Why Social Media Marketing is Essential for Your Optometry Practice
With internet access more widely available than ever, your potential eye care patients spend more time on social media, online review sites, and many other digital platforms. This means it’s a waste not to use social media to promote your optometry practice. Platforms like Facebook, Google My Business, and Instagram, provide plenty of opportunities to increase your exposure and engagement with followers.
We understand it may be daunting at first due to the vast variety of options and load of information you need to be able to navigate these new digital marketing channels. However, there are a lot of tools and educational resources out there that can help you learn the basics and eventually, use social media as an effective marketing tool for your practice.
In this blog post, we will go over the top 6 reasons why your practice should be active on social media. Let’s get started.
1. Tell Your Brand’s Story to Followers & Build Your Practice’s Credibility
Telling your practice’s story is critical because it helps to humanize your brand and give followers or potential eye care patients a better idea about who you are, your values, and how you can help them solve a problem they have, and in this case, improving their vision. Your story sets you apart from your local eye care competitors because it’s unique and unlike any other.
For example, what inspired you to become an optometrist? What drove you to pursue this line of medicine more than the others? If you have a good and genuine story to tell about your brand, it will help your current, and potential patients form a connection with your brand.
Learn More: Eye Care Social Media Marketing Ideas to Boost Engagement
2. Target Local Eye Care Patients
While your social media assets are initially built for awareness and engagement purposes, they can also be a lead-generating platform for your business. Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are constantly developing business tools that brands can leverage to achieve their sales goals through advertising and targeting solutions. You can even identify filters and modify your target audience’s settings to ensure that your content is reaching the right people.
For example, on Facebook, you can identify a “Core Audience,” which you can customize for your page based on age, interests, geography, and more. Through these settings, you can make sure that your posts will be visible to those prospects in your local area and those looking for eye care services, which in turn increases your chance for conversion and lead generation.
3. Drive More Traffic To Your Website
Being active on social media encourages your followers to go through the lead funnel and land on your optometry website, which leads to more bookings or purchasing eye care products you have for sales like contact lenses, frames, and many others.
While the direct way would be to add your site’s URL to all your social media profiles, more creative ways can be done to drive your audience to click and visit your website. Have a creative thumb-stopping visual or caption on your post that teases content on your eye care website. You can explore posting educational videos, funny GIFs, user testimonials, and other engaging materials that can potentially capture your target audience’s interest and lead them to check out your site to read more information.
Read on: 10 Tactics to Drive Traffic to Your Eye Care Website
4. Advertise Your Services and Products
Social media is a great way to engage and connect with your patients through fun and engaging content (optometry social content does not have to be boring!). Still, since you are running a business, you can also use this opportunity to promote your practice and products and attract new patients consistently. Here are some ideas on what to promote:
- Data-driven posts showing the most common services that patients are interested in. You can make it more engaging by asking your social media followers to comment and add their own experiences as well.
- Educational Posts that explain the details of each service you offer and what needs are they addressing
- Monthly or Weekly Discounts, Promos, and Contests to increase brand loyalty.
- New Product Updates that consumers should know about like eye drops, eyeglasses, contact lens, add-ons, and accessories
- New services or equipment offered may increase your credibility and differentiate your practice from competitors.
5. Use Social Media as Another Way to Provide Customer Service
The essence of social media is to make and maintain connections not just for personal but also for business purposes. Each communication channel offers a different kind of engagement. For example, reaching out via email gives off a less personal vibe, while a phone call may convey the need to discuss an urgent matter. The same goes for social media. As an optometrist, it’s necessary to have an accessible line where your clients can reach you.
Your phone isn’t enough because there might be instances where you cannot be reached; thus, an alternative is needed. We have social media as that alternative option. Connecting with your patients on social networks is different from connecting with them through email or a phone call.
Connecting via social media is a more informal way to communicate, but you can quickly answer questions or concerns they have. There are many platforms to choose from, but it would be more efficient if it’s all in one platform like Facebook or Instagram.
Learn More: 10 Eye Care Social Media Mistakes to Avoid
Beyond direct messages, you can showcase exemplary customer service by being responsive to comments and reviews. Make sure you leave comments on reviews, whether or not they’re positive or negative. Should you receive a negative comment or a complaint, try to resolve it immediately. Offer a solution to let your audience know that you care about your patients and that you want to keep them happy and satisfied.
6. Share Eye Care Tips and Tricks that Your Followers Would Like
Differentiate yourself from your local eye care competitors by putting out quality content that can be uniquely associated with your practice. Without content to interest your audience, you won’t receive any clicks. And without any clicks, there is no engagement which means fewer chances of being discovered by new patients. Apart from what was shared earlier (promoting services and products), there are so many ideas that you can turn into eye-catching, quality, relevant content.
- New scientific research about human vision – this may be formal and somewhat boring to some, but one way to make it more appealing is to use infographics and creative visuals.
- Eye care topics including tips and tricks, new treatments, and trends – You can explore posting timely content such as percentage of eye care problems caused by working from home and how to address them, or pros and cons of using contact lenses versus eyeglasses.
Post content with the right mix of photos and graphics to help drive your point and sustain the reader’s attention. Having clickable content is a plus because it can lead directly to your site, which increases engagement and website traffic!
Again, optometry social content does not have to be boring. Post content that followers can engage with, such as polls and surveys. You can also have referral programs and discounts to attract engagement and traffic to the site and clinic.
Using Social Media Marketing To Promote Your Optometry Practice
The above examples have illustrated how beneficial social media marketing is for your optometry practice. It’s not just about growing a social media presence for clout but ultimately getting leads to keep the business running. The social network also helps you stay updated with the industry’s happenings in real-time by connecting you with organizations and colleagues.
Let Us Create An Optometry Social Media Marketing Plan to Grow Your Practice
The different ways to promote social media that we have listed above are some of the most basic ones, but social media management can be time-consuming in the long run. It needs patience and some technical knowledge to optimize the tools that the different social media platforms have to offer.
Give us a call at 800.792.8384 or click here and we can show you how to attract more optometry patients using social media marketing.
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