The truth is that the coronavirus pandemic has impacted most businesses. While it may be tempting to put your social media on hold during this confusing time, we highly encourage you to rethink this decision. Maintaining a strong social media presence at this time will result in so many long-term benefits for your practice. If you are conflicted about what social media content is appropriate to post amidst the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve got you covered. In this article, we are sharing a list of engaging social media post ideas that you can use during this uncertain time.
WHY YOUR PRACTICE HAS TO PAY TO PLAY IN SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
At least 24 percent of small businesses are reported to have absolutely no social media presence. Despite an understanding of the importance of social media in modern marketing, some businesses still chose to avoid it, thinking the effort may not be worth the return. But, this is SO wrong! Here's why social media marketing is inevitable in today's world.
6 Ways to Target Patients Using Social Media Marketing
Patients have become much more active on social media, using the different platforms to research care providers, ask questions and share their experiences. With patients taking to their smart phones to provide feedback and search for providers on the go it only makes sense for imaging centers, hospitals and doctor’s offices to have a social media marketing strategy in place.
We're excited to see more and more radiologists and other health care providers recognizing the value of social media in health care; because that has been a big hurdle to overcome. The International Society for Computed Tomography for instance, will be hosting a talk by Jenny K Hoang, MD about the importance of radiologists utilizing Twitter at their upcoming CT symposium in San Francisco.
Today we’ll explore the six ways healthcare marketers can use social media to target specific groups of patients, this way their content marketing and messaging will be built specifically for different kinds of patients.
6 Tips for Targeting Patients Using Social Media Advertising:
1. Use Facebook advertising to share a recent blog post with a specific kind of audience. Ex: Boost your post about the difference between screening mammograms and diagnostic mammograms so it is shown to women, aged 55+ who are located within a 10-mile radius of your imaging center.
2. If you have a list of your patients’ email addresses, you can create a look-alike list from those addresses and launch a Facebook ad campaign.
3. New to Twitter and hoping to build your following and improve your brand recognition? Create a campaign for gaining followers. You can select your audience based on one or multiple locations, filtering by other accounts they follow, interests, behaviors event event targeting.
4. You can also create an audience to target on Twitter based on only people who have visited your website. Just put a snippet of code on your website to collect the visitors’ info and the ad you create will show to only those users on Twitter.
5. You can limit audiences on Twitter based on their regular behavior as well. For instance, you can limit your ad so it will OR won’t show to a group of users who are “likely to have health insurance from Aetna” which has a potential audience of up to 1.82M users.
6. LinkedIn is the best social media platform for industry experts. This article is supposed to be about using social media to target patients, but as a provider it’s also important to provide content for others in your industry. (ex: Referring Physicians or Community Organizations) These kinds of targets are regularly being active on LinkedIn where you can pay to sponsor posts and make it so that only users with certain job titles or employees of certain businesses see the ads.
< Read More: 8 Healthcare Digital Marketing Tips >
If you're interested in an evaluation of your organization's current social media practices, fill out the form below and we'd be glad to perform a free evaluation for you.
5 Marketing Mistakes You Can Fix Today
With new healthcare marketing trends rising this year, your team is going to have to make some changes to your strategy. Evolving your marketing practices will help you reach more patients as their behaviors change, leaving your non-evolving competition in the dust. Last year, we saw a huge spike in patients turning to the internet for health information and that is a trend that is certainly not going away, so let’s take a look at some of the mistakes you might have made in regards to your internet marketing efforts so you can improve this year.
1. Massive Marketing Collateral
Gone are the days of successful E-books. They take far too much time to create on your end and now patients are being drawn to more bite-sized content pieces. Smith & Jones calls them “info snacks,” giving patients with decreased attention spans the opportunity to easily consume the most important information you can provide.
TIP: Buzzfeed has become wildly popular because of their funny and topical content, but also because of the way they display their content with easily consumed lists and quizzes.
2. Data Overload
Last year the most consumed forms of content were videos and infographics. Due to the short attention spans of online readers, healthcare marketers have to be able to deliver important data in a concise and easily consumed way. Showcasing medical data in infographic format is proven to make it more memorable and more impactful.
TIP: Canva has some great infographic templates which you can easily import into a simple video format.
3. Website's That Aren't Mobile Optimization
People are using their smartphones and tablets more and more to search online for services, so if your website isn't mobile responsive you could be losing valuable leads. Your marketing team needs to focus on how your website content appears on phones and whether or not your content is driving potential patients to connect with you. You should also keep mobile optimization in mind when it comes to your email campaigns.
TIP: Squarespace websites include free mobile optimization and you can preview and test your web pages and mobile sites with the click of a button.
4. Unemotional Messaging
With healthcare marketing it can be scary to show too much emotion and be disruptively different, but if your marketing is too general and surface level, you'll go unnoticed. It is a huge mistake to avoid using personality in your marketing or to be too clinical. Some of the best doctors are the ones that get personal with their patients, share stories and can be seen as a shoulder to lean on; as opposed to those that are detached and unemotional. Let your content marketing reflect the kind of care you want to deliver to your patients.
TIP: Connect with patients by sharing information about your staff or physicians on your pages. Go beyond where they got their training; focus on the parts of their personalities that patients can connect with, like favorite movies or inspiration quotes.
(Read More: How to Grow Your Practice's Twitter Audience)
5. Blah Branding
There are few industries where brand loyalty is more imperative than health care but it is often over-looked. Let your brand speak to the kind of care your organization delivers and be sure to focus on branding in your social media content, blog posts and advertising efforts. This is your chance to stand out from the competition and in medical marketing, people are often afraid to deviate from the norm. Be the one who isn't afraid to switch things up!
TIP: Run a social media campaign or contest to get your patients and community involved with your brand by asking them to come up with a new tagline for you.