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:
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 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:
And, that’s just in 20 minutes! Hopefully, by now we have established the need to put your business on 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.
It’s fairly simple to open an account and start marketing your products & services on Facebook. Then, it’s a matter of:
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:
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.
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.
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
Need more than just marketing ideas for optical stores? Learn how Icare Labs can help you with significant savings on your monthly lab bill.