Earned media value vs. paid and finding a balance for your practice

Take a look at your earned media value vs. paid media efforts to find out where you’re getting results and where you need to make adjustments

Roughly 93% of people go online when looking for a local business according to BrightLocal’s 2020 Local Consumer Review Survey. The question you need to ask is whether your digital media campaign is effective at reaching these consumers and, subsequently, drawing them in with your practice’s earned media value vs. paid media efforts.

You must first understand that the term “digital marketing” encompasses a large variety of media avenues. Though, these avenues can be reduced to three basic categories:

• Owned media – includes all online property that you own and control, such as your website, blog, and social media channels
• Earned media – internet-based media that increases your exposure even though is not posted by you directly, which includes people sharing your posts or mentioning your business online, as well as online reviews or media articles such as newspaper
• Paid media – all of your social media ads, other online ads, and paid internet or media promotions

While all of these media are important to your overall marketing efforts, each one requires a slightly different approach for maximizing its effectiveness in 2021.

Optimizing owned media

The nice thing about owned media is that you have complete control over your content. It’s up to you what information you place on your website, the topics you blog about, and how you interact with your followers on social media.

If you are managing your owned media yourself, Christian Carere, SEO consultant with Digital Ducats, recommends paying special attention to your formatting. This can help you rank higher with search engines.

“Google is implementing ‘passage indexing,” Carere explains, which is an attempt to better connect online searchers with answers to the questions they pose. This is good, says Carere, because it “means more opportunities for search visibility for questions that require detailed answers.”

Think about what your patients ask most and include those questions and answers in your owned media. Ideas to consider are how to deal with a certain musculoskeletal condition or what stretches can help minimize back pain. Carere also suggests breaking up blog posts and other long-form content with descriptive subtitles as this helps “organize the information on your page into smaller definable chunks.”

Maximizing your earned media value

Earned media is media about you and your practice that is either posted or shared online by others. Carere says that good Samaritan acts and doing things for your community are both great for garnering earned media value for your practice. Reaching out to local reporters or journalists to share your story will give you even more exposure, thus, more engagement.

“Chiropractors can benefit hugely from influencer marketing,” adds Matt Bertram, CEO and SEO strategist at EWR Digital. How? “Instagram influencers have thousands of followers with whom they’ve built up trust and credibility,” says Bertram. If they are willing to promote you and your services, it tells their followers that you have their stamp of approval, making you someone they can trust as well.

When looking for a good influencer for your chiropractic brand, consider using people who a lot of your patients already follow online. If you specialize in sports chiropractic, for instance, a good influencer to consider is a star athlete with local ties or someone who excels in a sport that a lot of people in your area either play or follow.

Other social media aficionados who have the potential of helping you grow your chiropractic practice include high-profile medical professionals, personal trainers, top medical care facilities, or anyone in the health and wellness field who appears to have mastered social media.

After identifying a potential influencer, reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in creating a partnership. They can share you and your expertise with their followers and you can do the same, garnering you both earned media value and growing both businesses.

Improving paid media results

Web Strategies reports that 35-45% of your marketing budget should be used on digital efforts. Fifteen to 25% of this amount is often directed toward social media marketing specifically.

Bertram says that videos can dramatically improve your results when using paid media. And if you are trying to appeal to new patients who may be anxious about seeing a chiropractic professional, there are two types of videos that are best for this purpose: videos of you and your staff, giving potential clients a chance to virtually meet and get to know you, and testimonial videos from satisfied clients.

You can also maximize your videos further by using them to answer your patient’s most common questions, then breaking them down into chapters, says Carere. This will increase the likelihood that your videos will be used in snippets designed to answer specific consumer queries on sites like Google, thus also helping you make the most of your owned media.

The more you can create a strategy in which all three of these play off the others, the more effective your marketing campaign as a whole.