When it comes to preparing and running a successful marketing strategy for your dental practice, it is important to remember that a great Social Media presence really can make all the difference between simply having an online presence to one that actually performs well for your business.
Social Media marketing helps you reach thousands of users every day, it allows you to connect with your patients, increase your brand awareness and boost your leads and sales.
But with such a saturated market it can become quite overwhelming to stay ahead of the competition and maintain a successful presence.
So, why not incorporate some giveaways and competitions into your Social Media marketing strategy?
Competitions are a proven way of growing your Social Media following, increasing your engagement and driving more traffic to your Social Media accounts. People love the chance to win something for free and you have a chance to boost your engagement and build further rapport with your followers whilst expanding your reach to new followers.
Competitions that we have run for our clients have had some great results! One of our clients gained 94 followers on Instagram, organically, without any additional ad spend and another client acquired over 108 leads and 143 new Facebook page fans all within 15 days!
Sounds good doesn’t it? And it’s not even difficult…
Here are our 10 Social Media Giveaway & Competition Ideas that you should consider rolling out as part of your Social Media marketing strategy.
Is there a National holiday coming up?
National Holidays such as Valentines Day, Halloween, Christmas etc. are a perfect time to run competitions. Aspects of the competition can be heavily focused on the national holiday, for example, you might consider giving away a ‘Romantic Hamper’ as a prize for Valentines Day or for Halloween the competition entry requirement might be ‘Wear Your Best Halloween Costume’.
Remember to include the ‘holiday hashtags’ in the caption of the post i.e. #Christmas2021 and #Halloween2021 to drive further Social Media traffic to your competition. Combine this with hashtags for your local area to ensure you’re hitting the right geographical target.
You’ve probably seen this type of competition before, where you have to guess the number of sweets that are in the jar in order to win a prize, but why not take it online!
This type of giveaway will generate a high level of engagement as your audience will have to leave their answer in the post’s comments, generating lots of interaction on your comment section.
You could also add an additional rule where each person has to tag 3 others accounts to be a valid entry, this will increase your post reach, drive additional Social Media traffic and generate more post engagements.
Top tip: got a tonne of toothpaste samples? Why not use these instead! Make thing relevant to your practice.
A last-minute giveaway can create a sense of urgency by running the competition within a short time frame, for example:
“LAST-MINUTE GIVEAWAY – WIN a hygiene appointment! Competition ends in 48 hours!”
You will be surprised how many entries you will receive when the window of opportunity is limited and you create a sense of urgency.
Are you trying to reach a specific number of followers milestone on Instagram and looking for that extra boost? 100? 1000? 10,000?
Share a post on Social Media announcing that when you reach 1000 followers (for example) on Instagram you will be giving away ‘FREE Teeth Whitening to 1 lucky person’.
To enter, they must follow your page, share your post in their Instagram feed, add it to their story and tag your account to qualify as an entry.
This will cause a snowball effect that will help you to gain more followers, as other accounts will see the reposts and they will start following you so they can enter the competition, too.
One way you can reward regular patients is by running a raffle to be in with the chance of winning a series of prizes.
Every patient that attends their appointment throughout a specific month i.e. July, will receive 1 raffle ticket. If a patient attends more than one appointment they will receive an extra ticket, increasing their chances of winning a prize.
You could even Livestream the raffle on Social Media, informing your patients where and when to tune in to watch the prize draw to really create some excitement around the giveaway.
Try teaming up with one or more local businesses and agree on running a multi-business giveaway consisting of a variety of exciting prizes.
This can be a fantastic way of bringing more awareness to your dental practice, as other local businesses may have a larger Social Media presence consisting of local-based followers who are not currently patients at your practice.
Help each other by tapping into each other’s follower base and market.
Here is an important tip to remember when running this type of competition: Create 1 Social Media post (caption & image) which can be used across all of the business accounts who are involved.This will help keep the competition information, rules, hashtags and imagery consistent throughout.
You might consider running a competition on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly) as this will help to keep your followers engaged and looking forward to the next competition.
You’ll also notice that your engagements will gradually increase over time, as more people are aware that you are running giveaways frequently and that they have another opportunity to win a prize.
Try to vary the prizes each time round to keep the competitions interesting.
This is where you turn your patients into your fans on Social Media!
Ask your patients to share a photo of themselves showing off their smile after treatment or holding a sign saying “I ❤️ my dentist”.
You can ask them to share this photo to their Social Media feeds (tagging your account) and to include a testimonial in the caption of the post. They must tag you in their photo in order to qualify and the best testimonial wins a prize.
A good percentage of your patients’ followers will be local friends who may inquire about your services and your dental practice, those are quality leads right there!
This one can really get people’s attention, consider giving away a big-ticket item (BTI) which is a high-priced item that everyone will want to win.
The BTI could be ‘FREE Invisalign treatment to 1 lucky person’, and you could create a landing page on your website to enter the competition and to acquire each entry’s contact information.
You could offer everyone that participates a ‘Free Invisalign Consultation’ as an incentive to come into the practice (then of course, work your magic to convert them into a paying patient anyway!).
Consider the lifetime value of a new patient… It’s totally worth taking the hit on a BTI in the long run.
Post a funny or silly photo of someone in your team and ask your followers to caption it.
The best caption wins a prize!
Your team can even vote on who made the best caption. Have some fun with this one and get creative. It’s a great way to show off your practice personality and get the team involved too.
We hope these ideas have started to get your creative juices flowing for your Social Media pages.
Why not check out one of our other handy guides on getting the most out of your Social Media marketing too? Read our post on 21 Creative instagram post ideas to inspire you into posting regularly and with confidence or our top tips on introducing instagrams latest feature, reels, to your practices page.
https://www.dominatedental.com/21-creative-instagram-post-ideas-for-dentists/
If you follow any of our top tips, don’t forget to let us know and tag us in your creations:
@DominateDental
Or, why not Get in touch with us today and we can show you how to make sure that not only your Social Media is the best it can be, but all aspects of your digital marketing are working to deliver great results for your practice.