At GTK Solutions, we work with several clients in the Healthcare industry – from cosmetic dentists to med spas, to medical clinics, specialists, mental health doctors, plastic surgeons and even health clubs. Often we get asked what the results of our social media marketing campaigns are so we decided to do a few blog posts (more to come soon) that share case studies of clients we’ve worked with.

The first case study is with a cosmetic dentist. Here’s the bottom-line:

Referral Campaign Adds 580+ Patients In Six Months

Please note that are agreements are for 12 months. We have a 99% renewal rate – meaning that 99% of the people that sign up with us for 1 year, sign on for a second year. We do a 12 month agreement because as we’ve said many times before:

Social media is a marathon, not a sprint.

Our results grow over time. The results after 9 months and after 12 months will be substantially larger than what we’ve seen over the past 6 months – thus the reason our clients sign up for a second year. The second year of our campaign is even bigger and more fruitful than the first. Let’s take a look at this case study:

Category
Healthcare, Cosmetic Dentistry

Challenge
This Dallas based multi-­‐location cosmetic dentistry practice was facing a typical challenge. The poor economy had led to a decline in patients, especially those seeking cosmetic procedures, which are costly and usually not covered by insurance.

Solution
Realizing the importance of communicating with existing patients and managing the practice’s reputation, we began using social media to accelerate the natural referral process while encouraging patients to leave positive reviews on social sharing sites.  The results were staggering. The website experienced a 167% increase in unique visitors, bringing
the total website traffic to over 8,000 unique visits and over 580 new patients within six months.

6 Month Results
167% increase in Unique Visitors
Over 580 appointment requests
Over 1000 new Facebook “likes”
Over 700 new Twitter “followers”

It’s important to note that these are leads that we generate, not spam. If you’re a cosmetic dentist, we have a team of dedicated professionals ready to grow your business. We have sales team members in Georgia, Nashville, Dallas/Fort Worth, Portland and Salt Lake City ready to meet with you face to face. Contact us HERE for a free discovery meeting.

Have you ever read something and thought “YES!” – I totally agree. We at GTK Solutions came across a blog post by Susan Gunelius at Entrepreneur.com and thought this was good enough to share with our readers. What you are about to read is her list of the 10 Laws of Social Media Marketing. We resonate with each of these, share these, tweet these and have blogged about some of these before, but for what lies ahead, we give full credit to the original author. Please read Susan’s thoughts:

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and — perhaps most importantly — your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.

*** Do you agree with Susan’s 10 Laws? How have you lived them out or practiced them in your business marketing?

Did you know nearly all consumers (97%) now use online media when researching for a product or service? As we said in this blog post about not wasting money – put your money in social media and online advertising, not in traditional marketing like the Yellow Pages.

As we stated in that blog post: Last year cosmetics brand Swedish Skin launched its products using social media for 100 percent of its marketing.

With the view that social media ‘may well put an end’ to ‘expensive TV and print advertising campaigns’ Swedish Skin eliminated the middlemen, third party distribution companies, television advertising and ‘unnecessary’ business expenses.

Since the launch, the brand has continued to focus its marketing strategy solely online, and has heralded a ‘new era of more affordable skin care through social media marketing.’

The skin care company highlighted the affordability of social media marketing and online sales by successfully reaching customers on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Its product reviews have been posted in video format on YouTube and are said to have been viewed over 115,420 times. That’s effective, efficient and affordable marketing.

As we stated in this blog post, you need to focus your marketing efforts in the area (social media) where you get the most bang for your buck. “For many businesses with Low ad budget, the Social Media Networking is their sole means of Marketing.” – New York Times (July 23, 2009)

So, when was the last time you used the Yellow Pages?

We at GTK Solutions hope you had a wonderful New Year holiday and are looking forward to connecting with, resourcing, consulting, helping and growing your business in 2011. If you follow our Twitter account (@GTKSolutions), you’ve probably read many articles on social media and business and know we believe all companies should have a strong social media presence.

Currently, 83% of all businesses are on Facebook. Is your business on Facebook? If not, 2011 is the year for you and your company. Our advice to you is to “engage or die” as so many people have said. When 2012 rolls around (if not sooner), your business will become irrelevant if it’s not actively engaging with customers and clients on social media.

The Big 3

Where to start? At GTK Solutions, we set up our clients on over 300 social networks, do email marketing campaigns, as well as blog daily for our clients – but if you’re just wanting to get started and dip your toes into the water, we recommend the big 3: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Here’s a few things to consider about the big 3:

• Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.
• Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn.

For a little extra push as to why you should dive in to social media, read this old blog post and watch the video that we posted. Budget tight? Concentrate and focus your marketing dollars on social media efforts. For more on this approach, read this old blog post and consider what we propose.

It is our sincere desire to see you succeed and grow your business. If you haven’t already, download our free ebook on “7 Ways to Get More Likes on Facebook” – this resource will tell you exactly how to grow your Facebook business page. Here’s wishing you an amazing year of business in 2011.

First off: We hope you all had a Merry Christmas. As the year comes to an end, we thought we would try one more time to express how crucial a social media strategy and campaign is to a thriving business. We came across this blog post from Clare Lancaster and thought we’d share her thoughts on this subject. Here’s what she said:

2010 will be remembered as the year that social media made a big splash in the lives of business owners.

If you’re someone who runs an online business, you’ll have realized that social media has joined the ranks of SEO as a must-do activity (and, for some, has started to rival the number of traffic referrals sent, too).

While many people made mistakes as they tried to cash in on the next phase of the Internet, it was those who embraced the social element of social media who forged alliances, and built audiences and sustainable businesses.

Are you participating?

If you’re not participating in social media, you’re missing out on a lot.

The New York Times reported that Americans are spending as much time online as they are in front of the television set.

People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Facebook served over 500 million active users, and 50% of those users log on to Facebook in any given day. The average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 pages, groups, and events. If Facebook was a country it would be the third-largest in the world. Do you have a presence there?

Let’s not forget about Twitter—the social networking platform is on track to serve 200 million users by year’s end. I’ve got to ask you the same question: do you have a presence there?

Of course, people aren’t just networking and connecting online, they’re publishing too. As of December, 2010 there are over 32 million WordPress publishers.

Personal influence and reach is easier to build than ever before, and it’s more powerful than you could imagine. People’s purchasing behaviors are changing, as are the ways they find and consume content.

An introvert who spends most of their time on a computer in a basement can influence a network of thousands. What if they visit your blog and like what they see? You’ve got ways for them to share your content with that network, don’t you?

The bottom line

The way we use the Internet has changed, and social media simply reflects this. If you aren’t taking part, you’re getting left behind.

Have you actively used and experimented with social media over the last year? How have you fared?

*** If not, 2011 is the year for you and  your business to jump on board with social media and make use of social media marketing. We’d love to help. Contact us for details on how we can increase your business by generating leads for you.

We’ve (GTK Solutions) been talking and blogging about SMO (social media optimization) since our launch. On our website, you can read more about SMO and learn what all the buzz is about. Basically, it’s a long-tail approach to marketing. Social media, as we’ve said before, takes time and will pay off down the road. Gone are the days of paying a company to quickly get you to the top of Google. Google changed it’s formula for how it ranks sites and social media, authority, incoming links, back links, and of course content are king.

Ben Elowitz recently wrote, “Over the past five years, Web publishing has been so heavily dominated by search engine optimization (SEO) that, to many publishing executives, the right keywords have become far more important than their sites’ actual content or audience. But this movement toward SEO has been dangerous, as it’s moved publishers’ eye off their most important job of creating great content, and onto the false goals of keywords, hacks, paid links, and technical engineering that their audience doesn’t know or care about.”

The recent announcement of the Facebook/Bing partnership to integrate social and search results clearly marks the beginning of the end of SEO, and the smartest digital publishers will drop everything to rethink their distribution strategy entirely. (More on this in a future blog post).

Elowitz says, “With the rise of Facebook, we’ve entered a new era of digital media: personalized discovery. The balance of power is shifting: Already sites… are seeing more audience coming from Facebook than from search.

Search was critical when answers to questions were scarce. Google can find an answer to almost any keyword query from among the zillions of pages on the web. But at a time when such answers are abundant, it’s far more valuable to find the best content for me – and increasingly, find it before I’ve even asked for it. The sort algorithm that works best for that is more correlated to who’s doing the asking than how they would phrase the ask. For that level of personalized results, no abject algorithm can keep up without deep knowledge of its users. Advantage: Facebook.

The encouraging implication is that the audience values content, not keywords. And Facebook sides with the audience. And so it’s time to christen a new era of social-media optimization, or “SMO.” The era of SMO liberates publishers from the exercise of tricks, hacks and keywords. Instead, the big opportunity is now once again creating and refining the most appealing content possible.”

Elowitz says, “SMO strategy means appealing to the audience, not an intermediary; knowing what drives interest; and activating people’s desire to consume and share. Sure, there is buzz among many publishers around Facebook logins and likes, and the traffic bumps that come with them. But SMO offers more far than that. It’s about creating a positive feedback loop, where users are rewarded for both consuming and distributing content. The key is to develop virality in media like that of Zynga games and Groupon offers. Beyond, of course, creating great content and experiences that are worth sharing, publishers need to then reward their audiences with the full range of possibilities, including prestige, access, exclusive content and enhanced experiences.”

For those who are still working on implementing search strategies: if you haven’t turned your focus to SMO, you will be left behind. Period. Goodbye SEO. Hello SMO.

You’ve probably felt the rumblings, heard the buzz and/or seen the signs – there’s a revolution underway and it’s only picking up steam. Social media is quite frankly where it’s at these days and is where business happens. We, at GTK Solutions, would like to thank Danny Brown for blogging about facts on social media. Check out what he listed just about Facebook:

1. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
2. More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) is shared each month.
3. Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application.
4. More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.
5. Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.
6. There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
7. People that access Facebook via mobile are twice as active than non-mobile users (think about that when designing your Facebook page).
8. The average Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events.
9. People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
10. There are more than 1 million entrepreneurs and developers from 180 countries on Facebook.

Statistics from Facebook press office. For more cool facts about social media, read his blog post HERE.

We came across this updated version of “The Social Media Revolution” video (2010 version) on YouTube. This video is now out of date. At the time, the video stated that Facebook had 350 million users. Facebook has now passed 620 million users. It seems like it was just a month ago that they broke 500 million!

The revolution is going on. Notice that the video states that 83% of all businesses use Facebook. Read that again! If you haven’t seen this video yet, give it a watch – chew on it, digest it and share it.

Have a favorite video on social media? Comment and send us the link. We’d love to watch it and might even post it or add it as a Favorite on our YouTube page.

We understand: your marketing and advertising budget is small or has been cut. The economy has tanked. Business is slow or non-existent. Your struggling to keep things afloat and you think “Who has money for marketing?”

Often and unfortunately when a business feels the sting of the economy, the first place they cut is marketing. This should be the last thing you cut. It’s been said, “You need to spend money to make money.” Truer words were never spoken. If you want to increase  your business and gain new customers/clients, you’ll have to market your product or service. Please understand: marketing takes time and commitment. But, it can be one of the most cost-effective uses of time in your business. As marketing consultant Roy Young states in his article by the same name, “Marketing is the root of all income.”

The title of this blog (Rifle Marketing) is important because if you have a limited marketing budget, you really need to FOCUS it and concentrate your advertising dollars on social media marketing. Why? As we’ve stated before, “Social media marketing is CHEAPER and FOUR TIMES more effective than traditional marketing.” (Forrester Research)

Check out what the New York Times had to say last year: “For many businesses with Low ad budget, the Social Media Networking is their sole means of Marketing.” – New York Times (July 23, 2009)

Our advice? Instead of taking the limited amount of funds that you have and spreading it out across several marketing channels (shotgun marketing) – this could be a mixture of social media, direct mail, newspapers, billboards, magazines, TV and radio, etc. – take whatever you can afford and bet the house on social media. Put it all in the one area that gives you the most ROI and bang for your buck.

* Obviously, if you have a large marketing budget, you can afford to spread it around. This blog is intended to encourage those with a limited budget.