Why is Social Marketing on Social Media so Critical?

Building relationships is key to attracting and retaining patients in today business climate. People need to feel safe and have a level of trust when making decisions for themselves and their family. Marketing and Sales have always partnered together, but today marketing is playing a bigger role. In the past marketing primarily focused on brand building, name recognition and awareness of a business in the community. Marketing would be going on behind the scenes and everything drove potential clients to the Sales group who would “close the deal”. A shift is happening in the way consumers make buying and service decisions. Although the quality of the product or service is still a key contributor to why someone will buy, consumers are looking beyond the product or service by kicking the tires and looking under the hood closely as part of their decision. What does that mean? I mentioned it earlier people want to feel safe and want to trust companies they use. People don’t want to be a number, nor do they want their providers to be just an entity.

Marketing becomes a larger component in the sales process. The last thing you want is to “close the sale” too soon. Patience is becoming a behavior you must have in order to grow your business effectively. Social marketing can establish you and your practice as a trusting provider and safe environment. After all social media is about being social, showing your personality, letting people get to know something about you and your practice. Another great component about social marketing on social media is that it makes a stagnant marketing campaign interactive and attacks your target audience with inbound and outbound components.

There are many business components a business needs to address to be effective in the new approach of “building relationships” to “build your business”. As a business you should be aligning you external efforts and internal efforts to establish trust, confidence and security with your current patients and potential patients. Some of the areas to be addressed include marketing, sales, employee morale, hiring the right people for your practice, practice culture, your personality, your message, pricing, offers, etc. Over the next several months we’ll address many of these areas in more detail in our blog. We welcome you to visit often to see what’s new. More importantly we welcome your comments and own insight to any topic covered. As always, we welcome your input and value our relationship with you.