This is one of the most important means of marketing for alternative health care therapies including the fields of naturopathic medicine, bioenergetics practitioners, and other alternative therapies. This technique is used widely by holistic health professionals to grow their businesses. It provides a relatively inexpensive way to reach people that are already interested in their organizations. As with any part of the Inbound Marketing Methodology, user personas are key, to understand prospective and existing customers. By creating these personas based on a survey, existing customer data, or at worst, educated guesses we can focus our social media content creation around them. Based on these personas, we can determine what are the best social media networks to focus our energy in.

A content calendar can help you focus on all your major personas, making sure that you don’t miss any. This tool is a schedule of posts based on your business and your customers that educates and entertains them, building trust in your brand. One convenient way to organize this is using a  spreadsheet with the post, content, campaign, link and an image in list format. A calendar with specific dates and details of posting can be shared with others on your team to make sure marketing activities are coordinated.  This content could include useful health tips, a video talk about one of your services or products you offer,  an upcoming event you have planned or an interesting health-related infographic. A calendar helps you focus on different goals and campaigns for your business, whether creating awareness of a service you offer, increasing sales, offering promotions or some other goal.   The alternative health field is competitive, so this can be a tool to help you stand out. It allows you to post at the right time, with the right content and makes sure that the content is carefully orchestrated to build excitement.

Using a tool like Buffer, we can schedule and plan out our posts based on our content calendar.

Buffer allows you to do a variety of things including sharing a post to multiple social networks at once, adding graphics with a tool like Pablo, adding content from blogs subscribed to allowing the user to quickly curate and distribute content, or share other content you find online. This also shares your own custom content with your social networks. It supports most major social networks. Another similar tool is HootSuite. Both offer free versions although I recommend investing a little more and getting the paid versions.

Make sure to thoroughly check the grammar and spelling of your content. There is a free tool called Grammarly which can be used if you are typing into your desktop browser and it also supports some mobile ones as well. Another popular tool is Microsoft Word, although it doesn’t check content typed into your browser.

One thing to keep an eye on is that once you’ve posted your content, to check it in different browsers including your desktop and mobile, to make sure that your content appears as it should. Like any publication online, you don’t want to appear unprofessional in the eyes of those you’re trying to build trust with.

When posting your content, most social networks include the ability to add hashtags. A hashtag is some text preceded by a ‘#’ character that becomes indexed in the search of the social network and allows the content to be more easily found. Using hashtags is recommended to provide maximum exposure to your content.

Conclusion

Social Media Marketing has become a very important part of any marketing strategy. Contact us today if you need help fine-tuning your social media marketing strategy for your alternative health care business!