Today’s customer journey is digital-first – which means that most customers won’t walk into your plastic surgery practice for a consultation for the first time. Instead, they’ll visit your website or, more likely, your social media profiles.
According to one recent study, there were an estimated 4.9 billion people on social media platforms globally. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that this means your plastic surgery practice’s audience is now 4.9 billion people, however.
Facebook is the most-used platform by marketers in the world for a reason – it gives you an effective way to reach the people who live and work right in your own backyard. The people who are most likely to become clients to begin with.
Localizing your online presence in today’s digital-first customer journey is difficult, yes – but thankfully, social media platforms actually make it a great deal easier. This is true for a wide range of different reasons, all of which are worth a closer look.
How Does Using Social Media Help to Localize Your Online Presence?
To say that local searches generate an enormous impact for small businesses like plastic surgery practices may actually be a bit of an understatement.
According to one recent study, about four out of every five consumers conduct searches with local intent on engines like Google. Not only that, but about 76% of those people who search for “near me” will visit that business within just one day.
Establishing yourself as a local presence is a great way to build not only trust within your local community, but connection as well. This is especially helpful when you do it via social media, as it is something that plays a crucial role in today’s customer journey.
Another study indicated that about 70% of people trust what strangers have to say when they give their opinion on a business, a product, or a service. People are giving this opinion about you on social media – it’s up to you to participate in that conversation in any way that you’re able to.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Business
Because there are so many social media platforms out there, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, avoid trying to spread yourself too thin. You don’t need to have a presence on every platform. Work to identify the platforms that are most relevant to your plastic surgery practice and to your customers. If they tend to skew older, Facebook would probably be where you should start, for example.
Regardless, work to maintain a consistent brand presence across lal social media platforms. Content you post to Facebook should feel like it’s coming from the same place as content that you post to Instagram. Doing so creates a consistent experience for people and works to avoid confusion.
How to Set Up Your Social Media Profiles for Greater Local Search Visibility
As you start to set up these profiles, create a compelling and locally-focused bio. If you have an organic opportunity to incorporate local keywords and hashtags, you should absolutely do so.
Likewise, be sure to utilize any location-based features that are available to you – like adding the address of your plastic surgery practice to your Facebook profile, for example.
How to Infuse Your Content Strategy with Location Signals
As you build out your content strategy, make sure that everything you’re publishing resonates with your local community even in some small way. Don’t be afraid to show off your practice’s community involvement and support. Even if you “only” sponsor a local baseball team, you should post updates from that team after each and every game.
Take this same approach as you highlight local testimonials and success stories, too.
Use Social Media as a Way to Engage Your Local Community
But using social media to increase local visibility isn’t just about starting conversations with your local community. It’s also about participating in the conversations that are already happening.
At a bare minimum, you should be participating in local groups and community forums that are relevant to both plastic surgery and to the areas you operate in. Respond to any local reviews and feedback that people give you in a way that is both positive and visible to others.
Just because social media exposes you to a global audience doesn’t mean you can’t run local promotions to make an impact. You should also take the opportunity to engage with other local businesses in the community whenever possible. You never know – you might be able to help a part of their audience become a part of yours.
Enhance Your Local Visibility with Social Media Advertising
Many platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, give you the ability to target local audiences to almost a hyper-focused level. You can not only target specific locations, but unique types of people, too. You should be leveraging geotargeting features for all your specific local promotions to help guarantee you’re getting the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time.
Collaborate with Your Customers to Create Local, Authentic Content (User-Generated Content)
One of the best ways to engage with audiences, regardless of what industry you’re talking about, is through UGC or user-generated content.
Especially in a service-based business like plastic surgery, you always want to encourage your satisfied customers to share their experiences. Get them to tell their story in as much detail as possible to create an impact with people who may still be on the fence about working with you.
Along the same lines, run local contests and campaigns that bring your customers into the fold, boosting engagement along the way. Repost and reshape user-generated content across social media platforms whenever you can to keep those conversations going.
Analyze Engagement and Reach to Determine the Best Course of Action
Finally, be sure to set up analytics tools to track your local engagement and visibility over the long-term. As is true with so many other aspects of SEO, social media’s impact on your local visibility isn’t necessarily something you will observe overnight. But so long as you’re tracking everything properly, you should start to see everything trending in the right direction.
Analyze your key performance indicators and other metrics to understand the effectiveness of your current localization strategies. Make data-driven adjustments to optimize results based on the goals you’ve laid out for yourself, like increasing reach, engagement, leads, generating more revenue, and more.
Surefire Local: The Secret Weapon You’ve Been Missing
Overall, the importance of leveraging social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X to localize your online presence cannot be overstated – especially since they check a number of the important boxes required for proper localization, all at the exact same time.
Localizing your online presence is not something you “do once and forget about.” Once you achieve that status, you need to work to maintain it. Social media platforms provide an easy way to do it – maintaining your localized online presence without too much additional effort being required.
Likewise, social media is only becoming more important as time goes on – especially given the ongoing evolution of today’s digital-first customer journey. More social media platforms are transitioning into becoming e-commerce platforms of their own and if you don’t work hard to cement your position now, it’s likely that you’ll be left behind before you realize it.
When you localize your online presence within the context of specific zip codes, there is a major potential for increased visibility. But more than that, you can also enjoy better customer engagement and superior business growth by optimizing your social media profiles with local and relevant information.
At Surefire Local, we want to provide you with the tools necessary to leverage the benefits of social media and local visibility with as few of the potential downsides as possible. We’ve built our business around helping small organizations like yours establish their online presence by creating local signals cross platforms and profiles that make it easier for new customers to find them.
Surefire Local is a true all-in-one marketing platform in every sense of the term, offering local businesses access to innovative features like:
- Website/Local SEO Optimizations. You finally have one tool to create geotagged content that will get published on your website, blog, and even social media profiles.
- Online Review Management. Social proof is huge these days, and now you can send review requests, write responses to reviews, and analyze your overall brand sentiment from one effortless platform.
- Content Marketing. Surefire Local gives you the tools you need to craft locally targeted and relevant content for your blog, your Google Business Profile, business directories, and even social media profiles.
- Social Media Management. Take the “work” out of social media by scheduling posts, tackling engagement metrics, and even responding to comments in real-time.
- Analytics and Reporting. Get transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are really generating. You can even get AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see the improvements that matter most to you.
All this, and you get educational resources like webinars and blogs that will help you slowly but surely become the small business and local online marketing master you were meant to be.
If you’re eager to learn about even more local social media tactics for plastic surgeons, or if you’re searching for more effective ways to increase your practice’s local visibility as much as possible, please don’t delay – contact us today. You can also click here to attend a Surefire Local demo to see first-hand how much time, money, and energy you’ll save by putting this all-in-one marketing platform to work for you.