Medical Tourism Suppliers: Have you updated your Facebook Strategy for business?
Facebook now begins its second decade. The old adage of “adapt or face extinction” applies to the business of social networks the same as it did for dinousaurs. Consumers and medical tourism businesses continue to evolve with the rapid pace of the ever-changing digital environment. Adoption rates of mobile devices accelerate, Internet connectivity rises in formerly disconnected regions, and new communication platforms and devices emerge (and perish). Your Facebook strategies are all about to be completely disrupted.
For medical tourism hospitals, clinics, doctors, dentists, and wellness resorts, keeping up with the competition, cultural and technology nuances of target consumers, and the technology itself is challenging for each, but smart medical tourism brands have not evolved where Facebook and social marketing is concerned. They’ve been collecting “likes” and Fans and Followers, but Facebook strategies for marketing have nothing to do with building a large follower base to one’s corporate page and then bombarding them with ads. If you still use these old Facebook strategies, you missed the critical memo that was sent out in August 2014!
The rhythm and tune has changed at Facebook. Now, Facebook charges a premium to reach and target its community to be able to build your own. Will you dance to the new beat?
Everthing at Facebook is under revision and restructuring. The metrics that brands depend on to show the engagement level of their audiences — page likes, post likes, shares, comments, and clicks, etc. The object is no longer “advertising”. Instead, Facebook has decided to make the News Feed more relevant for its users. If you can’t come up with a content strategy to engage your audience, you will hear the echo of an empty room when you post because your news feed items simply won’t be shown on a follower’s timeline and newsfeed. Your noise will simply be “muted”.
Unlike pages among friends and school chums, organic reach is not a concern for commercial advertisers on Facebook because they have moved away from the word ‘social. Originally, medical tourism businesses assumed that having a Facebook page for their brand was all about fans and likes. Some of the businesses have noticed that Facebook is a business and marketing channel that is no longer “free” and the word “social” to brand advertising on Facebook is irrelevant.
For medical tourism brands, this disruption and change in Facebook’s strategy will create both inefficiencies and opportunities. To succeed, you will have to do one of two things: Either understand the new rhythm and learn how to dance the new steps of its advertising products and employ an internal team made up of social media and digital marketing members to better optimize ad spend will be essential for your medical tourism Facebook Page; or hire one do dance on your behalf.
Understanding and adapting to the market
Do you understand the medical tourism clients’ needs and desires? Their motivations? Can you articulate how your medical tourism consumers feel during the dreaming, planning, booking, traveling, and reflecting phases; who and where they are from; how much they are willing to spend; and their presence and habits on Facebook? If you cannot describe this and prove it by demographics and data from your business (business intelligence) you may not have a successful Facebook strategy. If you invest in the Facebook platform, either by time, or money or advertising without knowing these things, you are in for a nasty (and expensive) surprise. People may click but they won’t stay. Your dropoff rate will skyrocket and they won’t give you a second chance.
What purpose does Facebook serve in a marketing mix strategy?
It is important to get this right. Everything else follows. Social media is a channel where consumers are in the beginning, middle, and end of the purchase path. But that makes messaging tougher, not easier. Understand what to expect and plan for when you use this channel. Three objectives for your presence on Facebook are very specific:
Avoiding a dip in brand equity while also increasing brand awareness and purchase intent
To achieve turnover in medical tourism sales, your marketing efforts will be focused on an integrated strategy that utilizes a “Swiss Army Knife approach of online, newsletter, and social customer behavior.
If you believe you can use Facebook to “make friends” with followers, and build personal connections with potential customers, you don’t understand how this marketing channel works for business. You can put your political messages, cute little memes, or comments on the “lovely weather we’re having today” but nobody will care. You can say “click like” if you love the weather today, but what does that really mean to the people that follow you? Is that really “engagement”? Or is it just something to post? Will people wait with baited breath to read the next post you put in the News Feed? Nope! That’s a form of click-baiting or spam.
In August 2014, Facebook announced that it was taking technical measures to reduce the impact of clickbait on its social network, using, among other cues, the time spent by the user on visiting the linked page as a way of distinguishing clickbait from other content. So in American idiom… “What else ya got?”
If you want to learn more about Facebook marketing for medical tourism business, contact me and let’s chat about your strategy. I will review your Facebook page, perform a situation analysis, and then chat with you briefly on what I see and what can be done to improve results. It is a brief consultation of about an hour. The cost is very modest. But you can also do the research yourself if you have the time. You will spend more in time, reading books, and determining if what you read is valuable. If your time has value, as does mine. you can choose whether to hire a coach or do it yourself. Book an appointment soon and let’s take a look at what you are doing and your options going forward.
Best of luck. And don’t accidentally get cut by the tools on the knife!
I am interested in using my page to help market
That is interesting that you say that. When I went to the page, I could not discern for whom the page is targeted. It is a page of posts. No comments, no thought leadership, no opinion. To whom are you
“marketing”? And what is the product? Who should be interested in this page? Doctors? Students? Patients?
The act of marketing is action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. While it says Anesthesia Education is what the page is about, in reality, your page seems as if its business is collecting “likes” and posting articles about random topics.