Social Media Marketing in 6 Steps

Before creating any specific business goals to accomplish using social media, it’s important to step back and look at your big picture strategy. In other words, reflect on your business vision and how you want that vision communicated through social media.

Some questions that you can consider asking include:

• What do you hope to achieve through social media marketing?
• Who is your audience of ideal clients and patients?
• Where does your audience spend time online and offline?
• How does your audience use social media?
• What message do you want to communicate to your audience?

These questions help you visualize how your business goals can be achieved through social media marketing. Next, it’s important to set specific and measurable business goals.

An effective framework for goalsetting is creating S.M.A.R.T. goals, which helps you quantify your results so that you can measure your marketing return on investment (ROI).

S.M.A.R.T. goals are:

• Specific – well-defined and focused
• Measureable – made of tangible numbers to track your progress
• Attainable – realistic and achievable for your business
• Relevant – based on your business environment
• Time-bound – clear deadline for goal completion

For example, a S.M.A.R.T. goal that you can set for your practice may be:

“By the end of our fiscal year, we will use Facebook advertising to increase traffic to our business website by 25%.”

Most social media platforms also track various performance metrics that you can use to help you set goals. Here’s a summary of the most common metrics that are tracked:

• Reach: the total number of unique users or accounts that saw your post.
• Impressions: the total number of times that your posts have been seen.
• Engagement: the number of times that your post was liked, shared, and commented.
• Clicks: the number of times that a user has clicked on your post, link or logo.
• Visits: the number of times that a user viewed your profile or website.

The next step in effective social media marketing is to imagine your ideal client. Imagine this ideal client as one person with a name, age, gender, profession, etc. This is often called a “customer persona” or “client avatar”.

This exercise helps you imagine who your clients are, what challenges they have in their lives and how your health products and services can help them resolve their challenges.

This exercise also helps you learn how to position your practice on social media to communicate your brand promise in a language that resonates with your ideal clients.

The key is to learn who your existing clients truly are and how you can find more clients like them. By learning about your clients, their challenges, and how they use social media, you can position your practice to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in a way that resonates with them.

In addition to knowing about your clients, you also want to know about your competitors. This helps you measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns relative to your industry peers.

By comparing your performance metrics against industry averages, you can benchmark your results and determine how to improve your performance.

Researching your competitors gives you a perspective into industry standards, and lets you see how your competitors’ posts are being received by their audience. That being said, many business owners assume that their competitors know something that they don’t. Often times, they will imitate their competitors’ strategies, believing that it will help their goals.

Many social media management tools also have their own competitor analysis reports that helps you benchmark your own performance metrics against those of your competitors.

You can view how often your competitors are creating posts, the kinds of posts they’re creating, as well as how well those posts are being received.

You can begin searching for your competitors in Google’s search, as well as within your own social media’s search. Use your industry’s keywords, such as “dentist” or “optometrist” or “physiotherapist”. Refine your search to local results, ideally in a close proximity to your clinic.

If you already have social media accounts setup and you’re engaging in marketing, you can conduct a practice checkup or marketing audit of your performance.

You can begin by asking yourself these questions:

• What’s working and what’s not?
• Who is connecting with you on social media?
• Which social media networks does your ideal client use most?
• How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?

Review your accounts to ensure that you have a clear vision of the purpose of each account. Next, ensure that your images, biography, and links are all consistent with your brand.

Many small businesses have different names and images on different social media profiles. This creates confusion for your clients trying to find you.

Using your social media analytics tools, you can evaluate the performance of your posts. This helps you determine which types of posts are well received and have the best metrics.

After forming an effective strategy and setting up your accounts, you’re ready to start creating content. Many small businesses often struggle to know what kind of content to create or leave it until the last minute.

One of the most effective ways to stay organized is to create a plan using a social media content calendar. This is a monthly calendar that summarizes what content you’ll create for each social media network, and the dates and times that your post will be published.

Many research studies suggest posting on social media on a daily basis, but generally not more than about once per day. Some businesses see great results by posting more frequently on some platforms, such as Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram.

After creating content and promoting it on your social media networks, it’s important to analyze and evaluate the performance of your content to see how well it’s achieving your business goals.

Most of the social media networks provide robust analytics to measure and track your performance metrics. You can analyze which posts had the most views, likes, comments and shares.

The more that your audience engages with your posts, the more they like the quality of the content. Each time they engage with your post, it will also be seen by their network of followers, which increases the visibility of your health practice.

After analyzing your top performing posts, you can optimize your strategy by creating more posts like them. Over time, you can fine-tune your social media marketing strategy to help you grow your practice with new patients more effectively.

To learn more, please read Social Media Marketing: How to Grow Your Business Using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn