Marketing Refresh: A New Perspective on Social Advertising
If you’re a red-blooded human like me, you’ve probably binge-watched an addicting TV series on a free streaming service, subjecting yourself to the onslaught of repetitive ads presented during 30-second commercial intervals just to find out what happens in the season 3 finale. You probably also have vowed never to patronize the brand who accosted you with their incessant marketing ad nauseum, just on principle of excessive annoyance.
I use this example to demonstrate how elective healthcare marketing can have the same effect on audiences. A social media marketing strategy that pushes little more than sales-based messaging is just that; pushy. With audience attention spans growing increasingly miniscule, your opportunity to leave an impression is narrow.
What’s more, while every practice offers its own competitive advantage, nearly all offices are selling a similar version of “uncompromised patient care and beautiful, natural-looking results.” With the ubiquity of messaging like this, it’s no wonder audiences are growing numb to traditional practice marketing efforts.
So how can elective healthcare providers thread the needle?
We suggest adopting an updated social marketing approach with messaging that focuses on your audience, rather than highlighting the practice. Recent consumer research demonstrates social audiences overwhelmingly want brands to deliver content that engages, educates, and helps them—not content that sells to them.
Give Your Audience What They Want
Marketers often mistakenly interpret this newer social marketing concept to mean the opportunity to advertise the competitive advantages of their practice to potential patients has vanished with their audience’s desire to be sold to, but that’s fake news.
Let’s break this down: Audiences are saying they want brands to provide an added value of some kind to their online experience. “Entertain us, educate us, engage us!” So when your practice publishes content that audiences find valuable, your marketing message comes through intrinsically: we understand you, and we’re here to help.
This concept of helping (i.e. posting content your audience wants) rather than hawking sales messages (“We’re the best!”) makes good marketing sense for practices and their audiences alike. To illustrate this mutually beneficial strategy, consider how you perceive someone who has helped you, even in the smallest of ways. By and large, when someone impacts your life positively, you’re drawn to them. A few exchanges later, you find you like them, trust them, and want to learn more about them. The same goes for your social audience. Your target market wants to learn more about and engage with brands whose content leaves them with a positive impression.
So what does this kind of impactful content look like? That depends on what your target audience, as a whole, values. Take elective healthcare patients, for example. We can generally assume that your current and prospective patients hold an interest not only in your practice specialty, but also in health and wellness topics on a broader scale. It’s not hard to imagine that individuals who seek to look and feel their best through cosmetic and elective procedures might also strive to lead a healthy lifestyle, taking interest in exercise advice, beauty tips, and seasonal healthy recipes that contribute to their way of life.
To spell it out plainly, valuable marketing content does not always follow the cast-and-die pattern of “Scenario – Problem – Solution – Book an Appointment Now!” Effective marketing content can take many forms, but the singular element that it must possess is value in the eyes of your audience.
Get Inspired
Need some food for thought? Take a look at some examples of brands executing a social marketing strategy that speaks to what their audience values, and how these tactics deliver on their marketing goals. It’s important to note that you don’t need the deep pockets big brands have to run a successful campaign. You just have to be creative and know your audience!
Philips
As a company centered around healthcare delivery solutions, Philips engages their audiences by sharing health-conscious content like tasty recipes their followers can use.
Crest
Content that speaks to the value of kindness resonates with Crest’s audience in a unique way. This post allowed them to gain tremendous brand exposure organically by sharing content that highlights the family values espoused by the audience of the family oral care brand.
Ulta Beauty
Beauty store chain Ulta Beauty’s “The Possibilities Are Beautiful” campaign leveraged an empowering message of confidence featuring content across social channels that their beauty-savvy audience engaged with and shared, ultimately providing Ulta with valuable brand awareness and identity.
How to Get Started
Finely-tuning social marketing content that speaks to your target audience takes time and finesse to craft and execute successfully. For the elective healthcare practices that don’t have the time and mastery to dedicate to these effective campaigns, Rosemont Media offers full-service social media marketing packages customized to your practice. No matter how involved or hands-off you want to be, we’ve got a social solution to get your audience buzzing. Contact us to start giving your future patients the online experience they deserve.