Top Facebook Marketing Tips for Promoting Your Eye Care Practice Online – Part I in a Series

Top Facebook Marketing Tips for Promoting Your Eye Care Practice Online (Part I)

Feeling Overwhelmed about Facebook Marketing?

Are thoughts like this in your head when it comes to using Facebook to grow your practice?

“I don’t have time for Facebook…”

“Patients don’t book appointments because of Facebook…”

“I don’t know where to begin to market my practice on Facebook…”

Believe me, I completely understand. When I first began to learn about digital marketing for my own optometry practice, it was overwhelming. So much to learn. So much to do. But, I became passionate about it. I even started a digital marketing business and love helping busy professionals learn tips and tools without having to go through what I did!

Here’s what I have to say about your concerns:

1. “I don’t have time for Facebook” – Be assured, your competition IS likely making time for Facebook marketing! Here’s the good news – it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.
2. “Patients don’t book appointments because of Facebook” – Patients may not book their appointments as a direct result of marketing on Facebook, but they learn about you, find out how good you are through comments and “reviews” from happy patients; and can learn how to contact you there.
3. “I don’t know where to begin to market my practice on Facebook” – No need to worry, this article will get you started with marketing your eye care practice on Facebook so that you no longer have to wonder where to begin. (Tip: If you have a staff person or Office Manager who handles your marketing, you may want to share this article with them so you can work as a team or you can delegate the tasks, if you prefer.)

Here are the Top 3 Tips for Marketing Your Eye Care Practice on Facebook that I’ll Cover in This 3 Part Series:

1. Make sure your Facebook page is optimized for your top keyword phrases and addresses your ideal patients’ pain points (needs).
2. Buy Facebook Ads and target your local market (have an offer for “cold traffic/potential patients” that’s too good to refuse) (to be covered in Part 2 of this series).
3. Use Facebook Live (it’s like a FREE, real-time tv spot you control) to promote your practice (to be covered in Part 3 of this series).

How do you optimize your Facebook page to attract more ideal patients?

Define your Ideal Patient

First of all, it’s important to define your ideal patient. He or she is either one of your favorite patients or a fictional one that, if you could book 10 of them right now, you’d have the perfect practice. A perfect patient is someone who refers you more patients, buys extra products and regularly returns for their annual exams. Some of the information you need to include is his or her:

• Specific age (not an age range)
• Location
• Education and income level
• Occupation
• Hobbies and passions
• Marital status
• Number of children
• Buying habits
• Struggles/pain points your products and services will solve
• Where they hang out online or in the community
• More

Here’s a link to a form you can use to identify your ideal patient types. Upon completion, the results will be emailed to you. I recommend that you keep these key documents handy every time you create content to promote your practice. Before you write, you want to be clear to whom you’re writing. This content can be in the form of blog posts, Facebook posts, other social media platform posts, and advertising text and titles for your ad campaigns.

You’ll want to truly understand how you can solve your ideal patients’ eye care problems with your products and services. Otherwise, creating your content will be a tremendous waste of time.

3 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Page

Before giving you 3 specific ways to optimize your Facebook page to attract more patients, I want to explain what keywords are in order to maximize your efforts. In my eye care and digital marketing consulting business, I ask clients to come up with phrases they believe their ideal patients would use to search for a solution to their needs. This is very common in the online marketing industry.

For example, a prospective patient may type into Google or Facebook’s search field a phrase like “San Diego eye doctor” to find the closest optometrist because they ran out of contact lenses. Or, they may type a more specific phrase like “what’s the best way to clean my eyeglasses?” – in both cases, that phrase is made up of, or encompasses, some of your keywords. Wouldn’t it be great if, when they type these keyword phrases into the search field, your website or Facebook page came up as the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd link in Google’s results page?

I typically ask clients to list 10 to 20 keyword phrases that include only 3 to 5 words per phrase for their marketing content.

Now that you know about keywords, here are 3 ways to optimize your Facebook page:

1. Make sure you fill out everything you possibly can with information that is consistent with your branded messages and your keyword phrases. This includes making sure your profile picture is the same as that used on all the rest of your social media platforms. It also means, as basic as this may sound, you will need to include your phone number, your address, your practice’s hours of operation, and website. You’ll also want to include these special tips that many often neglect to implement:
   1. Add Services to Your Pages: Many Facebook page owners don’t realize there’s a “services” tab. You want to add a keyword phrase for the title of the service, add your price, then add a description that includes your keyword phrases as well as a description of what’s in it for the patient so that they understand right away how your service will help them. Also, make sure you turn on this feature as it is often turned off by default.
   2. Create and Optimize Your Page’s Photo Albums: Hopefully, by now, you realize the importance of using photos and videos for your social media marketing. An advanced trick that your competition may not be using is to add images to photo albums and title your albums using your keyword phrases. For example, if you take pictures about your vision therapy practice, include an album with a title that may be something like “Vision Therapy in Action at [name of your practice or city]” – and don’t forget to rename your images with keyword phrases that match the content of the images before uploading them to Facebook.
   3. Verifying Your Facebook Page: Another trick your competition may not know is that you’ll want to take the extra step to have your Facebook page verified (that little grey checkbox next to your page’s name). Follow the instructions here to make sure you do this if you have the type of page that can be verified: https://www.facebook.com/help/100168986860974/
   4. Make Sure You Have a Vanity URL: This is a very important task that all Facebook page owners should do. Click here to find out how to do this if you haven’t done so already.
2. Optimize your cover photo: Treat your cover photo as though it were a large billboard in your home town or city. Hire a graphic designer to create it for you if you don’t want to do it yourself. Most importantly, you can use it to promote a special product or service, or list the benefits of a subspecialty you provide, how it addresses your ideal patients’ pain points, and define who would benefit the most from it (e.g. “Children struggling at school may actually have a learning-related vision problem – this can be treated with vision therapy…”), or even show a happy patient with their glowing testimonial about you.
3. Optimize your “About” page (including the “Our Story” section), your Facebook “stories”, and your blog posts for your keyword phrases: Anywhere you can add text, make sure to optimize it for your keyword phrases. Of course, don’t overdo it. Make sure your content is natural and in your own voice.
4. BONUS Tip (VERY IMPORTANT!): Once you’ve optimized your practice’s Facebook page with the keyword phrases you’ve identified your ideal prospective patients may use to find you (or your competition!), make sure you define how your practice is unique. In the digital marketing industry, we call that your unique selling proposition or your unique value proposition. I’ll be discussing this in more detail in part 2 of this series.

Finally, if you would like to work with me in creating a complete Digital Marketing Strategy Plan, please click on this button:

START NOW Attracting More Patients!

And, don’t forget to come back to check out Part 2 in this series, “Top Facebook Marketing Tips for Promoting Your Eye Care Practice Online.”