Due to the typically clinical nature of dentistry, many orthodontal clinics unknowingly recreate impassivity and impersonality online, and some make the following mistakes when marketing their dental practices on social media:
- Using stale, unimaginative, or staged clinical stock imagery
- Sharing social media content that isn’t people-focused, despite providing a people-focused service
- Selling the features of their dental products and services, not the benefits – such as more confidence, better mood, and improved mental wellbeing
- Creating social media content that doesn’t represent their customers or relate to potential clients – audiences want to see real people using real businesses representing their own demographics
- Adding no value to their social media audience online – not educating, informing, entertaining, inspiring, or encouraging their audience at all
The above reasons tend to be why businesses such as dental surgeries aren’t growing their online following or generating conversions and leads from social media. None of the above social media ‘strategies’ sit well with digital savvy audiences who use social media for anything but being sold too in 2021.
Attention, orthodontists – it’s time to put down the tools and revamp your social media marketing strategy to drive real enquiries from real people!
Read on for our imaginative, people-focused, fun, and authentic social media content ideas for orthodontists to help you drive people to the dental chair.
Ideas for social media content for dentists
- User-generated content
By sharing and repurposing content created by your customers, you’re showing your appreciation for your clients, and strengthening your business’ reputation and credibility. User-generated content is excellent and invaluable social proof and shows potential customers that you fulfil your promises as a business. UGC provides solid, authentic proof that you can be trusted and therefore invested in.
2. Q&A’s
As well as running audience Q&As where online followers can submit their own questions regarding your business or dental hygiene in general (which helps establish your company as thought-leader and an expert within your vertical), demonstrate how important their opinions are to you and ask THEM questions!
Run polls, quiz questions, and the like, and share your responses. This is not only a great social listening strategy to uncover what your target audiences want and need, but it also will increase your social media engagement rates and simultaneously expand your reach online.
3. How-to’s and tutorials
We cannot emphasise how much businesses need to have a purpose and an intention behind their content on social media if they want to grow their accounts and increase their social media following.
Offering how-to’s, guides and tutorials that benefit your audience is a strategy for doing so, because you’re literally educating, teaching, and informing your online followers.
Create snappy, fun videos, reels, infographics, and carousels – or go live if you wish – to show your followers how to floss correctly, correct teeth brushing techniques, or how to use your whitening products. By providing something of value to your audience, you are giving people a reason to follow and engage with you on social media.
4. Client success stories
Before and afters are great for dentist content on social media but expressing to your audience how your dental services changed a client’s life for the best is what is going to really impress them!
Running profiles on your clients (with their permission, of course) builds social proof and authority. It demonstrates how much value your products and services bring customers, which is what people buy – customers buy benefits, not features.
Furthermore, if you can demonstrate how each treatment you provide is tailored to every individual customer, you’re going to construct a golden reputation of being customer-centric and people-focused and will show that you can provide a personalised solution for anyone, which opens your business up to more enquiries.
Client success stories are a fantastic way to integrate storytelling into your social media strategy – and storytelling = selling!
5. Meet the team profiles
If one of your employees is going to have various drills and scalers in a potential customer’s mouth, it’s probably better for your business and your client that they have more visibility on who your dentists are to start with!
Knowing who will be tinkering around their mouths is a great way to break down any potential barriers stopping a prospect from converting – such as fear, shyness, shame, or embarrassment.
Introduce your orthodontists to your social media audience with staff spotlights and allow them to get to know your dental team. Ask your employees to share their top tip for visiting a dentist, or a reassuring message for potential dental clients, or a story regarding their dental career and expertise so far.
Knowing the faces behind a business builds authenticity and strengthens relationships with potential clients, leading them to become paying customers.
6. Bite-size tips
Not only do bite-size tips provide filler content, but they also add value to your audience!
Share tips that add value to your audience by educating, motivating, humouring, or informing in a visually appealing and creative format (Canva have a multitude of free templates) such as calming nerves before a trip to the dentists, the best high-street toothpaste for whitening, three drinks most damaging to teeth, etc.
Such content fills the gaps between more purposeful or longer-form content, maintaining your presence whilst serving your social media audience, and should account for no more than 0-15% of everything you produce.
Read our take on effective, no-nonsense social media marketing for dentists.
