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What are you doing digitally to promote your Flu Jab Service?
It’s the beginning of the Flu Season and we’re all set, ready to jab away. Your pharmacists and consultation room are signed off, the staff have been briefed about procedure and you’ve plastered marketing material all over your pharmacy. However, have you done anything on a digital level yet? Are you maximising the exposure of your service to reach those who don’t just walk past or come into your pharmacy organically? In this tutorial, I'm collaborating with Pharmacy Talk - Uniting Pharmacy through Conversations, to talk to you about 5 online tools that will help you magnify your marketing efforts around the flu jab service you offer this year.1) Facebook
A simply brilliant tool to help you market your Flu Jab service is Facebook. On your business page, you can promote via the services tab, building an offer, pinning your posts, creating an engaging header and much, much more.
But your page isn’t the only feature of Facebook that can help you. You can message businesses directly through their own pages, publish posts in local relevant groups and even create a group yourself that will give you influencing power over a significant number of people. As an example, what I have done for one of my clients recently is create a group purely for the shops and businesses in the local area with the goal of improving communication. Local businesses have willingly joined and I can now post updates in there about the flu jab service they offer. Powerful marketing at zero the cost.
If you'd like to begin driving your flu service and business in general on Facebook, The Pharmacy and Social Media Mastery Course is the perfect place for you to start. Click here for more info.
NOTE: Due to the nature of Facebook today (Aug 2018), the organic reach of your posts through your page has deteriorated significantly. That's why Facebook Ads are more important than ever in order to reach your target audience effectively. Facebook Ads are very powerful and that's why I pretty much always include them in the digital marketing strategies I create for my clients.
2) Pharmacy Flu Jabs
I teamed up with PharmData to create a platform called Pharmacy Flu Jabs which helps the public find a pharmacy that provides the flu jab service quickly and easily. At this time of year, there is always a spike in the search terms associated with the flu jab, meaning people are looking for information about it online. By adding your listing on here, you’ll become much more visible as a flu jab provider online, making it much more likely for people to choose your services.
3) Update your website
Your website is your online shop window, so make sure you or your developer updates it to reflect that you’re providing the flu jab service. Just like I’ve done with this client. As soon as the user lands on the site, they can’t miss it. The button leads to a blog post I created about the service which is now showing up on page one of Google, or if you have an online booking calendar, it could just as easily direct to that too.
4) Create a post on Google My Business
It’s imperative as a local business that you have a Google My Business profile owned and validated for your pharmacy. If you don’t, then you’re simply missing out on a great opportunity to improve the visibility of your pharmacy online. Within the application itself, you can create posts about your flu jab which is fantastic free advertising.
Look at the post I created for Crosspool Pharmacy a few days ago. If someone now types in “Crosspool Pharmacy” into Google, they’re going to land on their Google My Business profile, and you can see a very visual promotional post on the Flu Jab service they offer. If you click on it, it gives them more info and this button takes them to a blog post on the flu. Not only is this helping with service awareness, it’s helping position this blog post higher on the google rankings. A great little feature that all pharmacy businesses can be using.
If you'd like to set up your pharmacy on Google My Business, then you can take this course which will walk you through the whole process, step-by-step. Using instructional videos, the Drive Pharmacy Footfall with Google course will teach you how to use the tools within Google My Business to attract new customers.
5) Yell.com
And the last thing I’m going to talk about is yell.com, the biggest business directory in the UK. Here, you have the contact details of pretty much every business in your locality who you can connect with and talk to about your flu jab service. Whether it’s through email or by phone, contact every single business and offer them the option to get them and their staff vaccinated. You could offer them a 10% discount to make your offering more attractive. Get one of your staff to take an hour out each day for a week and contact everyone within your catchment area.
Think digital. Think further than the walls of your pharmacy
By using these online tools, you’re gonna maximise the exposure of your flu jab service and capture more business than simply using the marketing material present in your pharmacy. If you need help with any of the platforms, again, I’m here to support you as always. Thanks for watching and I wish you the most successful flu season yet.Thanks for visiting and see you in the next learning module!
Saam
