Over the last few years, the landscape of digital and social media marketing has changed significantly. With the emergence of TikTok, many people are now turning to short-form video as their primary form of content consumption. TikTok has posed such a threat to other social media platforms that big players, including Instagram and YouTube, have now come up with their version of short-form video content.
So what does this mean for you and your pediatric dental practice?
If you want to utilize digital and social media marketing to the best of your ability, it’s time to hop on the short-form video train and start using TikTok and Instagram Reels to attract new patients to your practice.
How to Use TikTok and Instagram Reels to Attract New Patients to Your Pediatric Practice
It’s no secret that social media marketing is one of, if not the most effective and cost-efficient marketing tools in recent years. While it possesses immense potential to attract, influence, and convert your target audience, it’s also an incredibly fast-paced environment where things seem to be changing constantly.
If you’re currently feeling overwhelmed with short-form videos, you’re not alone. In this post, we’ll be highlighting how you can use TikTok and Instagram Reels to attract new patients to your pediatric practice in the easiest way possible.
Ready? Let’s go!
Consider Who You’re Trying to Reach
Marketing your pediatric dental practice can be tricky for a few reasons. On one hand, your target market is your patient. On the other, your target market is also their parent since they will be the ones in charge of making decisions.
These considerations are no different whether you’re ground marketing or digital marketing through social media. While it’s absolutely important to talk to the kids (your patient), it is equally as important to communicate with their parents as well.
When it comes to TikTok and Instagram Reels, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your ideal patient on the platform? (in otherwords, are the kids old enough to be using TikTok and Instagram.)
- Is your ideal patient’s parents on the platform?
If both your ideal patient and your ideal patient’s parents are on the platform, your digital marketing strategy is going to be twofold. Meaning, you’ll have to pay special attention to the types of content both your patient and their parents are consuming.
Which brings us to our next tip…
Notice the Trends
Although short-form video content like TikTok and Instagram Reels can feel incredibly overwhelming, it really doesn’t have to be that way. The great thing about TikTok and Instagram Reels is that these short-form video content is all about following a trend.
TikTok and Instagram Reels trends play out in two major ways:
- Trending sounds (this could be a song or a soundbite)
- Video structure (these could be a certain narration style or even a dance)
In order to find these trends, you need to spend some time scrolling through TikTok or Instagram Reels from the point of view of your target audience. You can do so by looking up relevant hashtags and scrolling through the content.
It won’t take long before you start to notice the same sounds or video styles throughout your “For You Page” or “Reels Explore” page. If you hear the same sound or see the same video styles throughout your feed, that means you’ve just found a trend.
So use the trend and adapt your content to make it relevant to your niche and services.
P.S. Something important to note here as you're scouring TikTok and Instagram for relevant trends is that there will be different trends for different audiences. For instance, the trending sounds and video structure will be different for kids as it would be for their parents.
Create “Edutaining” Content
At this point of the post, you’re probably wondering “how do I adapt to trends?”
There’s a common belief that short-form video content on TikTok and Instagram Reels are solely focused on dances, or entertaining story times. However, as a pediatric dentist or dental practice owner, you can participate in these trends simply by focusing on “edutainment.”
Edutainment, to simply put, is educating content packaged in an entertaining way. For example, if you notice a popular dance trend going around, you can mimic that trend while using the text function to overlay some educational facts about the service or offer you’re promoting.
Similarly, if you see a video structure going viral, similar to the “Things in my (insert place) here that just make sense,” you can adapt to this video trend simply by inserting the service or offer you’re promoting as the main topic. In which case, your video will be titled “Things in my (pediatric practice) that just make sense,” or even “Things about getting (insert service/offer) that just make sense.”
Set Aside Time to Create Video Content
The hardest part about using TikTok and Instagram Reels to attract new patients to your pediatric practice is actually getting around to filming your TikToks and Reels. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it but to set aside time to focus on creating video content.
The good news is that filming these short-form videos doesn't have to take too much time. Depending on how many TikTok and Instagram Reels you plan on publishing per week, you can expect to spend anywhere from an hour to two hours per week to film a week’s worth of content.
And if you want to make the process go faster, you can delegate the research (scrolling through TikTok and Instagram Reels to find trends) to someone in your office. You can also delegate the editing portion to someone on your team, and ask a team member to help you film.
So block an hour a week out of your calendar to get this done and you’ll easily have a week’s worth of content within 60 minutes.
P.S. The best part? Instagram Reels and TikToks don’t need to be separate pieces of content. The same video can be used on both platforms so you’re essentially getting content for both platforms in the time it would take you to create content for just one.
Stay Consistent
At the end of the day, consistency is the name of the game. Use these tips in this post to help you get started on using TikTok and Instagram Reels to attract new patients to your practice. But don’t forget to keep and stay consistent with it!
Creating short-form video content for social media won’t work if you do it only for a week. Give it time and stay consistent with it - that is the key to building up a warm audience who know, like, and trust you in the fast-paced landscape of digital and social media marketing.
P.S. Need a more in-depth social media and digital marketing strategy to grow your pediatric practice? We cover this and so much more in the Pediatric Dental Marketing Course, which opens for enrollment on September 6th - 19th, 2022. In the meantime, we’re dropping some juicy tips and information on our waitlist so hop on to snag some of our marketing secrets.
