Marketing for ECPs (Part 3)
If you’re an eye doctor or an optician, you probably did a lot of studying about eyes, optometry, chemistry, biology, anatomy and biochemistry. However, if you’re like most eye care professionals (and other doctors, chiropractors, pharmacists, lawyers, etc.), you may have only had one or two marketing classes.
So, you’re an expert at taking care of people’s vision. But, how do you get patients in the door? Where do you get marketing ideas for eye doctors, opticians and optical stores? Where do you learn about marketing for eye doctors?
This series of articles contains excerpts from our e-book entitled, "Marketing Boot Camp for Eye Care Professionals." For more information, click here.
This article series offers some basic marketing for opticians and some specific ideas you, the eye care professional, can use right away in your practice to help attract and build your patient base. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to marketing for optical stores, but it will help generate some ideas you can use immediately, especially if you’re new to marketing.
You'll learn:
- Basic Marketing Concepts
- Ideas to Market to Today’s Educated, Online-Savvy Audience
- Tips on Utilizing Social Media
- Basic Website Upgrades
- Much More
Utilizing Social Media
In this chapter, we will take a look at social media and how you might be able to easily add this important tool into your sales toolbox.
What is Social Media
First, let’s look at a definition. Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.
There are tons of social media platforms out there and you could easily chew up your entire day trying to post, comment, share and blog with the universe. Obviously, you’ve got patients to see and a business to run – so that’s not realistic. Where do you start?
Let’s take a look at Facebook: it’s free, simple to use, and powerful for communicating with your patients. Look at a few statistics:
- Facebook has reached 1.44 billion active users monthly (of which, 82.8% are outside the USA & Canada).
- There are 936 million daily users.
- There are 798 million mobile daily active users.
- Over 71% of Internet users are on Facebook.
- 29% are between the ages of 25 and 34.
- 25% are between the ages of 16 and 24.
- For the first time, more than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors.
(Facebook stats and Pew Research figures)
If you don’t already utilize this resource, you will certainly want to consider doing so. It’s the fastest growing social media platform, and already has more traffic than Google. Every 20 minutes, there are approximately:
- A million links shared
- 1.5 million status updates
- 2.7 million messages
- Ten million comments
And, that’s just in 20 minutes! Hopefully, by now we have established the need to put your business on Facebook.
Brief History of Facebook
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while a student at Harvard University. Originally called “the Facebook”, this social media platform was a tool to profile students and staff. In less than 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students signed up. After only one month, half the undergraduate population had a profile. The network extended to other Boston universities, the Ivy League, and eventually all US universities. It continued to grow beyond just universities and in 2005 it became facebook.com and was opened to anyone with an email address. It has continued to grow and adapt to attract commercial enterprises and is now the fastest growing social media platform.
Getting Started
It’s fairly simple to open an account and start marketing your products & services on Facebook. Then, it’s a matter of:
- Set Up Your Page - You can request an address like “facebook.com/yourbusiness,” which makes it easy to find. Think of this page like an extension of your business. You can share updates/images and start conversations with existing and potential patients.
- Identify Your Audience - Facebook allows you to reach your specific audience - those who will be likely to do business with you. It’s simple to invite your friends to view and follow your page. You can also share your page and invite your business contacts. You can even purchase inexpensive advertising on Facebook that allows you to target people with specific demographics and interests.
- Create Attractive Content - Content is the hinge pin to success. If you have compelling content, people will be more likely to follow you. Create posts that are authentic, engaging and consistent. Converse with those who interact with your content. Try different types of posts with images, videos and contests.
- Measure & Adjust - Facebook includes some pretty powerful analytical tools to help you measure your effectiveness. You can see what’s working and adjust your strategy on a regular basis. We don’t have the space to go into this in too much detail, but stay tuned for future e-books and articles on this subject.
Other Social Media Platforms
Besides Facebook, there are many other platforms to share your message. As you develop your strategy, you can branch out into these other tools to broaden your reach. Here is a list of the top 10 Social Media platforms in 2015:
- Twitter - 310,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- LinkedIn - 255,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Pinterest - 250,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Google Plus+ - 120,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Tumblr - 110,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Instagram - 100,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- VK - 80,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Flickr - 65,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Vine - 42,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
- Meetup - 40,000,000 estimated monthly visitors
You’ve only got a limited amount of time in a day to post and monitor social media, so choose wisely. Once you establish a social media “routine” you can actually share the same content on multiple platforms. There are even tools like Hootsuite that help you post once to multiple platforms.
The main thing is to set aside some time, or assign a creative person to regularly post and monitor your social media platform(s) of choice. A consistent approach will certainly pay off, but it takes an investment of time and energy.
Next Steps
I recommend looking into Facebook as your first foray into the world of social media. There are innumerable resources to help you get started. Just do a simple google search for “how to get started with Facebook.”
Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, try branching out into other areas of social media and see what works for you. For little to no investment, you can begin building your audience today. You might be surprised how many people will try to find you first on social media. If you’re not there…
In our next blog post, we will take a look at website design considerations for eye care professionals.
Download the e-Book!
Everything you've read here is an excerpt from our e-Book entitled, "Marketing Boot Camp for ECPs." Read the rest by downloading the entire e-Book.
http://info.icarelabs.com/marketing-boot-camp-for-ecps
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