[00:00:00] Chris Pistorius: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Podcast, a podcast that helps dentists win in the online world of modern day marketing. Each week, we cover the most cutting edge marketing tactics and strategies that are working right now across our client base to drive leads, phone calls, and more new patients for dentists.
[00:00:21] Now here’s your host and founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing, Chris Pistorius.
[00:00:29] Hi everyone. It’s Chris Pistorius here again with another edition of the Dental Marketing Podcast. Today I want to talk about something I’m asked a lot, and that’s about social media and what I call organic posting. Organic posting is when you’re not buying ads or boosting posts or anything like that, but you’re just posting on your page on Facebook or Instagram or whatever it may be.
[00:00:52] And I get asked, is it really worth doing that, right? I mean, does anybody see it? Does anybody pay attention? I get asked a lot. I don’t get a lot of likes on my content or nobody shares it. Is it really worth all the time? And so I want to talk to you about not only is it worth it or not, but I really want to get into the details of how it should be handled specifically.
[00:01:11] So first of all, is it worth it? Yes, it is worth it. And the reason why is because content is king in today’s marketing realm. And we’ll get to why. Maybe you’re not getting shares or likes or views or things like that in a second. But it keeps you in touch with your current patients. And so when you do organic posting, typically the people that are gonna see it are the ones who like your page or follow you or whatever it may be, depending on the social platform that you’re on.
[00:01:41] What you really need to do is make sure that you’re posting things that are relevant to your ideal patient. And so if you’re looking, watching this and you just asked the question, Chris, what do you mean by ideal patient? Then you need to back up a little bit and you need to look at your marketing strategy because you need to look at your patients, whether, whatever they are, you need to look and see what their demographics are.
[00:02:05] You should have all this data, like birth dates, so how old are they? Right? And any patient related data that you can use to come up with your specific demographics of who your current patients are. Along with, you know, if you could just sit down on a piece of paper and describe your ideal patient.
[00:02:23] Who is that? We call them here at KickStart patient avatars. So we have all of our clients draw out their patient avatar and we help them do it, and then that’s who we target with our marketing. Well, the same things here with social media is you really need to target and post content based on who your target demographics are.
[00:02:42] And you have two of them. So you have your ideal patient, like the ones that you wanna walk through the door, right? And then you’ve got your demographics of your existing patients. So when you go to write content, you need to write content that’s gonna be interesting for those people to read. Hopefully that makes sense.
[00:02:58] So it’s very important to come up with those demographics and the reasons why you may not be getting shares or likes or follows or whatever it may be, could be based on the type of content you’re posting. Okay. But I’m gonna back up a little bit because as me being the owner of a dental marketing agency, I get asked a lot, can you do my social media posting for me? And this may be surprising to hear, but I almost always say, no, we can’t.
[00:03:25] And the reason is, is that I don’t believe you should ever outsource all of your social media posting. And there’s a couple reasons why we used to try to do this. Okay. And it quite frankly, it just wasn’t very good and it failed.
[00:03:37] And by the way, it’s okay to fail as long as you fail fast and you learn from it. So we did. And what we found is that while we can do the technical work of posting on all social media platforms, what we do have problems with is posting really good content. And what I mean by that and what I talk about really good content for a organic social posting is that, that people in your demographic really want to pay attention to.
[00:04:04] Okay. We can post general things and you know, like funny things and just, you know, different topics about dentistry, but that’s not really what you wanna post all the time. What you really want to post is something personal, something that’s going on in the office. Like for instance, today is Halloween.
[00:04:20] For instance, when I’m recording this, I’m sure a lot of people dressed up to come into the office. That’s something you can quickly snap a picture of or a video and post it on social media. That’s the kind of content that your demographics are going to eat up and want to pay attention to. Okay, so I would recommend you don’t outsource your social media posting.
[00:04:39] Where we do help though is consulting people, like front desk people. Maybe it’s who you have, do it on what to post, where to post, how to post all these different things. And so I’m gonna go over a little bit of that for you next. So the next question is, you know, what should you post? Right. And sometimes I see the mistake of dental practices just posting nonstop sales stuff like come in for a new patient special, right?
[00:05:04] We’re doing this, we’re doing that. And it’s all trying to sell your social media crowd something. And that’s a big mistake cuz that’s not what your demographics wanna see, right? To them, that’s just spam, right? They’ll put up with it a little bit, but then they’ll just tune you out and not pay attention to you, right?
[00:05:21] So you don’t want to do that. You wanna post and continue to build the trust of your patients on social media. And so you need to really look at your demographic and you need to come up with a content plan that you think they would be interested in. So if you’re a pediatric dentist, your target’s probably 25 to 45 year old females owns their own home, has kids obviously, and maybe even owns a golden retriever, right?
[00:05:45] But you need to understand what’s gonna make them want to read that and want to click on it. Okay? So that would be things maybe going on in the community for kids, right? School events, news in the community about school board meetings, right? Things like that. Now, stay outta the politics side of it.
[00:06:00] Don’t pick a side because you’re likely gonna tick off 50% of your demographic, right? So don’t do that. But post knowledgeable information. And then every once in a while you can mix in something about your practice. Like maybe you’re doing a mom of the month club, right? Or a parent of the month club, or you’re doing some sort of new patient special.
[00:06:20] It’s really cool like you’re giving away a sonic Care toothbrush or something like that, right? Mix that in. But spam and salesy stuff can’t be the just can’t be the purpose of all of your social media content. Okay?
[00:06:33] Also video, post as much video as you can, and I’m gonna kind of get outta order here, but back to my original point of why things aren’t getting clicked or followed, or not many people are seeing it, is that Facebook has a pretty complex algorithm and a lot of what it’s based on is how people consume your content.
[00:06:51] If they’re scrolling through their feed and they just ignore your content, Facebook knows that and so does Twitter and all these other TikTok even, right? What they do pay attention to is when people start clicking on content and consuming the content. These social media platforms know that, and when people start doing that, by you posting more interesting content, then your stuff will be seen more often and if it’s seen more often, you will get more likes and shares and followers and things like that.
[00:07:20] So hopefully that makes sense for you. If not, I’ll be more than happy to talk to you and explain it in person as well.
[00:07:24] So let’s go to, you know, the video posts work well. People can watch video quickly. They’re engaging in video. Don’t make the videos too long though, right? Short and sweet, and to the point, right?
[00:07:36] Because people’s attention spans just aren’t there. So try to make those as short as possible, but to the point.
[00:07:42] So when should you post? Great question. I’m under the impression and my opinion is that you should post every day as long as it’s good content. If it’s not good, interesting content, don’t post that day, right?
[00:07:54] I wouldn’t necessarily post multiple times a day, but every day post something valuable toward your target demographic. Okay?
[00:08:06] Who should post within your office. If you’re the doctor or the owner and you’re saying, well, I’m just gonna do it. No, you’re not , I’m just telling you, you won’t do it. Although you’re very qualified to do it, you’re just not gonna have the time. Right. It’s one of those things where you say you’re gonna do it and it doesn’t pan out and you just don’t have enough time.
[00:08:23] So you need to designate somebody to do it. Typically, with our clients, it’s somebody at the front desk or the larger practices, maybe has a marketing person that can help with that. So it doesn’t matter who it is, as long as they’re good with social media and technology, they’re good with video and posting pictures, then put them in charge of it, have them make up content plan, have them stick to it and use something KPI based, key performance indicator to make sure they’re doing what they said that they’re gonna do.
[00:08:51] Are you looking to grow your practice but are a little unclear on what the best way is? Let us help you out. We have over 13 years of experience in helping practices just like yours, increase new patient growth. Just go to KickStartdental.com and sign up for a free strategy session where we will give you some great insights on how to take your practice to the next level.
[00:09:17] Okay? Where should you post? Great question. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere. YouTube, when you do video, put it on YouTube. Your social media outlets use TikTok. That’s only video. Right? Use it. Facebook. Instagram, LinkedIn, put it everywhere. There’s tons of software out there now that’ll allow you to post something on the software and then it will automatically distribute it to all the platforms that you’re associated with.
[00:09:45] One popular one is called HootSuite, H O O T Suite, s u i t e. That’s a good one. Social Pilot is actually one that we use a lot. It’s a little bit more affordable than Hoot Suite and it does a pretty good. So these are just some few places.
[00:09:59] You can even post content directly to Google now, in Google business places under your profile, you can post in that as well. So post everywhere. If you’re gonna do the content and you’re gonna take the time to put together good quality content, why not put it everywhere? It’s gonna help your SEO results. It’s gonna help your reach, it’s gonna help with your local authority and credibility.
[00:10:19] So I say everywhere. Everywhere you can. Okay, and so you might be looking at this or watching this and thinking, Okay, well that makes sense, but really what should I post? I mean, you talked about Parent of the Month Club and cool things, but what else can I post? Well get inspiration if you need it.
[00:10:36] All right. You’ve got plenty of competitors out there in other markets and everywhere. Just look up their Facebook pages, okay. And, and see what they’re posting and see if they’re getting good, you know, followers and clicks and, you know, likes and things like that. You can get a lot of inspiration from just seeing what others are doing and even some large practices that may of hired agencies like mine to help them, you know, check out what they’re posting and get some inspiration.
[00:11:02] TikTok, I can’t talk enough about TikTok right now and what we’re seeing with TikTok and the reason why is you maybe think, you know, that’s just for kids. That’s for teenagers. We don’t need to be posting there. You’re wrong. You do. And the reason is let me reference Facebook. Back when Facebook first started, it was really mostly for kids too.
[00:11:20] I mean, it was a pretty young generation that was using it. And then gradually over time, over the years, the users, the people that were using the platform got older. Now it’s people, old people like me using it. Right. And TikTok now is for the kids, you would think. However, we’re seeing the same thing happen in terms of users getting older, but it’s happening much faster.
[00:11:41] So now the average age of a TikTok user is 30 some years old, whereas just a year ago it was much younger. So your demographics are likely using TikTok. They’re using it a lot. You need to pay attention to that and you need to get involved with it. There’s paid advertising opportunities with TikTok as well that we’re exploring right now and getting some good preliminary results.
[00:12:02] So TikTok and video is huge and it’s not the future, it’s now, there’s no more videos. The future, it’s happening right now or amongst it. So you need to get involved with that. So I hope this helps a little bit. Just to kind of summarize, is it worth it to do organic social media posting?
[00:12:20] Yes, absolutely do it. It’s gonna keep you top of mind to your existing patient base, and if it gets shared, that could open up new avenues for potential new patients as well. Should you outsource it? No, do not outsource it. Do this yourself. Listen to consultants like myself, media companies that can teach you how to do it, but do that in house.
[00:12:40] Save yourself some money and post really good content. Speaking of that, what should you post? Stuff that’s in your target demographics, your ideal patients and your current existing patient demographics. Okay. How often should you post? Every day, as long as it’s good content. Get inspiration from Facebook and Instagram from others that are doing posting right now.
[00:13:02] Look at influencers and TikTok. Do video, do TikTok get involved in that. So anyway, I hope this has helped. If you need a little bit more help with this or you just want somebody to consult you on your social media strategy altogether. Please feel free to reach out. My website is KickStartDental.com.
[00:13:20] There’s a free strategy session right on the top of the page. I do all of those myself. It’s absolutely free to do. And I’ll go in depth in your practice and, and give you some great tips and tricks, not just on social media, but really anything marketing to help you really spark your new patient flow.
[00:13:37] So I hope this helped and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
[00:13:41] Thanks for joining us this week on the Dental Marketing Podcast. Make sure to visit our website, www.KickStartDental.com/podcast, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS so you’ll never miss a show. While you’re at it, if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes, or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show, that would help us out too.
[00:14:06] If you are ready to grow your practice, then you might want to schedule a free strategy session with us. Just go to KickStartDental.com and click the free strategy session button and give us 15 minutes of your time to change your practice forever. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode. And thanks for listening to The Dental Marketing Podcast by Kickstart Dental Marketing, where dentist go to win online.
