even more help using social media to grow your practice, sign up for the Delivering WOW Platinum Coaching Program to access forms, courses, and coaching from me and other top dental experts.
