How to Create Strong Shareable Content and Boost Online Engagement

Hearing metaphorical crickets online day after day can wear away at your eagerness to spend time and money on crafting content for an online marketing campaign that’s getting zero traction. While channeling in on your top marketing initiatives can benefit your overall success rate, engagement results won’t drastically improve unless your medical aesthetic clinic is creating quality content with intention. Discover how to harness the power of emotion, authenticity, and value to create strong, shareable content, boost online engagement, and get more traffic through your aesthetic clinic’s doors.

What Motivates Consumers to Share Content Online?

While statistics will vary by demographic, region, and personal values, among many other factors, there are some general statistics regarding what motivates people to share content online that can be of great value to designing your next online marketing campaign. Consider the following statistics from the New York Times “The Psychology of Sharing” study: 

• 84% of those surveyed say they share content as a way to show their support for something they care about.
• 73% share content as a way to connect with others who have similar interests.
• 49% share to spread knowledge of a product or service they care about, to either help spread the word or to even change the opinions of others towards it.
• 94% consider the ways in which the content may be of value to others before sharing.
• The top reason people share is to entertain and educate others.

Applying the Statistics to Your Medical Aesthetics Marketing Campaign

It’s important to always keep your clinic’s brand and values in mind when developing any marketing campaign. Each element of your post—from images to videos, captions, tone, featured personalities, and more—needs to match your aesthetic clinic’s brand to maintain authenticity. Keeping the above statistics in mind, consider the following four elements as a springboard for your next digital marketing campaign.

Share a Laugh

With entertainment being the top reason for consumers clicking that share button or tagging a friend, incorporating humor in your social media posts can offer a useful strategy to boost engagement. Humor is a social concept in the sense that we naturally want to share it, to make others laugh. Humor can be tongue in cheek, drawing attention to common misconceptions regarding aesthetics, or it may be something humorous regarding topics like beauty, wellness, or lifestyle that complement your aesthetic services business. Try to be original to encourage more shares; if users have seen the joke before, they’ve likely already shared it.

Speak to Common Interests

If humor won’t resonate with your target audience, consider tapping into other emotions. Research your target audience and create a profile of potential core values. For example, feminism and female empowerment may trend well if your ideal client is a career-driven, 30-something female. Nostalgia can also play well on social media for almost all ages. For example, you may consider campaigns that focus on beauty trends in the 80s or 90s and compare them to current trends or to your aesthetic clinic’s services.

Talk Trends

When creating a content calendar or searching for new topics to post about, Google Trends is your best friend. Whether it’s current celebrity news or a national day of recognition, a trending topic can offer an easy jumping-off point when you’re short on ideas. But don’t just post something for the sake of traffic. Consider a creative approach to a trending topic that might set your aesthetics clinic apart from the crowd. For example, an airline company used the divorce announcement of one top celebrity couple to advertise its one-way tickets to Los Angeles, home of the newly single Hollywood heartthrob. The black humor approach aligned well with the recent trending topic and the advertisement went viral.

Educate

With more than 90% of the population opting to share only when they believe content is of value to others, creating informative educational posts is a smart move. Consider introducing new equipment in your aesthetics clinic with bulleted notes on the benefits of your new treatment, pushing to a blog post that contains more in-depth details to further funnel prospective sales. Alternatively, you might offer followers a quick how-to workout regimen that complements your body shaping treatments. Another idea may be to incorporate an educational element into your before-and-after images, offering a testimonial or short story about the transformation a recent patient experienced with your aesthetics services that may have gone beyond physical appearance. Share their story and let prospective patients know that the benefits of your aesthetic services are more than skin deep.

General Rules to Follow

• Be Genuine: Choose causes and approaches that feel authentic to you and your aesthetics clinic and be consistent. Followers can tell if you’re faking it and simply insincerely co-opting values or causes just for the traffic.
• The 80/20 Rule: While you can include a soft sales pitch, try to maintain an 80/20 balance of fun or informational posts to sales posts.
• Watermark It: Include a watermark or your clinic’s social handle over images posted to social media, so your brand is shared alongside your content.
• Make Your Staff Proud: Make marketing a point of pride. Creating posts that your staff is excited to share is an easy way to get engagement rolling.
• Beware of Contests and Giveaways: While a contest or giveaway every now and then is a nice way to thank your followers for their support and engagement, too many freebies can lead to worse engagement, with followers tagging along just for the perk.
• Try Video: While it’s more costly to produce, video accounts for 33% of all online activity and 54% of consumers want to see more of it from marketers, making it a lucrative format for creating shareable content when combined with one of the above elements.

Questions to Ask Before Posting Online

Before publishing your content, consider the following six questions as a way to determine whether you’ve created a high-value, high-share piece of content:

1. Who are you posting for? Consider your target audience, including their values and interests. Review the image, text, tone, and overall look and feel of the post and ask, will this resonate with them? If not, edit and review again.
2. What is the value you’re offering? The golden rule to building a loyal following and encouraging followers to become paying patients is to give more than you take. Before publishing, ask if the content offers one of the above-mentioned elements of value and ensure that it doesn’t violate the 80/20 rule.
3. When are you posting this content? Some content will perform better during certain periods, such as a workout post for a motivational boost on Mondays rather than on Sunday mornings, when many are looking to relax or run errands instead. Does the timing of your post make sense with what is likely top of mind for your ideal clients at that time?
4. Where are you posting this content? Long informational posts aren’t likely to fly as well on Twitter as short, humorous posts, but those educational captions will perform better on Instagram, where mini-blogging is proving to be a strong marketing move. Is what you’re posting appropriate to the platform, or would it be better to revamp it for another area of your marketing campaign?
5. Why are you posting this content? Your reason for posting should be about more than filling content slots. Have a specific purpose in mind and you’re likely to see better value in each post. If you’re posting just to check it off the marketing to-do list, unfortunately, it’s best to go back to the drawing board and consider a deeper purpose that’s much more likely to benefit your aesthetics business.
6. How do you hope followers will engage with or share your content? Sometimes followers just need a cue. Before pressing publish, consider how you’re calling on your followers to engage with you, whether that’s a callout to share a post with a friend who needs a laugh or a call to action that invites followers to post more questions they’d like answered in future educational posts. Always invite followers to share and be part of the conversation to improve engagement and create killer content that’s made for sharing. 

The #1 Online Marketing Rule

Always, always, always focus on quality over quantity. It might be tempting to post to every social channel multiple times a day, but if you’re strained for time and simply slapping things together to fill a gap, it’s only going to be detrimental to your marketing campaign. Dial it back and focus on producing quality content with intention to ensure you’re always delivering value to your followers.

Not sure where to get started? A marketing make-under might be the answer to help your aesthetics team focus in on your business’ top marketing campaigns and funnel efforts towards the platforms and posts that really count in reaching your business goals. Download our report, Do You Need a ‘Make-Under’? Get Better Aesthetic Marketing Results By Doing Less, today to get started.