Ready-made Facebook Posts

So as a small business owner you may not have enough money to hire a social media marketer and you don’t have the time to come up with facebook posts every week.  While it very important to have a social media strategy, here are a few ready-made posts that can help get you started and fill in the gaps. 

Holiday posts – Veteran’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, 4^th of July, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco De Mayo, Mardi Gras, Groundhog Day, labor day, Daylight savings, Earth Day, & Martin Luther King Day  That’s almost 20 days out of the year you want have to create content.  Post pictures to have more impactful content and let your clients/patients/customers know how your schedule corresponds to these holidays.

News articles that relate to your company, profession, community, staff, customers, and schools.  Try to steer clear of negative or political articles and you will save yourself some headaches. 

Funny Pictures, Memes or Jokes.  Everyone wants to laugh including your clientele.  One of the many reasons people go on facebook is for entertainment, so why not entertain them. 

Pictures of you and your staff.  Your patients love you and your staff, well they at least like you and your staff and these pictures will get a lot of activity.  You can post pics of staff on their birthday, you can introduce new staff, you can use your staff to highlight a new product or asset that you have, and pictures of your staff dressed up for holidays or awareness.  There is a reason people keep coming back and sometimes it’s good to remind them with a face.

Tips – Any kind of tips that relate to your product or area of expertise.  The easiest way to find these good tips is to follow other businesses in your industry and see what they are telling their patients.

End of the year Flex Spending account reminders – Post reminders about patients flex accounts at least once a month in October, November and December.  You can even link patients to articles, or your own blog, that explains what a flex account is and how it is beneficial.

Using Patient Surveys to Build Revenue

Today’s blog is taken from an optometry marketing blog called Optometry Practice Marketing, sponsored by Solutionreach. Solutionreach is a marketing and communication company that is focused on acquiring, retaining and reactivating patients for your practice. You can find out more about their Vision Marketing services here. 

This blog focuses on the Importance of Patient surveys.

·         Companies like Solutionreach currently provide an easy-to-use survey section, if you aren’t using an outside company, you should set up a survey portal on your website.

·         Take time to review these surveys and find out what you are performing well at and what areas of business that you are performing poorly

·         Listen and React - Review these surveys with your staff each month.  Praise the positives just as much as you highlight the negatives.  This should not be mainly about the negatives and the vibe of the meeting shouldn't be negative, however you should discuss openly how to be proactive with these issues.

·         How to Get More Surveys - Make sure you are asking for sincere revues at some point during your exam.  Try it for a month or two and see how many more people respond to the survey.

·         After a few months of this routine you can even think about tweaking the questions and making them more open ended so that patients get more specific about their wants and needs. 

·         With companies like Solutionreach you can tie your surveys to your Google Plus page, which will help with SEO and Google searches

·         Your reviews from your patient scheduling company can also be tied to facebook for optimized social media marketing.

Customers are going to Complain

Here’s a straight to the point article about how to handle a customer complaint.  This would be a great article to share with your staff at your next staff meeting.  You may think this should be common knowledge, but clearly outlining how you would like to handle certain situations can save yourself some headaches and hopefully help retain patients.  You could even role play past customer complaints to explore the best ways to respond in the future.

Make a customer mad and they’ll tell 10 people!  Make one happy and they just might refer a friend.

It cheaper and easier to retain the patients you already have than it is to get new ones.  I’m not saying we shouldn't try to get new patients, but our current patients should definitely be a priority.

This article gives a little five step program but I want to add one more to the beginning:

1. Don’t get defensive – It’s pretty natural for us to take pride in our practice, but being defensive does not help when it comes to dealing with a customer.  EVEN IF THEY ARE WRONG don’t get defensive.

2. Listen & Understand – “First, always listen to the customer. They are concerned about an aspect of your services. Let go of the temptation to respond in any quick fashion. Take the time to listen and truly understand what is driving their concern.”

3. Empathize – Put yourself in their shoes and bond with the customer.  Let them feel that you understand and that you want to help them

4. Offer a solution – Always focus on what you CAN do for them as opposed to what you can’t.  It might not be exactly what they are asking for, but staying away from “No” will always help.

5. Execute – You’ve done the hard part, but if you don’t do what you say the next storm will be twice as bad.

6. Follow up – Send them an apology card or call them and ask them if they are satisfied.  Extend an extra peace offering and they might just remember you for bending over backwards rather than the original complaint that they had.