I have spoken to many dietitians and nutritionists and one of the biggest problems they face with growing their business is acquiring new customers. The fact is: every business needs clients, therefore every business needs marketing.
If you are new to marketing, please check our marketing for nutritionists introduction article. It’s an in-depth guide with everything you need to know to get started.
If you are a nutritionist or a dietitian you are maybe frustrated with the amount of work you have to deal with, that is completely unrelated to your nutritionist background. For example in order to grow your customer base, you have to know about different marketing strategies. To make your practice profitable, you also need to know about accounting and sales. All of this is important and very time consuming. Fortunately, we live in the 21st century and many of these tasks can be automated. In this post I would like to tell you how to grow your customer base on social media and present you the ways of automating your marketing campaigns. You will be able to free up some time and devote it to other important aspects of your business.
So, how can dietitians grow their business on social media?
1. Decide on what interests your clients the most.
Take some time and write down what is that interests your clients the most. If your clients are mainly concerned about weight loss, write a series of blog posts with recipes for losing weight. If many of your clients are athletes, your content should contain information helpful for achieving more in sports. There are infinite number of topics you can write about. To help you start below are some suggestions:
- diets – the science behind popular diets
- articles about supplements
- new research discoveries relating to nutrition and wellbeing
2. Submit your articles to social media.
There are many popular social media networks and it is important to focus on the ones that will bring you the most engaged followers. Below are some of the statistics that should help you decide, based on your targeted audience. For example: YouTube is mostly used by teens, so as long as your customers are not teenagers, I wouldn’t recommend this one.
Post the articles you have written to all your social media accounts. Obviously submitting it all manually sounds like madness and would take a lot of time. That’s why I would suggest using Hootsuite which will allow you to post to all your social media streams. For more information, have a look here
3. Recycle your existing materials
You don’t have to post new articles every time you post something. For instance, people who use Twitter are constantly bombarded with information and it is proven that on average around 4% of your audience will see your post. This means that you should post the same article many times to reach your whole audience.
Posting it all manually will be extremely time consuming, and probably very boring as well. For Twitter there is software that you can use called Tweet Jukebox. It will allow you to schedule your post and then it will automatically resubmit it to Twitter every few days, depending on your configuration. The software itself is very easy to use and its completely free if you have less than 200 posts.
4. Gather metrics.
Over time you will be able to see which social media works for you best. Usually social accounts provide metrics such as average engagement of the posts or number of visits to your account. This will help you decide which social media to focus on the most.
Don’t forget to also ask your clients whether they use social media and if yes, which ones are their favourites! This information will quickly let you know where do you clients hang out.
5. Be persistent
Remember to constantly post valuable content. Growing a business takes a lot of time and effort and so does growing your social media audience. This is a long term investment, but believe me – it will pay off.
6. Make sure to have fun!
Social Media can be a lot of fun. It allows you to write about topics you love and to engage in very interesting conversations. You can not only grow your customer base, but also learn something new everyday and meet interesting people!
If you want to grow your business and make it more productive, please have a look at our nutritionist software that can help you save time by automating all your admin work.
Image Credit
Header image credited to https://edubirdie.com/blog/economics_paper
