I remember once someone came to me and asked for some social media help in promoting their upcoming course. They had spent hours and hours putting together a fabulous course programme which they believed would truly benefit their target market and they wanted some advice on how to use social media to promote this.
I remember the conversation I had quite clearly:
Me: “How many Facebook fans do you have?”
“None”
Me: “OK, how many followers on Twitter?”
“None”
Me: “Hmm, okay, how many connections on Linked-in?”
“None”
I immediately had to question why they thought social media would be of any benefit to them, the reply was, “Well, that’s where everyone seems to do their marketing at the moment, so I thought I could get people on my courses with it!”
Take time to nurture
The principle they were completely missing is that social media is relationship marketing where we market the relationship. It is not transactional marketing where we market a single transaction, e.g. selling a course or treatment.
In order to be able to communicate a message on social media we need to have been nurturing the relationships with these people over an extended period of time.
If you suddenly have a course to sell but have no one to communicate that message to, then organic social media is probably not the right choice.
The current Covid-19 situation sparks that same feeling in me. If you’ve not been nurturing your followers, fans and connections on social media over the years and months prior to the crisis, it makes it very difficult to deal with such crisis.
Build an engaged audience
So the real lesson, I think, is to not wait for a crisis to occur or for a revenue budget to be met by selling a course or treatment, but to genuinely engage with these people all of the time, nurturing them, helping them, communicating with them, letting them know you are a friendly, real and approachable human being.
Actually, forget about trying to sell anything at all, just look after your followers and social media.
Then, when a crisis or need arises you have an audience interested and engaged with what you have to say.
After that you can communicate your message effectively…and right at this time, that message is about saving lives and so couldn’t be more important!
Unfortunately, all of the important work needs to come BEFORE we need to do the communication.
There’s never been a more poignant reminder of this than with the current crisis, so get communicating, be real, be approachable, be likeable and build your following so that when you have something important to communicate, those people are ready, waiting and listening.
Stay safe and well my friends.
About Mark
Mark is the only person in Digital Dental Marketing to have an MBA majoring in marketing and creativity, run a dental laboratory for 14 years and been a dental technician for 23 years. He’s also a Master Practitioner of the communication modelling system, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) as well as being a Master Practitioner of Hypnosis and a Master NLP Coach.
Mark understands business, dentistry and communication. To find out more contact:
- 0845 259 1232
- Mark currently has a library of 239 articles on dental marketing on his blog, read more here https://www.markoborn.com/
- info@markoborn.com