Instagram is a highly active platform among the young population. It provides various features to boost engagement and reach out to a larger audience.
You can put various types of content on Instagram from providing information about treatments, useful tips, or even share behind the scenes on your stories. And that’s not all, you can get more creative and share a trendy reel, making it entertaining as well as informative for your patients. So the content ideas are endless here.
Also, the Instagram app is very easy to use and thus, you can use it to interact and engage with your patients effortlessly!
Doctors need to build trust and a long-lasting relationship with their patients, this can only happen with a personal touch. As a doctor, you can leverage Instagram to build your personal brand online.
You may have questions like “how to start with Instagram marketing” or “how to build a brand image on Instagram?” Let’s dive deeper and talk about this trendy social media marketing platform that’s all the rage nowadays.
In this post, I’ll talk about various content formats and content ideas for medical aesthetic practitioners, and how to make the most out of the different Instagram features like IGTV, IG reels, story highlights, and more.
How doctors can leverage Instagram
Instagram is the one tool with a huge community, multiple features, and everybody wants to use it to get the most out of it. Doctors are no exception to that!
Feed
Instagram is a photo-centric platform. Creating a visually pleasing feed will help you to capture the attention of the audience. It’s all about portraying who you are and what you do when you are thinking of starting Instagram marketing and building a brand image on it.
Posts
The feed is made up of posts and those can make or break your grid! So, always try to create aesthetic, trendy posts.
You can use some templates and incorporate your brand colors to give it an organized and consistent look thus creating a theme for your Instagram profile.
Many people think that having a theme means every picture needs to look the same. But that’s not true! It’s all about focusing on the overall brand image that you want to create on this platform so that people can easily recognize you.
Visuals
To engage your existing followers and to attract more followers, always try to share different kinds of posts. You can share updates, provide information about treatments, share inspiring quotes, helpful tips, and other variations. Always try to be creative with your headlines, that is the content of the visual, to grab people’s attention.
Hashtags
Hashtags play a very important role in helping the content to reach wider audiences. So, make sure to use them right to get the most engagement and new followers.
Captions
Captions are pretty underrated on Instagram but they play a huge role in the social media space. Writing captions is an art and those 2200 characters have the ability to add even more context to the post. Captions and call-to-actions help to get even more engagement and provide value to your audience. And it’s no secret that the Instagram algorithm loves the posts that get more engagement!
So, that was about Instagram’s more traditional features – posts, captions, and hashtags. Let’s talk about the unconventional features of Instagram that could be used for marketing.
Stories
Instagram story is a great feature that allows you to share texts, photos, or videos that get displayed for 24 hours. Stories have also been proven to encourage users to stay on Instagram longer and visit it more frequently.
One of the most valuable features that Instagram Stories gives is the ability to include a link as a CTA. You can post a story on the offer going on a particular treatment and provide a link so that the viewer can swipe up and go to the offer’s landing page directly.
Also, though stories disappear after 24 hours, you can save them in the highlights section. You can categorize these highlights and showcase your best stories to give users an overview of your Instagram profile. Stories were and are still popular.
Reels
To keep users engaged, Instagram always comes up with new features and tools. And it’s important to stay up to date with new Instagram tools and trends and stay on top of them because it sure gives you an advantage over your competitors.
Instagram reels are one such new feature that has become so popular nowadays and for good reasons. Reels are 15-30 seconds long videos with features such as different effects, sound, and music in them making them engaging and fun to watch.
As these videos are short and entertaining, users like to watch them. So it’s easier to increase engagement with users. From the marketing point of view, reels are important because they get featured on Instagram’s explore page. And that means more people are going to discover it, watch it, increase engagement with your content and create brand awareness. So, when you are out of ideas, do give Instagram reels a shot!
So, that was all about using Instagram’s trendy and unconventional features for marketing.
Now let’s go from trendy to conventional but a fail-proof way of marketing and brand awareness and that is ads.
Instagram Ads
Instagram comes on top when you are looking to reach out to a greater audience organically. But do keep in mind, you need to understand your target audience- understand where your patients are.
The engagement rate on Instagram is very high when compared to other social media platforms like Facebook. And that is why you should explore this platform more and engage with your audience via ads.
You can run several types of ads on Instagram. Because Instagram is owned by Facebook, you can create, manage and monitor both, Instagram ads and Facebook ads using the Facebook Ads Manager. Read about 9 Best Facebook Ads for doctors.
IGTV
From trendy to conventional ways of marketing, Instagram has it all. When it comes to social media marketing, video is one of the most useful and effective content formats because videos provide information, hold users’ attention, and are comparatively more engaging.
Instagram conducted a study on Instagram engagement and results showed that videos receive twice the engagement than the other post types. Videos are an easy and useful way of marketing and building a brand image on social media platforms. IGTV on Instagram serves this purpose.
IGTV can be used as a separate app or in the Instagram app itself. You simply need to set up your channel on it. The length of IGTV videos can range from 1 minute or 1 hour.
Using IGTV is a great marketing strategy because there are no commercials, no interruptions, it is optimized for phone viewing, plus it is easy to upload videos on IGTV using your smartphone. So, overall, a great feature of Instagram to use for marketing!
Guides
So far we’ve discussed Instagram Feed, Posts, Stories, Reels & IGTV. Instagram has again come up with a new feature called Guides.
A guide allows you to share scrollable content. It’s like a cross between Instagram carousels and blog posts.
The best thing about these guides is that you can recommend posts that you’ve created or saved.
Instagram is a great platform to engage and interact with your patients. The Instagram algorithm keeps changing. It promotes content with a higher engagement rate. So, try to make most of the features provided by Instagram.