As a private practice owner, social media is something that business owners tend to overcomplicate and make more difficult than it needs to be in terms of their physical therapy marketing plan.
The best advice is to always to plan ahead for your social media.
There is no excuse you can conjure up to convince me that you can’t plan for your social media marketing strategy. So, now that you know the importance of planning, what do you do now?
1. Stay Active & Consistent
Some people use social media and give up after a few weeks, which obviously won’t achieve anything. Social media success isn’t something that will happen overnight. You may have a really successful social post that gets a lot of engagement with your target audience, but that certainly doesn’t mean you should stop or that you’ve “cracked” social media. Capitalize on that momentum and keep going.
By staying active, you’ll have a much better chance of getting more followers and likes. This means that the more posts you make on your social platforms, the more chance that your perfect patient finds you.
2. Diversify Your Content with Pictures
People’s attention spans are shorter than ever. Want proof? How many of you read the entire start of this article rather than just skipping down to the numbered points? I know a lot of you did. We can’t expect people to read hundreds and thousands of words. This is where social media comes into play by giving you the ability to post images along with your short text messages.
It sounds simple, but sometimes the simple tips are the most effective ones. By using eye-catching images, you’ll be able to grab the client’s attention and put it onto your posted content. This can result in higher engagement rate, more likes, brand awareness, more followers and a higher chance of your perfect patient coming across your clinic.
3. Post Scheduling
This is something we touched on already in the first point, but let’s look at it in a little more detail. Scheduling posts is vital to any business, as you can’t be expected to be posting all day long. I have no doubt that some of you would be able to find the time to post daily – but why not give yourself one hour a week to write the posts and schedule them all. That way, you don’t have to worry about posting different types of content on particular times of the day because you’ve already done it.
You can also use this as a way to play around and learn when the best time is to post out on social media platforms. We know, from many different experiments, that the time our social media gets the most engagement is early in the morning when people first wake up and check their phones and devices as they get ready for their day. Why not test it out and see when your posts get the most views or engagement at different times during the day?
We use the website Hootsuite to plan and schedule our social media content for the week. It is a fairly user-friendly program and allows you to schedule posts on multiple social platforms for the week.
4. Use Video Content
Not only do you want to be posting images to grab your customers attention, but you also want to be posting videos that will make people stop scrolling down their page/feed and watch. Those first few seconds are crucial as you want to make this a reality so make sure that your videos are engaging from the start – don’t leave the best parts of your video to the end, get them out the way early!!
Did you also know that you can set a particular thumbnail to a video? The chances are that you’re thinking more about how that is relevant to this article. If you don’t know why this is important then think about buffering screens…
If someone is scrolling through their Facebook feed and they come across your video, but their internet isn’t loading the video properly, it will show them the thumbnail from the video. So, if you set the thumbnail to be something that explains the video perfectly, whether that’s from the funniest part of the video, the most important part of the video or the highlight of it – make sure that it’s something that would make people stop scrolling and click on your video to watch it, even if they are frustrated by their internet and buffering circle!
5. Social Media Paid Advertising
This is the point that we always cover on calls, when we chat to you guys in person or whenever we get the chance. Posting engaging and relevant content on social media, ALONG WITH running Facebook and Google Ads on your business pages, will increase your presence on social media and your overall omnipresence. Google and Facebook’s algorithms pay attention to the people who pay.
Why do we tell you to do this? All of your online marketing compliments each other, providing it’s all consistent. For example, if you’re advertising back pain on your Facebook Ads, then you want to be putting out content relating to back pain on your social media. That doesn’t mean everything you post on social should be on back pain the entire time you’re advertising it on Facebook – just a couple times a week, make it around that topic so that it’s consistent.
Of course, you’re always advertising on Google (or you should be!) and that will help to compliment your Facebook Ads and social media posting too. It’s as simple as that – so get it done!
If you aren’t using Facebook or Google Ads for your digital marketing strategy, I’d suggest you check out this article to learn which (or both) platform is right for you.
6. Take Advantage of Customer Loyalty
As a clinic owner, you want to consider the lifetime value of a customer, the first step is to gain customer loyalty. When you have dedicated patients that return to your clinic time and time again, they are more willing to spread positive stories about your clinic as well as give you free promotion through their social media.
You can take advantage of this by asking for a review on your social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. Encourage your followers to share content about their positive experience on their own social platforms. Share video interviews of satisfied patients in order to promote their story. You can even take advantage of holding contests or giveaways that would encourage people to digitally share words about your business.
If you get a dedicated and loyal customer base, they will effectively do your social media marketing for you.
Summary
I just want to quickly take this time to remind you all that social media is a great way to get free marketing as you don’t pay for it. In terms of keeping it simple, just post things that are relevant to your physical therapy clinic and that you think your patients will find entertaining to watch. Don’t get too bogged down in the planning aspect of it, just post it and hope you can entertain your customers, your audience and your overall niche.
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