Attention Aesthetic Clinics: Boost your social media presence without spending money on ads, it’s all about organic reach using relevant, engaging and consistent content

Posted by Sarah Mason

With 2.8 billion people on Facebook and 1.4 billion on Instagram, chances are your clients and prospects are spending plenty of time on these platforms. Your aesthetic clinic is losing out if it isn’t attracting its audience and building a connection. You may be thinking this requires major ad spend and you don’t have the budget to make this happen. The good news is you can still grow your social media presence without spending a penny on ads! Yes, it is a much slower process than with Ads, but it still has a place in your marketing plan and it relies on posting content regularly that’s high-quality, relevant to your brand, creatively presented and offers your audience value.

Building your social media organically can be extremely challenging since there is high competition between brands and the chances of your posts standing out from the rest without ads are slim. However, using the right techniques and best practices for each platform can give you the edge over your competitors and help you garner more followers, likes, comments, shares, and eventually get both new and returning clients buying your products and booking your expert services. 

What to learn more? Read on to discover the 11 most effective ways to organically accelerate your social media reach. Although this blog is aimed at aesthetic clinics, it still applies to all businesses looking to grow as the tips are universal.

1. Honesty matters

Like everything in life, social media comes with the good and the bad. It’s a powerful platform to find new clients and promote your services. However, in the rush to grow, many clinics fail to paint a full picture of procedures by minimising associated risks and promoting unrealistic expectations. This makes brands look unreliable and untrustworthy, which inturn prevents them from attracting a loyal following who trust their services and expertise. 

To steer clear of this, ensure honesty is at the heart of your social media presence using the following guidelines: 

  • Always be transparent about the risks associated with all your services;
  • Always maintain realistic expectations and never promise what you can’t deliver;
  • Always keep it natural and never enhance the results of your procedures or treatments using photo editing apps or filters;
  • If you receive negative comments on your posts, don’t delete these. Instead, start a conversation with the people who are unhappy with your content or your services;
  • When talking about skin imperfections, body concerns, insecurities or any other pain points, always focus on how good your services make people feel. In this way, those battling certain skin conditions won’t feel bad about themselves. 
2. Visual content engages 

Did you know that your social media accounts are digital representations of your clinic? This means that every online message and visual needs to correspond with your brand image and values. When your target audience looks at your social media accounts, it should provide a glimpse inside your clinic and the expert work that gets done here. To make this happen, you need to create exceptional and professional content that mirrors the quality of your clinic. Need more guidance? Consider the following:

Organic social media tips
  • To create eye-catching photos make sure you have good lighting or you can invest in a professional photoshoot;
  • The visuals should promote both your specialist services as well as showcase the expertise behind the brand with a focus on you, your clinic and your team members;
  • Capturing before-and-after photos are essential for your social media accounts as these showcase the incredible results achieved thanks to your expertise. To create these ensure the photos are taken at the same place, from the same angle and at specific times (before, during and after treatments). For added accuracy, include another photo a few days after the treatment to demonstrate the healing process;
  • Share client testimonials to build social proof;
  • Encourage your clients to share their own experiences with your clinic on their own social accounts and tag you for user-generated content.
  • It’s important to note that every photo or video of a client first needs their permission before any marketing activity takes place. Ask your clients if they are happy to participate and be sure to have a media consent form signed.

Pro Tip: Find a team member in the clinic who is handy with taking pictures and videos, and consistently block out time every week to get this done. If no one on the team has this ability, give us at ONCREE a call and our experts will help you create premium-quality photos. 

3. Keeping up with social media 

Keeping up with social media is the key to growing your audience and brand. These platforms are constantly evolving with new features, trends, updates, capabilities and best practices. With this in mind, it’s essential for your social media strategy to adapt to constant changes to stay relevant, grow your audience and build your client list. For example; Instagram is currently undergoing some of the biggest changes. 

When it launched in 2010, it was a photo-sharing app that encouraged striking, thumb-stopping imagery. Although this aspect still remains, it is now reimagining itself as a worthy competitor to TikTok through the concept of Reels. This is a new short video feature that is fantastic for engagement and holds incredible potential to make a post go viral and garner thousands of views, comments and likes. For your clinic, you can use Reels to creatively showcase your brand, services, promotions and people behind the business. 

Organic social media tips
4. Make social media tools work for you

As mentioned above, Reels is a great video content feature to engage and entertain, but there are loads of other tools you can throw into the mix. For example, carousel posts on Facebook and Instagram allow you to share a post with multiple photos or videos that can be viewed by swiping or clicking left- this is great for educational posts where you’re speaking about a certain procedure or treatment. For quick brand updates use Instagram Stories or Highlights, through simple yet effective photos share client results, and use Instagram or Facebook’s live-streaming video feature to connect with your audience in real-time and provide advice or share your favorite products for anti-ageing. 

5. Niche influencers boast loyal followers

The influencer market is growing phenomenally – from $1.7 billion in 2016 and $9.7 billion in 2020 to $13.8 billion in 2021. Now this year, it is expected to become a whopping $16.4 billion industry. The good news is you don’t need to partner with an influencer with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers to help grow your social media presence. This can cost a pretty penny. 

Instead, you can focus on niche influencers with a few thousand loyal followers who trust and rely on the information they share. These influencers are complete experts in the aesthetic industry and usually work with brands that share similar values as them. Partnering with the right influencer for your clinic is one of the quickest ways to organically grow on social media as your brand takes centre stage on platforms that have dedicated and engaged followers with an interest in what you’re offering.

6. Winning with social proof 
client testimonial for social media

In the age of social media, your happy clients are your best ambassadors, and they can massively influence consumer decisions. Don’t be afraid to ask your clients to write reviews on various platforms and provide testimonials. You can even throw in an incentive, free product or discount on their next treatment. But it doesn’t end here as you can make the most of features that encourage client interaction, such as encouraging them to use the check-in feature on Facebook when arriving for an appointment or tag your practice in a personal post about their positive experience on Instagram. You can then add this to your Stories or Highlights. And once you build a social media following of a few hundreds or more, thank them for choosing your account to follow and show your gratitude by organising product giveaways or free treatments. 

7. Get discovered through Hashtags

Social media is an overload of information right at your fingertips with new content being added every second. This along with tricky algorithms make it incredibly difficult for individual posts to become visible to people interested in your products or services. Thankfully, using hashtags in your social media posts help boost organic reach as it increases the likelihood of audiences seeing your posts if it is relevant to the hashtags they are browsing. Using relevant hashtags help build your brand identity, ignite conversations, run campaigns and even generate sales. 

Pro Tip: 10 – 15 hashtags per post is ideal and these should include a mix of niche and broad/common hashtags. 

8. Get active 

Remember, you’re doing all this hard work to build your social media presence, create a connection with your target audience, and get them to take action in some way. With this in mind, it’s imperative to interact with your audience by replying to direct messages in good time, always engaging with comments on posts by responding or simply liking them. This is the best way to win over your following, beat the slow or unresponsive competition and show that you’re approachable, trustworthy and caring. 

Pro tip: Ever received a bad review or critical comment? Don’t ignore these – always respond truthfully and kindly. Who knows, you may even turn an unhappy client around!

9. Post on the regular

Posting consistently on social media platforms is essential to growing your online presence and each comes with its own best practices. Generally speaking, the sweet spots are:

  • Facebook: A few times a week
  • LinkedIn: Once a week
  • Instagram: Daily

It’s important to note that these are rough estimates based on industry advice and research. For more accuracy, it’s best to keep track of all your posts in a spreadsheet, look at the analytics after a few weeks and use the data to determine if you need to beef up the frequency or scale back.

Check out the full report on the best times to post on social media for this year.

10. Content calendars keep you consistent 

content calendar

To ensure you post regularly, it’s essential to draw up a content calendar with ideas and plans and a clear structure of the posts you will be sharing on a daily or weekly basis. This needs to be planned in advance so you don’t end up rushing for ideas at the last minute. Another important part of the planning process is to block out time every week to plan a steady flow content for the months ahead as these can easily dry up if overlooked.

11.  Don’t forget the basics

As you can see there are many parts to organically growing your social media accounts. It takes hardwork and dedication. But remember, at the heart of everything you do is to eventually convert followers into clients. This means your clinic’s details must always be presented accurately and clearly, so they can easily get in touch to book one of your many expert services. 

For example, on Instagram your website link and address should be included in your bio, and “Contact” button enabled for prospects to easily access your phone and email. 

At ONCRÉE, we have a dedicated team of social media experts who know how to make social media work for your clinic. We can set up your social media accounts, manage them for you, engage with your audience, and create posts that are relevant, professional and attract followers to your accounts. We also develop a content strategy and calendar to make sure you post consistently. 

ONCRÉE is a Creative and Media Agency that blends creativity, data and strategy to help your business meet goals, drive results and ultimately grow to exciting heights! If you want to own your space and stamp of authority on social media, search engines, email, and any other platforms your audience uses, we have the expertise to make it happen. Contact us today to find out more.

Take a look at how we helped this Cosmetic Clinic scale.



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