Posted by Amy Carbone on Apr 13, 2020 9:00:00 AM
Instagram is quickly gaining traction as a top platform for dentists to market their practice. Here are five tips for growing your dental practice's Instagram following.
1. Post Consistently
Buffer, a popular social media marketing software platform, suggests that making one Instagram post per day is essential to increasing your number of Instagram followers.
In one of their studies, Buffer found that users who posted at least seven times per week get more engagement than users who post less often. The correlation implies that the more you post, the more followers you’ll earn.
What You Can Do
Post pictures of your staff, office events, and happy patients (with their permission). Before and after pictures of procedures completed that day, such as veneers or teeth whitening, are also a great idea for dentists on Instagram.
2. Emphasize Video Marketing
If a photo is worth 1,000 words, then a video is worth even more.
Video marketing is a top marketing medium across all social media platforms, and Instagram is no exception. In fact, Animoto found that 33% of surveyed Instagram users said that they were more interested in a company after viewing one of their videos on the platform.
Even if you’re starting your account from scratch, that’s a lot of potential growth from video.
What You Can Do
Post about your dental practice to your stories. If your practice is attending a fundraiser or community event, get your staff together to post a quick clip of your team's excitement before the event or mingling with the other attendees. You can also go live on Instagram, which lets you broadcast whatever you’re doing to your followers.
Day-to-day posts can include video too. Publish a tour of your dental office, staff introductions, or anything that you feel could connect you more with your patients and prospects.
3. Utilize Paid Advertising
While Instagram wasn’t originally intended for use by businesses, it has quickly modified its platform to cater to brands. Paid advertising allows you to reach a larger portion of Instagram's 500 million users, creating more exposure for your dental practice at a more reasonable price than television, billboards, or radio ads.
What You Can Do
There are multiple types of ads that you can purchase on Instagram. Photo, video, and story ads tend to be more effective for dentists than carousel or collection ads, which are typically better suited for retail businesses. You can purchase all of them through Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, and their ad manager.
4. Engage with Your Audience
Many business owners treat their social media channels as a megaphone they can use to speak at or to their audience. In reality, your social media channels let you speak with your audience.
Posting ad after ad on your Instagram channel will teach your audience to tune you out. Instead, you can produce engaging content that revolves around your patients’ pain points, like children’s fear of dentists.
In a nutshell, let your patients know there's a real person behind the profile picture.
What You Can Do
Use strategic hashtags that are relevant to your audience to increase the visibility of your dental practice among users who follow you or are searching for similar content. Good hashtags could be anything about dentistry, teeth whitening, or even the name of your town.
Then, you can focus on creating content that promotes engagement and back-and-forth dialogue between users and your dental practice. You can ask questions in the caption of images, get followers to answer, and reply to them to stimulate a conversation.
5. Explore Influencer Marketing
Instagram influencers are individuals who have garnered a large following by positioning themselves as thought leaders of a niche interest. They often post images and messages on behalf of organizations like your dental practice to promote them in a similar way to word of mouth marketing.
When influencers make a recommendation, their followers listen. Companies have taken to creating marketing relationships with influencers that allow their brand to be promoted in a way that feels more natural or organic to consumers. Instead of selling your products and services on your own channels, influencers do the work for you. This helps foster brand trust and loyalty, which go a long way for dental professionals.
What You Can Do
Search for notable influencers in your industry using tools like Klear that identify Instagram users with large followings who work with dental practices like yours. You can also search for notable influencers outside the dental industry, such as celebrities, YouTube stars, popular bloggers, or other notable personalities.
Seek Expand Your Practice with Treloar & Heisel
At Treloar and Heisel, we know that growing your practice using today's technology is critical. Social media has extended far beyond personal communication and is now a primary way dental professionals can reach their target audiences. We can help you increase your patient following, learn effective dental practice management tips, and protect your business with comprehensive insurance coverage. To learn more, download our eBook on ways to help increase your dental practice’s patient list today.
Treloar & Heisel and Treloar & Heisel Property and Casualty are divisions of Treloar & Heisel, LLC.
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Treloar & Heisel, LLC. and its divisions do not offer legal or marketing advice. Please consult a professional concerning these topics.
