When we talk to healthcare service providers and other local businesses we help, Instagram comes up ALL.THE.TIME.
We hear you… 25M businesses are Instagrammin’, right?
Right.
And of course, all of us have heard this too:
“Boost your Instagram post with £5 and reach 1,000+ of your potential customers…”
Not to forget the impressive conversion rate: 3%!
That’s like getting 30 of those 1000+ people to convert (by becoming your followers or engaging with your content).
Taken at face value, these numbers imply that you, too, can use Instagram to get such ROI for your practice.
The numbers look good… but only when seen without context
Think about it this way:
As a local healthcare provider, if boosting an Instagram post gets you 30 followers or engagements — at that mythical 3% conversion rate! — what does it actually mean for your business?
What are those numbers actually translating to for you?
Are they:
Getting people to visit your website?
Driving people to make queries about your service (form fills/calls)?
Generating actual bookings?
The answer to the above is usually no and if you can’t definitively answer these questions, then you probably only got what you were promised — some followers and engagement.
AND the (very) DISTANT possibility that you’ll stay on the minds of these people and they’ll think of you when they need your help.
But that’s not the best use of your money…
… especially if you’ve limited marketing bandwidth.
Besides, it’s never just £5… because it’s addictive to keep hitting that boost button again and again (who knew social media marketing could be so easy?). Stopping only after spending some good money.
It’s also not consistent, maybe you hit the jackpot, spent £50 and got 2 bookings but that doesn’t mean by spending £500 you get 20 bookings, you won’t.
Now:
IF you only shift your mind from Instagram to focusing on showing up in the moments of your need of your target customers, you could see better footfall within a month.
How?
Here’s putting it in perspective:
If you’re a therapist (or any service provider for that matter), then more than Instagram, you need to be present and visible when people who need your services look for you. For example, a person in your postcode looking for a local therapist.
This “action” mostly happens on Google.
You’d be surprised to know that Google gets about 70,000 health-related searches per minute — that’s 7% of Google’s daily searches.
Not just that, a whopping 86% of the local searches from these result in actual visits.
Now imagine being the first ad to show up before this person.
Or being the first website to appear in the organic search results for the same.
You can surely sense how much more likely this person is to actually visit you when you “appear” at the right moment.
This is, in fact, the SEARCH, CLICK, and VISIT model. And put simply, it works.
And to hack it, you don’t need random Instagrammin’. Instead, you need to build your paid and search channels. If you’d like to know how this works — the details and all — get in touch. We’d love to help you out!
Oh, and all of the above isn’t to say that you shouldn’t consider Instagram ever. But it’s really more about prioritizing channels that bring business.
