Send Us Videos to Post
Create videos touring your practice, answer FAQs, and any other personal topics you think would be valuable coming from you directly.
Post Videos to Your Story
Adding video to your story provides a more personalized way for your customers to connect with you. These videos should be short and show your day-to-day or answer helpful questions. You can also use hashtags and tags in stories to help increase awareness.
Go Live on Instagram
Live video is a great time to answer questions and shows your audience your most authentic self. Live videos will save to your profile as well so others can watch after the live is over. Lives are a great way to set an online event for your community, most accounts will go live on a schedule to help build an audience.
Share on Your Personal Pages
Share all content from your company page to your personal profile. All platforms have the ability to do this and can be found next to the Like and Comment buttons.
Share Posts on Your IG Stories
Share your feed posts to your story. You can do this by hitting the paper airplane and selecting “Add to My Story”.
Write For Others (Back-linking)
Find other companies who may have the same audience as you but are not competition. Offer to provide them a guest blog for their website in exchange for linking back to your website.
Find Your Community
Make sure you know the neighborhoods and districts locals are using to describe the area you are in.
Use Local Hashtags
Use city neighborhoods and areas to search for new hashtags. You should only be looking for hashtags that have the highest numbers of use, around 10,000 is good for a local tag.
Follow, Comment & Like
Spend 15 mins a day following accounts who could be potential clients, comment on therapy-related posts, and like posts that align with your practice’s values.
Connect With Referral Sources on LinkedIn
Find any referral sources on LinkedIn. Connect with them as well as follow their company page.
Invite Referral Sources on LinkedIn to Follow Your Page
When you are in your company page on Admin View, you can click tools dropdown at the top and select Invite connections.
Boost a Social Post
Go to a post that is performing well and has helpful content, select the Boost button. You will be able to apply a small budget and adjust the audience you want to target.
Invite LinkedIn Profiles to Follow Your Company Page
Purchase LinkedIn Navigator and gain the ability to invite connections to follow your company page. One benefit is that although you only have 100 credits, as individuals accept the invite you will gain the credits back.
As a therapist looking to grow your online presence, you may be asking yourself “What are ways that I can help aside from what my marketing team creates to maximize my results?”
If you have hired a content marketing agency, it may be clear what the plan is for your content, but you may still be unsure what your role is. Are there additional ways that you can help expand your reach? The answer is, yes! As the clinician, you have the best knowledge of your business, your space in the industry, and the community you serve. This is especially true if your marketing agency does not specialize in the service you provide or is not located in the area that you practice within.
With this all taken into consideration, today's blog will focus on how to work together to maximize the content marketing that your marketing team is providing you! These will be actionable efforts that you can start today! With our goal of working together in mind, all ideas shared will only help your marketing team and won’t interfere with any other strategies they are running.
Even with a team of experts creating content, it’s still important to create additional content when you can. Your audience will always enjoy seeing the face of the company directly addressing them. There are certain types of content that are best captured by you.
Whenever working with us, we encourage you to create longer video content for your main social media pages and send it to us. We will edit, polish, and post the final content for you. You can create videos touring your practice, the story on how you got started, and any other personal topics you think would be valuable coming from you directly.
Adding video to your story provides a more personalized way for your customers to connect with you. These videos should be short and show your day-to-day or answer helpful questions. Instagram Stories don’t have to be perfect or high quality and can be posted directly after filming. Don’t worry about creating original content for this each time, since stories only last 24 hours feel free to recycle the same tips or information from previous videos.
Instagram offers Live video streaming to your audience as well as anyone who chooses to join. Live videos can be hosted alone or you can even invite another account to join you. Live videos are a great way to show your audience your most authentic self, it can be an ideal time to try building trust with your audience. Live videos will save to your profile as well so others can watch after the live is over. Since the nature of the video is live it is ok if there are mistakes or pauses just keep in mind that the video will be saved to your account without edits.
Amplifying your efforts sounds pretty simple, in theory, but let's make sure we have some groundwork before we get into this tip. If you want to amplify your current efforts, you have to first know what your current efforts are. Make sure you stay aware of the content marketing for your counseling center. One way of staying conscious of your deliverables is asking your marketing team for a schedule of days that they post content to your company’s website and social media. If you aren’t already, follow all of your social media accounts from your personal pages so you aren’t neglecting any new content. When you are constantly seeing your content it will be a lot easier to amplify it.
It is key that when you are working with social media, as a marketing tool, you are not only sharing content to your company's page but to your personal page as well. Unless you are sharing your company page content, many individuals who only interact with your personal profile may not see it. Your personal profile may have a separate reputation, following, and audience, making it a great spot to re-share content. It is important to remember that your personal page is only connected to your company page as the company you work for. Your company page has a different audience than your personal profile, and that is vital to use as a reminder for why sharing the content to both profiles really amplifies your voice.
Sharing content on social media is fairly easy, and you can follow along in the video example for LinkedIn below. In the tutorial, you will notice we go to the company page first to find the content that we want to share. For day-to-day, we hope that you will naturally see your content on your LinkedIn News Feed and you can share directly from there. This will be very similar for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We also added extra best practices with tagging the company and adding a hashtag but start with just sharing content!
Similar to company pages and personal profiles, Instagram Feeds and Instagram Stories have different audiences. According to a study done by Facebook, 33% of United States Instagram users have become more interested in a brand/product after seeing it on Instagram Stories. The two options give users to unique modes to absorb content for your business. This is why you must be making both areas of your profile aware when there is new content to ensure both user preferences are acknowledged.
This might seem like a tedious task as Instagram Stories follow a different template and style than your feed. Although that is one approach, a simple way to start is by sharing the same content from your feed. Instagram allows you to “send” your feed content to your story. Many people think that you need to repurpose content for it to be tailored content for your story, but this is not true. If you start by sharing the content from your feed to your story, you will create an awareness of the content you have on your feed. Because Instagram Stories appear in a time-sensitive order to the user, it will be helpful for individuals who don't scroll through your profile often but are still curious about what content you release.
Sharing your Instagram Feed content to your Instagram Story is extremely easy and requires a click of a few buttons. Below you will find those basic steps as well as a few different ways that you can optimize it with best practices. Instagram has a lot of options for adding captions and the styling of the post you're sharing from your feed. Have fun with it!
Backlinks are a great way to bring outside traffic to your company's page. Backlinking is when you provide content to another company's website and in turn, they will link it to your website. Meaning that anyone who typically goes to their website will now have an opportunity to bounce from their website to yours through the content you provided. This is a great strategy for anyone who has a new website and is looking to grow the number of people who visit their website every month. The main strategic goal is to provide free content for a company, with a similar audience to yours, in exchange for a chance at capturing some of their audience for yourself.
Another positive of using this backlinking strategy is that you don't always have to create anything new. You can send content that you've already created for your website and ask the other party to place it on their website if they approve of the content. This is also a great way to network with your community and bring awareness to your company simply by sharing your content with another business. This is something you can exchange, so feel free to offer for the company to supply you with a blog as well!
Click here for an example pitch you can send when emailing companies about back-linking.
So we have talked about different ways to amplify your voice, but how do you make sure you are amplifying it to the right people? It is critical to understand and establish the community you serve. This is a great area for you, as the therapist, to help your marketing team.
If your marketing team is located in a different area than where you are located, the most impactful action you can do is to educate them! The local community will have inside language and colloquial terms used by locals and natives to the area. These may be terms that your marketing team may still not find, even after researching the area. This is exactly where your help comes into play and you can help your marketing team narrow down a more tailored way to speak to your audience. When you use the local language, you will attract others who resonate to the way you are speaking to them. By localizing your language, the strategy is to attract your community without even needing to mention the location.
To get started, let’s see how well you know your area! Think about the city as a whole. How is it described? Do people use districts, neighborhoods, urban areas, business centers as landmarks when giving directions? These are all more targeted terms for an area and are perfect for your marketing team to implement.
For example, both Denver, CO and Orlando, FL, are divided into districts which tend to be the most common way locals refer to their community. So although “Denver” and “Orlando” may seem like enough, some individuals may not even use the overarching city name if they are only looking for a counselor located on their side of the city. If you are new to the area, it is always a good idea to talk to other local businesses and ask them how they describe the areas they serve. Notice in the video below, as you zoom closer into the city you can find some of the smaller neighborhoods or zones.
Don't forget to take into account that if you can offer your services remotely or if you notice a city or area that will commute to your location, target them as audiences as well. When your marketing team receives your list of neighborhoods, districts, and local language they should be implementing this across your website blog and social media content.
Let's start with the definition of a hashtag! For example, if you were to search #TherapyWorks you will find a stream of content from a multitude of accounts who have posted content relating to therapy and who all used the hashtag #TherapyWorks.
Now, what do we mean by local hashtags? This is a continuation of knowing your community. If your therapy practice is located in a specific district, although it may be located in a larger city the locals may be more likely to search the district area. For example, although fewer people may search #DenverTherapist it is more likely that the person searching is already in your area. Try to find terms and hashtags that set your city apart. These will be great ways to connect directly with your local market.
The rule to follow is 5:5:5: to spend a total of 15 minutes following potential followers, liking your followers’ content, and commenting on their content. Although 15 minutes doesn’t seem to be a huge time commitment, it makes a big difference to your overall engagement and interactions. The more places people can stumble on your account, the better, and being engaged with other accounts is the perfect way to start.
Try to be as meaningful as you can with this, as there are a lot of bots and spam already bothering your followers, so it is important to not appear as one of them.
LinkedIn is a platform you should be leveraging to build your network. Try to do research on companies who could be referral sources for your business and connect with them on LinkedIn. Connect with them and make sure to also follow their company page so you can engage with their content.
Once you have gained them as a connection, reach out and provide them with a resource. Consider sending a blog or link to your website to help them assess how you can work together or who they can recommend.
At this point, it is important to make sure the referral sources are aware of your content. The more they discover your content the more likely they will be to share it with their audience. The best way to do this is by inviting them to follow your page. When you are in your company page on Admin View, you can click tools dropdown at the top and select Invite connections.
Do you have a little bit of extra cash to spend? Here are some easy tips to help accelerate your content marketing team’s effort by boosting your content to a new audience.
Facebook allows you to easily add an extra boost behind posts you have already posted to your profile. It is easy and cost-efficient to use the Facebook Boosted Posts feature. Boosted posts are something that you can do across both Facebook and Instagram. Once you select the post you would like to boost you have the ability to tailor who you would like the post to reach. Boosted post budgets are best utilized when you take your top-performing posts and apply a small budget to it. We typically recommend $50 - $125 to start and you can spread that across 2-5 posts. With this budget, you will be able to target a certain area and age group.
When you purchase LinkedIn Sales Navigator you get access to different features. You will gain the ability to invite connections to follow your company page. One benefit is of this is although you only have 100 credits, as individuals accept the invite you will gain the credits back.
If individuals don’t know about your company how can they ever choose to work with you? When you expand the content that user is exposed to the more likely they will grow trust for your brand and consider being your customer.
As a recap, it is crucial that we adapt to a world gone digital and there may have been more word of mouth and print advertisements in your previous years of owning your practice but these are tools available to help you grow your business. The more time spent doing these activities that foster online awareness to your brand, the quicker your brand will be able to flourish. If you aren’t sure where you need to start or think you may need more aggressive efforts to help your brand, let’s talk! Set up a complimentary consultation with our team to walk through more strategized and tailored growth plans.
