The world is changing, and the way we perceive every product, business, and service is changing along with it. For good or for bad, medicine has become big business, and the need to market medical services is a real thing.
The internet may have changed the modus operandi a bit, but people have always cared about the same things when selecting a doctor, medical product, or medical facility. With medical services comes a large degree of trust. It is necessary to constantly nurture relationships with patients and develop that trust relationship with potential new ones. In today’s world, the best place to focus those kinds of efforts is social media.
Why Social Media?
While there are definite questions that have arisen over the trustworthiness of social media over the past couple of years, it is still one of the best places for businesses to establish and build trust. People are more real on social media. If they have an opinion about something, they are much more apt to voice it digitally. This comes with both a degree of caution and opportunity.
The cautionary aspect comes in the need for transparency, competency, and trustworthiness. Lapse in any of these areas in front of a social media audience, and it can do considerable damage to your reputation both on- and offline. This is especially true for any business or service that expects people to place their health and well-being in its hands. In many ways, the weight of responsibility in sound messaging on social media is much greater for medical practices.
The opportunity here is a much more exciting prospect. Social media gives your practice the opportunity to put its best foot forward in several ways. Let’s have a look at several key ways you can build a stronger reputation on social media for your medical practice.
1. Know Your Audience Well
Medical practices are unique in that they don’t necessarily appeal to a single demographic. There are, however, many branches of medicine, which makes it a bit easier to wrangle things in. For specialists like orthopedists and dermatologists, the target audience is reasonably specific. For general practitioners and family medical practices, a bit more strategizing might be necessary.
When you contact us for medical content creation services, we can suss out the particulars of your practice and help you plan out that strategy. In most general terms, you want to consider who makes up the majority of your audience and cater to those people with your content. Pediatric practices would likely have the most success speaking directly to parents with children and teens under 18, for example.
Once your audience is clearly defined, you can begin experimenting with the kinds of content that should appeal to them. At that point, the task revolves around producing relevant, quality content and sharing it on social media. That brings me to my next point …
2. Keep Quality Levels High
It is important in any marketing context to deliver content that represents the brand well. In this instance, the need for consistent quality is even greater. Again, people trust their doctors with their lives, and they want to work with practices that maintain the highest standards. The content you produce for social media will correspond directly with people’s perceptions of your practice.
So, how do you maintain those standards? It comes with producing consistently good, engaging content, particularly with your blog and with relevant curated content. I’ve written other posts on subjects related to medical content creation, so I won’t revisit concepts that are already out there other than to quickly mention a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing.
Regular Blog Updates: Deliver a steady stream of blog content with an emphasis on long-form articles. People trust medical information more if it is well-written and thorough. I’ll plug our medical content creation services here once more because the more professional the quality of your blog content, the more trustworthy it is perceived to be. Don’t cut corners on written content, ever.
Current Events and News: Posting curated content on timely, relevant topics that relate to your practice show your patients and potential new ones that your practice knows what is happening in the world of medicine and that your services are as up-to-date as they can be.
3. Maintain High Levels of Visibility
It is vital in the medical industry to project an image of your practice’s brand that has people – real people – at its foundation. This is a tricky proposition when you’re trying to use a digital platform to convey this message, but there are effective ways to do it. Here are just a few:
Real-Time Engagement: Starting conversations and participating in discussions communicates the human aspect of the practice. It confirms that you are involved with your patients and that what’s important to them is also important to you.
Fast Responses to Messages and Questions: Always respond to questions as quickly as possible. Certain platforms take notice of this and report publicly how long people can expect to wait for a response from you. It is vital that these numbers be measurable in minutes (ideally) or hours (realistically), not days.
Predictable Content Delivery Intervals: Don’t post one blog post this week, two next month, and another six weeks later. Get on a content publishing schedule and stick with it. This is yet another reason to work with professional medical copywriters: We can help keep your content delivery on schedule.
I hope that my message today has helped you understand better why your practice should be on social media. More and more practices are catching on to this concept every day, but few actually get it right. I encourage you to search this blog for more medical-related topics; there are posts that answer some of the questions that likely arose for you reading this one. Also, feel free to contact us anytime to discuss your specific medical copywriting needs and develop a delivery strategy that helps you build trust on social media.
