At private medical practices, we have achieved such results in social media marketing in the recent past that surprised us. But, again, organic social media marketing makes sense if you do it right!
Social media is present in almost every aspect of our lives. It is intertwined with our private life, relationships, work, and free time; after that, it is perhaps not surprising if we claim that it is also with our health.
Today, social media is no longer just a world where people communicate with their friends and share the events of their day with others – they are networks where your potential clients research the best healthcare providers. Social media is the “place” where you can build deep, strong relationships with your clients and patients. The place that makes your business personal.
Social media offers many opportunities for the healthcare industry – not only does it help to establish and strengthen the aforementioned provider-client relationships, but it improves the reputation and credibility of healthcare providers (including doctors).
This is not surprising since the more people know about a doctor, the more willingly and with greater confidence they visit him. At the same time, we must not forget that in healthcare marketing, social media is more of a PR than a marketing tool.
However, major changes have taken place recently, especially affecting healthcare providers. For example, we have achieved such results in Instagram marketing for private medical praxes, which also surprised us. No, not with paid ads and effective organic social media marketing.
As a doctor or health care provider, you should not ask if you should use social media, but how. This will be discussed in the following.
Before we get to the specific tips, let’s dig deeper into social media. What are the benefits for doctors and healthcare professionals active on social media?
Well, the first and perhaps the most important advantage is the doctor-patient relationship. The more you communicate with your patients, the stronger relationships you can build with them.
But why is this so important? Think about it – when someone feels down, they prefer to seek support/help from someone they know and trust. Healthcare social media marketing helps to establish such acquaintances so that for as many people as possible, you can be the certain reliable person they can turn to in times of trouble.
Community media can also help educate your patients. Combined with content marketing, different social networks are perfect for sharing useful, valuable content and knowledge with your followers. This can cover any topic from prevention to medical procedures needed in different situations – the main thing is that the content is useful for your followers.
Various social platforms also enable collaboration between two or more healthcare providers or professionals – LinkedIn was created specifically for this purpose (not only for healthcare professionals, of course). On the one hand, collaborations help to spread expertise. But, on the other hand, they allow as many doctors and other professionals as possible to recommend you to their friends and clients.
Finally, social media helps your name reach as many people as possible cannot be neglected. Using the right marketing techniques, you can ensure that potential patients find you on the Internet!
Make healthcare more fun.
This sounds counterintuitive (although pediatricians are certainly familiar with
the principle). Of course, health is a pretty serious topic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sometimes make your marketing campaigns more humorous or entertaining. With this, you can somewhat alleviate your patients’ fear of examinations and interventions.
You can do this in several ways – for example, and you can create weekly or monthly quiz games or competitions, all in the name of health. With these, you can hit several birds with one stone – you can not only prove that there is an approachable side to healthcare, but you can also encourage your followers to engage in fun, healthy activities.
Of course, your brand’s name will spread as more and more people participate in them. A hashtag of your own can help a lot in this, especially if you link participation in contests and games to the use of the hashtag.
Social media is about building and strengthening functional relationships. If you want to carry out successful health marketing on it, you need to find out what you can do to encourage your community to be active in a way that reflects positively on your brand.
So what is this viral marketing thing? Well, the term has nothing to do with biological or computer viruses. Rather, it refers to the fact that sometimes a piece of content (for example, a video campaign) suddenly becomes popular and, thanks to many shares, starts to spread on the Internet, like a virus. Viral marketing exploits this phenomenon.
Healthcare professionals, service providers, and companies are at an advantage in this field since they work on a topic that is relevant to every living person: health.
To take advantage of this phenomenon, you need to find (or build) a community willing to do something for such a charitable purpose – for example, a charitable foundation with which you can form a partner relationship.
This is good for you and the foundation, as you can draw attention to a noble cause and prove to your followers that it is really in your interest to help people.
Many people find illness scary, and for a good reason, people fear what they don’t understand. So when someone visits a doctor, they trust that that specialist will offer them a solution to a problem they do not know much about.
This is something you can use in your healthcare marketing agency. All you have to do is become a reliable, thorough, understandable source of health information. Nowadays, many people looking for explanations on the Internet for their problems or basic information about certain symptoms, medical procedures, diseases, medicines, etc.
On your social media profile, you can share useful resources and articles (even from your blog) that provide answers to frequently asked/searched questions on a certain health topic. For example, do your patients often ask about contraception? Are they interested in which vitamins should be taken in winter? In the summer, many people want to know what the treatment of Lyme disease due to ticks involves.
Although for this purpose, you can even make informative videos in which you answer frequently asked questions, dispel misconceptions, or collect the most popular questions from the comments every week and answer them.
Create infographics
Trying to convey a message with dry percentages and other boring statistics doesn’t do any campaign any good. This is especially true for healthcare, as doctors use a completely specific language among themselves, which the man on the street is unable to understand.
So how can you make the amount of information your followers need daily more digestible? First, of course, you can create long explanatory articles for your blog, which you can then share on social media, but other types of content dwarf their popularity.
Of course, these also have their place in your content strategy, but you can’t rely solely on multi-page case studies and explanations. If you have some drier data that you want to convey to your audience more understandably, then use infographics. Infographics are perfect for visualizing data and information that would not impress anyone in text form.
Of course, creating such (info)graphics requires serious graphic knowledge, so it is worth collaborating with a talented graphic designer who can pour the content you provide into illustrations.
Another big advantage of infographics is that you can place all your important contact information on them, so whenever they are shared, your website, email address, and links to your social profiles are immediately included.
Ask your colleagues to help build the community.
Good relationships are extremely important in the healthcare sector. As already mentioned, diseases are scary and serious things, so, understandably, people want to be sure when they choose a doctor or a private clinic.
Involving all team members in your marketing activities is important if you are the owner of such a clinic or practice. Doctors, nurses, and even administrative staff regularly contact your clients (patients) so they know better than anyone what problems they are struggling with. Thanks to this, they can become members of such communities without any problems.
By involving your colleagues in your marketing activities, you make your practice much more humane in the eyes of your future and current patients. For example, it can help if your team members share your practice’s links or re-share the pictures on their profiles that also appear on your branded profiles.
Encourage your patients to promote your brand.
It’s not just you and your colleagues who can do the marketing of your brand! Reviews and evaluations from former patients can give your practice more credibility than anything else and help make it more reliable on the Internet. Most people read several reviews on the Internet before visiting a health professional.
This is where the importance of relationships comes in again – while you are looking for content for your content marketing and your team members are strengthening your reputation, it is important not to forget about your most loyal patients if you want to collect as many social proofs as possible (thus improving the credibility of your brand in the eyes of new patients).
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