There is a lot of confusion about how to put together incredible patient recruitment campaigns on social media. Some people underestimate its complexity – thinking that it only requires a few button clicks to put something together. Others think it’s one step short of alchemy. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
A strong patient recruitment campaign on a social media platform is made up of four components. Built the right way, you’ve got magic. If not, your results will suffer.
The four components of any social media campaign are:
Audience
The basis of every campaign. This is literally who will be seeing your advertisement. Typically, it’s comprised of geographic, demographic, and interest-related information. Most audiences will be based on criteria like age, location, and how potential audience members spend their time online. With tools available today, it’s easy to build an audience of 45 – 60 year olds within 20 miles of your office who are interested in yoga and expensive cars – you just need to be sure that’s the kind of person who wants to use your services! It’s also possible to create audiences that look like your current patients, which can be extremely valuable to a growing practice. If a marketing campaign doesn’t go well, the first place to look is the audience. It drives everything else.
Creative
A good social media campaign must catch a prospective patient’s attention. This is typically accomplished by having an eye-catching image or video (what we would call the creative).The whole purpose of the creative is to engage the viewers attention long enough to read the copy (more on that next). To give you a sense of the power of good creative, during a recent campaign we added a new creative element mid-campaign and saw a 10x increase in prospective patients asking for more information.
Copy
If the creative catches their attention, the copy tells the prospect why s/he should engage with the ad to learn more. Good campaigns will test different descriptions of the service being offered to see which description connects most with prospective patients. Typically, we’ll start off with 3 – 5 sets of copy at the start of a campaign and eliminate underperformers as quickly as we can see which descriptions resonate best.
Landing Page
This is the final component of a patient recruiting campaign. It’s the website you direct prospective patients toward to learn more about you or your offering. Your landing page should have one, clear “Call To Action” – an action you would like your prospective patient to take. It’ll be something like filling out a form, calling a phone number, watching a video, or scheduling an appointment. We typically see the best results by building a specific page to educate the prospective patient on the product or service being offered, but there valid reasons to have a different type of landing page. Landing pages are the easiest part of a marketing campaign to triage, since you can look at the number of people who landed on the page against the people who took the desired action.
Putting together patient recruiting campaigns is one-part science and one-part art. When it comes together just right, it can be transformative to a practice – filling the schedule with high-quality patients seeking care. It’s what motivates the team every day to constantly improve on the successes of yesterday.