After spending a considerable chunk of your life cracking the books, you’ve finally made it out of dental school, and now you want to set up your own dental practice. You’ve spent years honing a skill that could help you set up your own business, but as you step out into the world of a business owner, it’s not as simple as you had imagined.
Luckily for you, finding clients has never been easier; you just need to look in the right places. Social media takes up one of the largest chunks of the world’s information landscape today, and there are no signs of its growth slowing down!
Let’s look at the most prominent platforms. Facebook has almost 2.5 billion users, Instagram has over 1 billion users, and YouTube has over 5 billion video views daily!
As a business owner, you probably understand now how social media can be a potential gold mine for your business if leveraged correctly. There is uncapped potential for generating potential leads on social media because probably all of your target audience is on social media; you just need to make sure you reach them.
This leads us to the question of how. Well, there’s no need to worry because we’ve got a complete guide on how to build a winning social media strategy!
Benefits
According to the Journal of Dental Hygiene, almost 80% of Americans suffer from anxiety regarding dental procedures. When you curate content around those procedures, showing them that the dental world is not as scary as people make it out to be, you build a very personal and authentic connection with them, leading them to trust you!
These elevated trust levels are what will help you in generating leads!
Another major benefit of building a powerful social media platform is that your content will reach many demographics that you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise!
For many businesses, this isn’t beneficial as their product is very niche-specific. However, that’s different for you because everybody has dental problems and everyone needs a warm, friendly dentist to whom they can turn!
Social Media Content Marketing Strategy
Finally, we get to the juicy bits, where we discuss how to build a powerful social media strategy. The first thing you need to establish when creating a content marketing strategy is deciding on your ICP. If you don’t know what that means, it’s basically the segment of the population you want to reach on social media.
This helps you because you can now take a more focused approach to social media. Let’s suppose your target audience is teenagers and young adults. According to Statista, for the age demographic of 18-29 years old, 41% of them were on Snapchat, 35% on TikTok and 32% on Instagram.
Source: Statista
Now that you know this, you need to identify what social media platforms your content will resonate with so that you can work on building a successful strategy.
If I were in your shoes, I’d select Instagram and TikTok as my mediums to publish content. The main reason for this is that the majority of my target audience is actively using these social platforms. There are two main types of content:
- Organic Content
- Paid Media Content
Organic Content:
If you’re going the organic content route, it’s basically free marketing. You create your content yourself and post it, with zero advertising budget required. However, the process is a very slow one, and it may take you several months to build an audience, further delaying your route to lead generation via social media.
Some small but actionable tips we can offer you when strategizing your content are:
- Offer free value to your audience; this could be in the form of tips for dental hygiene
- Make your content relatable. If you speak from the viewer’s perspective and make them feel seen, your chances of building an audience are much higher.
- Try to make your content humorous. People on social media mostly want to unwind, and if you provide them with valuable content in a humorous manner, they are sure to be attracted to your brand!
- Don’t be afraid to join a social media trend every now and then. New trends emerge almost every month, and you can join them to boost your growth and create more warmth and familiarity with your audience.
- Always engage with comments on your posts. This helps build that connection with your audience and boosts you in the eyes of the algorithm.
- Be consistent when posting! This is quite possibly one of the most important and overlooked tasks on social media.
- Post multiple times a day to see when your posts perform best (we call this A/B Testing). Stick with that time because you want your post to reach as many people as possible.
These are some of the few things you can do as an individual in order to boost your chances of winning the social media game. However, to ensure your posts aren’t lost in a sea of content, you can opt for another strategy, which is paid media content.
Paid Media Content:
Paid media content is an absolutely different ball game. It delivers much faster results, ensures your content reaches your target audience, offers a higher conversion rate, and can yield tangible results with respect to a return on investment.
However, the catch with paid media is that you must pay to play. You need to allocate a monthly marketing budget, which might not be possible for everyone starting out.
A big plus point of paid media buying is that you can target regions where your content reaches. Suppose you’re a dentist in Philadelphia, but all of your organic audience is from New York. In that case, that will only do you a little good in terms of lead generation. You must develop a solid paid media content strategy to counter issues like these!
How can you leverage YouTube?
Although YouTube isn’t your conventional social media platform, the amount of traffic it generates daily made it necessary for us to list it as an honorary mention.
The first and most basic thing you can do in order to build an audience on YouTube is to start repurposing your Instagram content as YouTube shorts. This is a great and easy way to get started and to start building traction on YouTube without taking too much of your time.
If you’re serious about building community on YouTube, a good way to create meaningful content is to start a dental podcast. By collaborating with local dentists, you can discuss oral hygiene and provide people with helpful insights.
You can also repurpose the content from that podcast and turn the highlights into YouTube Shorts, improving your chances to get a wider audience.
You don’t need to worry if you’ve gone through this whole article and feel overwhelmed by the number of tasks you need to complete. This work can easily be outsourced to a social media marketing agency.
At SI Global, we have extensive experience working with different niches, including a number of healthcare clients. Having said that, if you’d like to review some of the services we offer to clients, you can do so here.