Early adopters and forward-looking people all predicted it. Naysayers called it a passing fad. A decade in, social media has proven itself as a new and ubiquitous marketing landscape that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. A Twitter account and a Facebook page is as necessary to today’s businesses as the phone book and newspaper ads were 30 years ago.
And as portable devices such as smartphones and tablets become as common as socks and shoes, the next “must” in any business’ marketing strategy is a mobile responsive website. If you haven’t been able to grasp the future path of our technological society just yet, know this: the age of the desktop and laptop are quickly coming to an end. If you scoff at the idea, go back and read all the doubters of the internet in the 1990s and the doubters of social media and smartphones in 2005. We’re getting more mobile, and soon we’ll have even smaller devices doing even bigger things.
Social, Now!
If you’ve still only dipped one toe into social media so far, it’s time to get in the water. Establishing and maintaining a Twitter account and Facebook page are bare minimum requirements for business survival in the coming years. The two biggest barriers that keep people from jumping in head first are lack of knowledge and lack of resources. If knowledge is the problem, hire a reliable agency to get you going. Your budget can’t be a barrier. This is a necessary marketing expense.
A social media agency lets you outsource the time and manpower resources as well, but if you have people in your business that have the necessary knowledge, then good social media marketing software in their hands might get you where you need to be. Sit down with your team and make this a priority for your next quarter.
Be Responsive
A responsive website is one that is readable and navigable as easily from a smartphone as it is from a 28 inch monitor. If people can’t read or enjoy your website from their small screens, your conversions are going to suffer badly. You also need to post regularly to your site, blog, and social pages. In the chiropractic field, health-related images and information are the obvious fit, and testimonials from patients can be the most powerful message you deliver.
All of this together, done correctly, can be a massive force for driving traffic to your website and finding new clients. This post is meant to stress the importance and urgency of using these tools to drive your marketing, but obviously there isn’t enough room here to go into great detail about how. We recommend that you either contact an agency or do your own research on how to implement and maintain this strategy. As a refresher, the steps you need to move on are:
1. Establish a social media presence, with Twitter and Facebook as the minimum requirements.
2. Make sure your website is mobile-responsive.
3. Regularly post to your site, blog, and social pages. “Regularly” is a moving target depending on the platform, but 2-3 times weekly is a rough minimum.
4. Enjoy the influx of new clients!