Social Media Marketing For Your Dental Practice In 2020

Curious about using social media to help grow your dental practice? Social media marketing is a complex strategy that, when implemented correctly, can generate high quality leads for your dental practice.

However, there are a couple things that you need to get in order before thinking about investing in a social media marketing strategy.

Branding
Is your dental practice’s brand in order? Do you have a high-resolution version of your logo? Do you know who your target customer is? Do you have a bank of images that work with your brand? Getting a complete understanding of your brand is key before you consider leveraging social media marketing.

Website
Yes, you probably already have a website. But is this website optimized for conversions? The ultimate goal of a social media strategy is to drive warm leads to your website and convert them into paying customers. A clunky, outdated website sends a strong signal to potential clients: Buyer Beware! Investing in a well designed responsive website is key to the success of a social media strategy.

Paid Ad Spend
While social media presence is nice, we recommend that dental clinics start with some paid ads on Google & Facebook and then graduate to traditional social media marketing when they’re ready. Why? It’s much easier to measure the returns on paid advertising in terms of cost per conversion, and our clients see results much more quickly. Building up an engaged social media following can take years – time that your clinic may not have in the short term. Unsure if social media marketing is right for your business? Schedule a free conversation here.

In the interest of transparency – we don’t tend to recommend that dental clinics invest in organic social media marketing. There are better ways to spend your time, energy, and money. Organic social media management makes measuring concrete returns difficult, and, unless executed flawlessly, can weaken your brand & reputation.

However, if you’re hell-bent on setting up a social media marketing plan for your dental office, here are five things to consider…

Voice
How you speak to your social media following affects how they engage with your brand and business dramatically. Do you tend to post tips and tricks, or is your content more informative and formal? Do you use emoji’s in your copy? Brands like Burger King have used unique voices on social media platforms to drive extra eyeballs to their content. How can you differentiate your tone from every other dental clinic in your city?

Frequency
How frequently are you going to post your content and what channels are you going to be most active on? In general, we recommend choosing one channel to start with and doing that channel well. It is better to have one well managed channel as opposed to three poorly operated socials. We’ve all had the experience of clicking onto a businesses’ facebook page only to find out that their most recent post is from 2017 – don’t let this be you! Better to have no facebook page rather than a dormant page.

Monitoring
How are you going to monitor your social media channels and how frequently will you check and respond to messages? Are you going to pay a staff member to respond to inquiries within a day? Within an hour? The public expects your business to be responsive to their requests on social media – oftentimes more quickly than other traditional forms of communication such as phone or email.

Planning
Planning out a social media calendar saves you time & headache over the long term. Tools like Hootsuite allow you to pre-plan social media posts ahead of time. Say goodbye to your annual calendar reminder to post about ‘National Bring Your Dog To The Dentist Day!’

Measurement
As with any marketing strategy, measurement is the key to success. If you don’t have an understanding of which channels are driving traffic that actually converts into paying customers, optimizing your efforts to double down on what’s working is a challenge. We recommend Ontraport as a simple, centralized solution for getting a flyover view of your marketing efforts. Google Analytics can also provide interesting insight as far as whether traffic from your social channels is converting into paying patients.