17. Social Media Marketing: How to Know if it's Actually Working

There's a huge problem that we have to figure out. If we don't, the time and money we spend creating content will be wasted.

In this episode, I want to share my thoughts on the epidemic of mental health practice owners getting on social media without knowing WHY they are doing it and IF their efforts are actually working.  This is not about dissing social media marketing. I love using social media (including blogs, podcasts, Instagram, and Facebook) in my marketing. What I'm talking about today is the how and the why behind using social media so you KNOW it is doing what you want it to do for your practice.

When we use these platforms, we have a wonderful opportunity to capture the most valuable commodity out there - the attention of your potential client/fan/customer/purchaser. So how do we optimize our posts for these content consumption habits?

I'm learning a lot as I interview experts in SEO and listen to podcasts about using content to build a brand, and I want to share some of my findings with you in this episode. These tips apply to everything from podcast intros to blog posts and are vital for any mental health practice owner who wants to incorporate social media into a marketing plan.

There's more to come, but join me today for a discussion about the strategies I recommend to use social media effectively!

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Introduction

Kate Walker:       Hey Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses, I’m Dr. Kate Walker, and I have a question for you: Are you on social media? Now, usually counselors, mental health professionals, we are in one camp or the other. We are like, no, never, I would never get on social media! Or, yeah, I’m scrolling right now while I’m listening to this podcast. 

                           So how do you use social media? How do you use blog posting, SEO, all of the things as a strategic element of your marketing plan? Well, the fact is, most of us don’t. We get into this rut or we start looking at other people or we get shiny objectitus, we say, oh my gosh, so and so had a TikTok, so and so has an Instagram, I need to there too, but we don’t really know why. And then when we finally do get on the thing, we don’t know how to measure if it’s working or not. You’ve got to figure out a way to measure whether any effort you’re doing in marketing is working, but social media especially, and I’m going to tell you why.

                           So when you leave this podcast today, you’re going to know ways to use social media effectively and ethically to grow your private practice, whether you’re looking for ways to build your brand or engage with potential clients or really get the phone ringing, there’s a way to do that if you’re strategic about measuring the data, and you don’t have to be a scientist to do it. You ready? Let’s get to work.

                           What can social media do? Well, those are called goals. If you were sitting across from me and you said, okay, Janie, what do you want social media to do? I’d be asking you, Janie, what are your goals with social media? And I would probably get an answer, something like, ah, well, I haven’t really thought about it. Or I want to engage with people. So I would get this very nebulous answer. Now, Janie is out there – I’m sorry, I’m not trying to diss you, I promise. But as counselors, sometimes we don’t talk in specific, measurable, trackable language; we talk in dream language, right? We’re talking about, well, I don’t know how big I want to get. I do want to get big but I don’t want to get too big and I don’t know if… 

                           Okay, great, but my question is: how do you want to use social media in your practice? And when I say social media, I include podcasts, blogs, SEO, all of these things because they all work together if you do it right in order to… those are your goals. So if you haven’t really thought of goals for marketing with social media, I’m going to give you some right now. Ready? Get a pencil and paper because I’m going to say it. Or, it’s a podcast – just hit pause.

                           Here are three ways you can use social media or blogging or podcasting to build your practice. One is to increase engagement. You want people to share things, you want them to recommend things, you want them to like, you want them to comment. That’s called engagement. The other thing you can have as a goal, click a button to purchase a product. So if you have online courses, if you sell counseling t-shirts in an Etsy store, you’re going to use your social media, your blog posts, your podcasts, your things, to direct people to click to make a purchase. The third thing you can use your social media, your blog posts, your podcasts for, is to build your email list. And you may be thinking, well, I hate email, why would I want to build my email list? So I’m saving that one for last.

                           Let’s start with engagement. Engagement means the process – if you’ve ever looked at your insights on Instagram or you’ve ever looked at the number of comments or how many thumbs up you get or hearts or whatever, those numbers are a measurement of engagement. I remember I did an experiment once, I posted some things on my Kate Walker Training Facebook page, this was probably 2018 or so, and I mean, I was posting great stuff – I thought. So I was posting, measuring, okay, a little bit of engagement, a little bit of engagement. And then I posted a picture of me hugging my son, and my adult son is taller than me. In fact, the picture isn’t even my face, it’s him hugging me and you just see him embracing me and the back of my head and he’s got his eyes closed and it’s just this very sweet embrace. And by far, that was the number one post that I have ever had and the engagement was incredible. The likes and the hugs and the hearts and the caring hearts and all of the things.

                           So what can engagement do? Well, that’s what our goal is, right? Because we can have engagement and you get into this game where you kind of play with numbers, and I have colleagues that do this. It can drive you pretty crazy because you start tracking the number of engagements per post and you’re starting to see data and trends and all of these things and it’s pretty numbing unless you have an actual goal. So I’m going to give you a goal, just to start with, and of course, you take that and you modify that for your practice. 

                           But one of the things that you can do with engagement is use it to position yourself as an expert in your community. This is also brand building. So when people engage with you, they’re liking you. That means whatever platform you are on will be attracted to that and they’ll actually start putting you into the feeds of other people more often and with greater frequency – I think that means exactly the same thing, but never mind. But engagement will drive your posts to the top of the viewing list for whatever platform you’re on. So what you put out, the content is very, very, very important because people will be sharing your posts. They like it, that means more people will be seeing your posts. So measuring engagement or focusing on the goal of engagement is a wonderful thing to do if your big goal is to position yourself as an expert and to build your brand as an expert. 

                           And as mental health professionals, that’s a really, really good thing to do. I’ve talked about before in my community, one of the things that I had great success with was a ten-minute consultation. And so when I would talk to people, I wouldn’t say, “Hey, you look like you could use some counseling. Why don’t you come over to my practice?” No, I didn’t do that. What I said was something to the effect of, “Hey, if you have questions or if you have a family member or a neighbor who has questions, just tell them to click the orange button. They can schedule a ten-minute consultation with me today.” And I became known in my community not as a therapist, but as a resource.

                           Okay, so follow me. My goal is to increase engagement in order to position myself as an expert in the community, which builds my brand in order to – now, this is where the key performance indicator comes in; this is where the KPI comes in. Because we have a goal, now we have to have a way to count. And so with engagement, a great KPI is the number of phone calls. So take my story positioning myself as an expert. I would tell people to click the orange button. The orange button was a widget on my website which allowed people to schedule a ten-minute consultation. It was easy for me to see that after I gave a talk at a PTO meeting or after I did a thirty-second stand up and introduce myself speech at the local chamber of commerce, I would see my number of ten-minute consultations go up. And to translate that from number of phone calls, right, because that’s what each ten-minute consultation was, it was a phone call. So it was really easy for me to track, hey, when I go to schools, I tend to get 20 requests for phone calls, whereas if I just go give a talk down at another town next store to mine, let’s say I just go talk to their chamber of commerce, I don’t get any requests for ten-minute consultations. Okay, so now I know my marketing going to the PTO meetings is resulting in more ten-minute consultations; that’s something I can count.

                           When you’re measuring engagement, it’s important that you become familiar with Google Search Console, and that’s part of Google My Business. There are some great tutorials out there about that. Because what you’re looking for is a few things. If you’re blogging, you want to see the engagement in your blog post and using something like Google Search Console, you can actually see how blog posts are doing, how often they’re being searched, how often they’re being searched compared to other blog posts. Or, you can also get search engine tools that show you the terms that are the most searched for and then write your blog based on that. 

                           So this time of year, we’ve got Valentine’s Day, there are so many things that you could blog about. Well, go into a search engine tool like Key Search or Keywords Everywhere – there are lots of them out there – and you put in terms like “breaking up over Valentine’s Day” or “grief over Valentine’s Day” and what you’ll see are a list of search terms that are most engaged with. Well, why not write a blog or a series of social media posts based on something that people are already searching for? Now you can put out amazing content that will have your signature line, it will have a link so that folks can find out more about you, and you know that they’re going to be popular, they’re going to be engaged with, because you already did the homework and found out through Google that this is something that people are searching for. 

                           So our goal is to increase engagement. You can look at your numbers on your social media posts and your blog posts or you can go see what people are searching for and then write your content based on that. And seeing those numbers go up, seeing your blog posts getting searched for, if you write several blogs or several podcasts, you’ll be able to see which ones are the most engaged with, and then you can develop more content around that, and we call that cornerstone content, and all of this will go to build your brand and position you as an expert in your community. So engagement is great but two other KPIs are counting dollar signs and counting the number of first appointments. So what does that look like?

                           [Ad: 40-hour training]

                           Your goal is to have more purchases. Now, you may be an online course salesperson, you may have an Etsy store with printables or tshirts or things that counselors can use in session. Or you may want to count the number of sessions as purchases. This is a really easy KPI to track because you’re literally just looking at dollar signs. You’ll be looking at them per day. If you are looking at sessions, you can look at maybe the number of hours, the most popular times of day, you can look at what purchases happen after which blog posts or which social media posts. 

                           But the most important thing if your goal is to have increased purchases, you must have a call to action. That means at the end of every social media post, at the end of every blog post, at the end of every podcast, you’ve got to tell people to do something. Click the link. Grab your ticket. Make the purchase. Get the tshirt. Make the appointment. Schedule the phone call. It has to be an imperative voice and it has to be very short and to the point. So you call to action will lead to a behavior and that’s what you’re going to count to see the effectiveness of your marketing. So if you decide to do a great big flash sale through Instagram and you’re going to do a series of TikToks and you’re going to do some Facebook ads, you want to see how your purchases, the dollar signs, increase after every post, on every platform.

                           You remember my example earlier of whether I give my talk to the PTO in my town or if I go to the town next door to mine and talk at their chamber of commerce. I’m able to see how my KPIs increase after each one of my marketing efforts. And so with social media, you really have to stay on top of what you’re putting out and we do this through an editorial calendar. You have to track the data. You have to be able to say okay, on this day, this is the topic that I put out there. This was my call to action. Here’s the number of people that actually took action. They clicked the button. They checked out the link. And there are ways to track that as well. So now you know, along with your Google Search data, hey, this is what people are looking for. This is what people are clicking on and this is what is really working in my social media efforts.

                           Okay, the third thing that social media can do is build your email list. Now, I know everybody turns their nose up at email, but imagine if some day, you want to give some couple intensives, you want to offer weekend retreats for folks who really want to dive deeper into communication, or maybe you’re EMDR certified and you want to offer certification to other therapists. Your social media can start to find folks who are interested in that type of thing and then they start following you because you’re positioning yourself as an expert in the community, but instead of a call to action, that leads to a purchase, because let’s say you only have these retreats twice a year. What you need to do is get these folks on an email list so that they know when you’re offering your next retreat. Now, you can be totally just transparent and say, hey, I’m going to get your email and I’m going to send you lots of emails with lots of information: click here. That’s a great call to action but what tends to work even better is to offer an incentive. So five ways for couples to fight fair, get the free guide when you click here and give us your email. Offering an incentive in exchange for an email, and then of course you do your part, don’t blow up people’s emails, but that’s a way to build a very, very tight-knit community who is completely interested in what you have to offer. 

                           So you see what we’ve done here. You have gone into Google Search, you have found what people are searching for. You’ve created some amazing content through your blog, through your social media posts, you took data so that you knew what calls to action were really going to be effective, you decided that you wanted to gather emails in order to get the message out and sell some really nice big ticket items like retreats, and in order to do that, you have to build trust. You have to take that trusted position as an expert in your community and you have to make sure that you’re building that trust with this group of followers and email is a fabulous way to do that. And the call to action is click here, get the incentive, and I will send you information about what you’re looking for. It’s a perfect match.

                           Okay, badasses. So everybody raise your right hand and make a promise you will not get a social media manager until you figure out why you’re on social media anyway. And I don’t mean just scrolling, killing time. And how are you going to know when it’s time to get on social media? Well, you’ll have some goals. What are those goals? Our KPIs, key performance indicators. You want to increase the number of phone calls. You want to increase the number of sales. Or you want to increase the number of emails that you capture because you have a goal to position yourself as an expert in the community. You want to sell some really cool stuff in your Etsy store or your online course catalogue. Or you’ve got some really nice big ticket items that you’re only going to offer a couple of times a year and you need to make sure that people who are interested are the first ones to know and the best way to do that is through email.

                           So you’ve got some goals, you’ve got some ideas, now it’s time to get to work.

                           Alright Texas Badasses, go build a great practice and go do great things. This is Dr. Kate Walker, thanks for listening.