BUSINESS WITH VISION

Living (and Marketing) In a Digital World

4 digital marketing strategies to grow your business

it’s no surprise that the most successful practices have adopted digital marketing strategies to reach their patients and communities. Now, more than ever, resources exist to make online marketing easy and effective for small businesses such as optical practices. If yours isn’t using digital marketing resources, then you could be losing out on sales—and services for your client base.

Let’s touch on a few digital marketing tactics your practice should employ:

WEBSITE: Having a responsive, optimized website is a must. In order to compete with big retailers that have large marketing budgets, you need a professional website optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with regularly updated content and simple avenues for patients to contact you. Most patients look for a website before visiting a practice, and having a contact form on your website, along with your hours and service offerings, can help you make sure every visitor to your site is converted into a person who walks through your doors.



SOCIAL MEDIA: Social media websites experience huge search traffic and engagement with their users. They provide you with a chance to relate to frequent users as well as people who browse social media more casually. Social channels can help you demonstrate your brand values in a less formal setting, and you can have some fun showing off your staff, new products, holiday promotions, and educational information.



TEXT MESSAGE: People overwhelmingly prefer text messages to email. Texts have a 98% open rate. That is a huge difference from email, where marketing messages are opened just 22% of the time. Services exist to text your patients for promotions and for appointment reminders that help reduce no-shows. In a digital world where people prefer to get messages on their own terms—and often ignore phone calls and voicemails—text messaging is crucial for your digital strategy.



EMAIL: Email is still effective, especially when compared with the dismal open rates of voicemails. Curating an email list and making sure you reach out to patients via email is still an important part of your digital marketing plan.

—Samantha Toth

Raised in an optical family, Samantha Toth is the president of Innereactive Media, a marketing firm specializing in the optical market. Innereactive offers a digital marketing solution in its unique Innexus platform.

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