Making use of Instagram and other social media platforms is essential for private practice owners to promote their products or services.
Creating a calendar to post regularly on social media will help drive traffic to your website, encourage your target audience to convert and even help with lead generation.
Social media marketing should absolutely become a part of your weekly routine when building a marketing strategy for your physical therapy clinic.
Here are a few simple ways you can boost your traffic and generate new social media leads by using Instagram.
1. Post Consistently to Create Omnipresence
Create an omnipresence so that your perfect patients see you and your clinic everywhere online.
Consider this scenario:
You are planning to go out to eat with your family at a nice seafood restaurant in your area. You quickly type “best seafood restaurant near me” into Google. Several
paid ads for local seafood restaurants pop up. You click on a few of the top links and look at their websites and what they have to offer. Oftentimes, most people will then hop over to Instagram and search for the restaurant on there as well, hoping to find pictures or videos of what the restaurant has to offer before making their decision.
If this is what millions of people do every day just to make a decision on where to spend their $100 on a seafood dinner, imagine the thought and research that will go into their decision on physical therapy.
Your perfect patients absolutely ARE searching for your clinic online and on social media. So make sure that your marketing efforts include consistent high quality posts to your Instagram account so that you appear active and relevant for your perfect patients who are trying to make their decision on physical therapy.
Omnipresence also includes using Facebook and Google Ads! Check out Paul’s Private Practice Marketer Program if you aren’t already doing Facebook and Google Ads but want to get started.
Across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook Ads and Google Ads, Paul’s patients regularly comment on how they see his face and clinic EVERYWHERE. This is what you want to happen for your perfect patients.
2. Make Sure Your Profile is Set-Up Correctly
I strongly recommend that you make your clinic’s Instagram account a “Business Account.”
This account type allows you to track your account’s Insights, giving you an idea of how well your posts are performing.
As a business account, you can also use social scheduling platforms such as Hootsuite or Content Cal to create and schedule posts ahead of time. This allows you or your marketing assistant to create a scheduling calendar weeks or months ahead so that everything will be posted to your account automatically on the days you choose.
You should also pay particular attention to how your profile is set up.
On your profile click “Edit Profile” to review what your perfect patients will see when they land on your Instagram account’s profile.
Here are some key things you should make sure you have:
- Your Name should be the name of your clinic. (*Your Name does not have to be the same as your Username*)
- Your bio should be short, focusing on the benefits you provide to your perfect patients. Ex: “We help people in Phoenix, Arizona who are 50+ stay active, maintain independence and stay free from painkillers.”
- Make sure your clinic’s phone number, email, and address are filled in appropriately in your “contact options.”
- Check the status of your “action buttons” and “profile display” to make sure you have selected to have a “book now” button and “contact” info displayed on your profile so that patients can call your clinic or email you straight from your Instagram account.
- Strategically use your link in your bio (see the next point below).
3. Have a Link in Your Bio – But NOT Your Website
Many PTs just put their website URL as the link in their bio. But there is a better way to optimize this.
Since you are only allowed one link, you are limited in how you can share content and opt-ins with your followers.
Instead, try using a site like Linktree. Linktree allows you to have one link in your Instagram bio that takes visitors to a separate landing page with multiple links that can target your audience to relevant pages. This way, you can link to blogs, case studies, YouTube videos or even individual opt-in landing pages. Check out Paul Gough Media’s Linktree.
4. Use Hashtags
You are allowed to use up to 30 hashtags per Instagram post. And in the past it was determined to be best to use all 30.
Now, experts say that 11 is the optimal number.
Hashtags help you get discovered by people who are interested in the content you are posting, but that may not be following your account yet.
Try researching the hashtags you use and optimize them so that you have some that are high volume hashtags that have 100,000+ posts, a few that are moderate volume hashtags that have between 75,000 and 100,000 posts and a few that are low volume hashtags that have less than 75,000 posts.
You can see how many posts are associated with a certain hashtag by typing the hashtag into the Instagram search bar.
Consider hashtags that fit for your practice and who you serve. Consider #runnersinflorida #activelivingorlando #physicaltherapyphoenix and other keyword hashtags that your perfect patient might follow.
Remember to use as many “location specific” hashtags as possible. It doesn’t matter if 1,000,000 people see your Instagram post if they are all located in cities hundreds of miles away from your clinic. It is better that 10 perfect patients see your post than thousands of irrelevant people that will never become a patient.
5. Carousel Posts > Single Posts
When your post includes more than one graphic it is referred to as a carousel post. Instagram is 2x more likely to show your content to your followers when you post a carousel post as when you post a single graphic.
So it is in your favor to post more carousel posts than single graphics because it will heighten your chances of your content being seen by your followers.
6. Make Use of Instagram Stories and Highlights
Instagram stories are short video clips or images that highlight what is immediately relevant in your clinic.
They are viewed when a follower clicks on your profile or at the top of their Instagram feed.
Stories are a great way to increase engagement with your clinic. You can add polls, quizzes and other question features to a story to get your perfect patients to engage with you in a less formal way.
You can even store old stories as “highlights” if you want your followers to be able to view stories that you shared in the past that could be evergreen content.
7. NEW – Instagram Guides
Instagram Guides are a new feature that allow you to group and categorize certain posts into “guides” for your patients.
This will allow you to group all your posts on back pain, or other pain points together to be easily found and explored by your followers.
This is a really cool and easy way to target your patients based on their pain point and encourage them to take action to visit you and your clinic.
8. Maximize Your Potential With Tagging
Always make sure that you are tagging your clinic’s location in any Instagram posts for your physical therapy clinic.
Tagging your location will allow more people to view your post if they are looking for content in your area.
Also, you can consider tagging specific individuals in the comments for certain posts that you feel are relevant to them. For example, if you have a list of clients who experience back pain and you just posted a great new post on Instagram about back pain, tag them in the comments for the post so that they will definitely see it.
9. Share the Content You Already Have
You don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
Any content that you have created for other sources should be shared and marketed on Instagram.
Wrote a blog post? Share it on Instagram by creating an engaging graphic and adding the blog’s link to your Linktree URL in your bio.
Created a YouTube video? Share it on Instagram in the same way.
**You should also be sharing these things on your Facebook page and other social media platforms as well!**
As you can see, there are so many opportunities to enhance your presence on Instagram to bring in more leads for your physical therapy clinic. In the long run, you will see how important this omnipresence becomes for your clinic as the leads start flowing in.
As a reminder, successful marketing means creating an omnipresence for your clinic. Just doing Google Ads or Facebook Ads or even Instagram Ads alone is not enough. You need a good mix of paid and organic content to really drive traffic to your website and generate a stream of leads to your PT clinic.
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