Chiropractic digital marketing doesn’t just consist of building a website. It’s about designing a patient-friendly website that receives traffic from a variety of digital channels. With over a decade of experience managing the online presence of thousands of chiropractic practices, we’ve discovered five key digital marketing factors essential to maximizing new patient results:
- High-Converting Website
- Website Traffic
- Online Reviews
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
In case you haven’t heard, social media is no longer an optional activity for businesses in the 21st century. Surprised? Here are a few facts to know about social media today:
- As of April 2018, Facebook passed the 2 billion active users per month mark.
- 1 of every 6 minutes spent online is on Facebook
- 56% of online adults use more than one social network
- 41% of people say that it’s important the businesses they engage with have a strong social media presence
So clearly, it’s important to be doing something on social media but, like any other marketing activity, there are certain goals and strategies that are suited specifically for this channel. Social media plays a key role in chiropractic digital marketing but it is only one of the 5 factors of chiropractic digital marketing – not the entire marketing plan.
What are the best ways to use social media? Here are a couple of key ways to use this medium in your chiropractic digital marketing to build patient retention, increase referrals, and connect with new patients.
Patient Retention: Build Loyalty
Building on the informal atmosphere of social media is a great way to stay current in your patient’s minds in between appointments. Social media builds loyalty for patient retention and could also help with patient reactivation. By staying on their news feeds, you’re reminding them that you are still the best chiropractor for them.
With just a few posts a week, you can expand your reach and connect with your patients more than you could just in your practice. Encourage patients to follow you on social media by sending out an email or posting a sign in your practice. Then keep their engagement online with informative and interesting posts.
Patients follow your practice on social media for a few reasons:
- They want to stay up to date with announcements from the practice
- They are interested in promotions you might post
- They want to get to know you and your team’s personality
By keeping these three key reasons in mind when putting together your post schedule, you will keep your followers engaged and connected with your practice.
- Keep your patients up to date: Post practice updates like changing holiday hours or the addition of new team members
- Post about promotions: Try posting about a special offer where they have to mention the post they saw on social media to redeem it
- Let your patients get to know you: When people feel a connection with your practice, they are more likely to keep coming back and stay loyal to you and your brand. Share pictures of your team events. Post fun facts about your practice and inject a little personality into your social media presence.
For some more ideas of what to post on your social media pages, check out this blog post here.
In the overall view of chiropractic digital marketing, social media builds loyalty in your current patients so that they will happily tell others about your practice.
Patient Referrals: Build Community
Social media is a community – one of the largest communities in the world, in fact. By building up your online community, you’re creating more ways for your patients to tell their friends about your practice. This is one of our favorite ways to use social media in chiropractic digital marketing – creating genuine communities where people can’t help but share how happy they are to be a part of your practice.
There are a few key ways in which social media facilitates patient referrals:
Shares Your Appreciation for Referring Patients
Simply saying thank you publicly to those who have already been sharing about your practice not only makes them feel appreciated but also encourages others to do the same. It’s also a way to remind your followers online that they can share your practice with their friends as well.
ACTION: Share an image that says “Thank you” with some text like, “Your referrals are our greatest compliment. Thank you for sharing our practice with your friends and family.”
Makes it Easy to Share Your Practice Information
Every day people use social media to ask for recommendations – Whether it’s looking for great restaurants, attractions and, yes, even chiropractors. When you have a complete social media page and one of your happy patients wants to share your practice as a recommendation, Facebook will show a small preview of your page and ask if they want to share it with their post. This small preview and automatic link to your practice page, shares all that they need to know to connect with your practice, visit your website, and schedule an appointment.
ACTION: Fill out your Facebook page’s “About” section and make sure your hours, contact information and website are visible. This is key in getting people from your Facebook page to your practice.
Increases Your Reach
By posting engaging content on your Facebook page, people will want to like, comment and share it with their friends. When someone comments on a post, Facebook could share this with their friends and your practice’s post will appear in their news feed. To encourage more comments and shares from your followers, it’s a good rule of thumb for only 20% of your posts to be promotional and 80% to be outward-focused.
ACTION: Create a post that asks an engaging question that will encourage comments. Try injecting some personality into your digital marketing by interacting with your community more.
That’s where Perfect Patients comes in! Learn more about our Social Media Marketing Service here.
New Patients – Build a Connection
Social media is a great way to build trust with prospective patients. People are checking and researching businesses more than ever before. With an active social media presence, prospective patients can see what your practice is about, who you are and why they might want to choose you.
Here are a few ways to use your social media platforms to connect with new patients:
Show Your Expertise
Are you an expert in sports chiropractic? Write some blog posts on specific techniques and share your expertise on your social media profiles. This will not only get more people to visit your website but will show prospective patients browsing your profile that you are an authority in the field.
Be Active on Social Media
It may seem obvious but regularly posting to social media shows prospective patients that you are an active and accessible practice looking to connect with them. Set aside a few minutes one day a week and use a free scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to create and schedule posts ahead of time so you don’t have to worry about posting every day.
Encourage Reviews
Ask your patients to leave reviews for you on social media as well as Google by posting a sign at your practice or sending out an email (if permitted in your jurisdiction). More and more prospective patients browse through all of these channels when deciding on their chiropractor.
If your current patient retention and reactivation strategy isn’t working, or you’re looking for new ways to generate patient referrals and enhance your online presence, it’s probably time to build your practice’s presence on social media.
Keep in mind that it is still just one of the five factors of chiropractic digital marketing, though. At Perfect Patients we know it can be overwhelming thinking about doing all of these things alone. Click here to learn more about our Perfect Patients digital marketing service.
