Once you have your basic website set up, you need to ensure customers can find it. This means you need to become familiar with the way internet search engines work, and you may want to use the power of social media to drive people there. In this article we look at simple steps that can help your local community find you and engage with you – through search and social.

Simple steps to search optimisation

A lot of pharmacy website visits start with a simple ‘search’. But on the internet, you are competing with every other website around, so it’s important to ensure that when people search for ‘pharmacy near me’ or similar terms, your business is one of the top ones listed. This requires you to understand a little about the way search engines such as Google work. It sounds daunting, but as with building your web presence you can start with small, simple steps and there is plenty of help available.

Let’s first take a look at what happens if you search for ‘pharmacy near me’ on Google.

Search engines such as Google work by ranking websites according to factors such as locality, how relevant content is to the search terms and the length of time your business has been established online.

Some of the businesses listed in the above search will rank highly because they have paid to be found when users search for certain keywords or terms. This is called paid search advertising. Others will be listed at the top because the content on their Google business page and/or website closely fulfils the search criteria. This is called organic search marketing.

Let’s look at what’s involved with each type of search marketing:

“Google basically matches what you’re looking for with an answer. It then measures the click through rate, i.e. the amount of people that come onto your site, and then the proportion who bounce straight off your site. If I type that I’m looking for beard trimmers and the search result shows me a picture of bikes, then I’m going to just go somewhere else. Similarly, if you’re looking for green mugs and I show you a picture of crockery, and you have to go looking for those green mugs, you probably won’t find what you’re looking for. When the Google algorithm sees that this person didn’t find what they’re looking for, it realises it hasn’t done its job properly and it reduces that website’s ranking for that keyword and/or increases your ad price compared with other sites that are showing green mugs.”
Andy Boysan, The Independent Pharmacy

When you consider how search algorithms work, you can see why it is so important to carefully consider the domain name of your website and the content that sits on your home page (see Getting online: The first steps to building a web presence for your pharmacy).
At a minimum, you should ensure algorithms can pick up your location and your type of business. But to improve organic ratings further, you need to continually update your website’s content to reflect what customers are looking for.

It is worth spending time writing a list of keywords that you then include in your homepage content to ensure your business is picked up by search engine algorithms. There is no point writing a beautiful webpage of content about your pharmacy if no one is going to find it.

Think about your existing and desired customers, the products and services you want people to know about and then the search terms people might use to find them. For example:

You could also visit the websites of the top three pharmacies that come up when you search for these products and services locally and look at the keywords they use.

“You’ve got to think of a website like cheese, or like wine; they get better with age. They get more value as they mature. If you have just bought a website domain and your page is brand new, it’s going to take a while to rank on Google. Even if you’re not going to go straight into digital marketing, it’s a good idea to have some type of web presence so you can start getting ranked for it.”
Andy Boysan, The Independent Pharmacy

Leveraging social media to increase revenue

You might be wondering how you can harness the power of social media for your pharmacy business, as many of your services and products are likely to be discreet, i.e. ones that people don’t want to necessarily talk about. Few people would probably like or share a post on social media about haemorrhoid cream, or recommend the local pharmacy where they bought emergency contraception. But social media can play an important role in increasing footfall into bricks and mortar pharmacies if you invest your time in it thoughtfully.

Top tips on using social media for independent pharmacies:

1. Approach using social media from a ‘business’ perspective, not as a personal user who is seeking to build up followers. The only way to drive large numbers of followers is to constantly post lots of new content that people want to share further. This is very time-consuming. For small businesses without a dedicated social marketing team, the best use of social media is to use its platforms, advertising and paid media. Social media is also a good way for people to rate your business. If potential customers can see instantly that 10,000 people have given you a five-star review, this provides considerable trust in the products and services you offer.

2. Target your activity. For example, if you set up a Facebook business page you can choose to target your adverts to Facebook users within a certain distance of your shop. This is important because you pay for click-throughs to your website. Unless you have an online shop offering national delivery, if your shop is in Wales, you don’t want to pay when people in Scotland click through to try and book your services.

“In areas where our pharmacies are in villages, the local council have their own Instagram page and they quite often promote businesses and try to drive customers to shop local. So we always offer local discounts and things like that on the High Street. Because we are a community pharmacy, and we want to be part of the community wherever we are.”
Amir Bhogal, Pyramid Pharmacy

3. Choose the right platform for your target customers. Different social media platforms have different user demographics and there are some general rules of thumb:

Twitter is used by people of all ages, but you have to work very hard to get any penetration of your messages on Twitter. Many large companies use Twitter for their customer services but they have teams to manage this.

4. Make the most of product or service endorsements. If a celebrity or healthcare professional endorses a product or service you provide, then sharing their endorsement on your social media channels is a great way to advertise your business. Similarly, personal endorsements from trusted healthcare professionals can work well if you can get them. For example, GP Dr Hilary Jones, endorses several community and online health initiatives and delivers health advice in partnership with the Co-op Pharmacy. A household name such as this might be beyond the reach of a small independent pharmacy, but if you can affiliate or partner with local, trusted healthcare professionals, this can boost engagement with your online presence. You don’t always need to do all the legwork to use endorsements. Many wholesale companies that provide your products will already have social media assets you can use, such as customer testimonials or celebrity endorsements. Before you start sharing any endorsements and recommendation, it is important to familiarise yourself with the MHRA Blue Book guidance. Which states that recommendations by scientists, healthcare professions or celebrities should not encourage the consumption of any medicinal products¹.

5. Use social media for two-way communication. As well as using social media as a proactive way to stay in touch with your customers, you can also use social media simply as an additional way for them to get in touch with you. This can be helpful if your phone lines and very busy and ensure you don’t miss out on potential custom. If you choose to use social media in this way, it is important to set up expectations about how quickly you can respond to messages through these channels.

Now that we’ve considered how to approach using social media for your business, let’s look at the types of content you could generate to engage customers.

Social media content ideas

It can be difficult to think of what to post on social media if you are new to using it for business. Here are some ideas for inspiration:

“We started by buying a light box from Amazon for about £20 and took a photo of the Product Of The Week. Then in some of our stores, we have a glass case where we have the product of the week and it really encourages sales of that product or in that range. And because people have to come into the store it’s another way of increasing footfall. Then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone was buying analgesics, hand sanitizing gels and disposable surgical masks in large amounts. So a big part of our social media activity was promoting the fact that had those items in stock.”
Amir Bhogal, Pyramid Pharmacy

“For inspiration and ideas, try following Abraham the Pharmacist on YouTube. He’s a really good example of what pharmacists could do to promote themselves. He’s been going for about four years now and produces a video every week, like how to treat acne and dry eye syndrome and to use your inhalers properly through to busting myths about microwaves causing cancer. Some of his videos have had over a million views.”
Andy Boysan, The Independent Pharmacy

If you have time and feel comfortable filming short videos of yourself talking about a particular condition or product then this can be a great way to provide useful, engaging healthcare information while also advertising your business at the same time. Remember though that you don’t have to build up to millions of followers, for a local business it’s more important to target useful information to your desired customers.

“One thing I’ve seen is pharmacists using their social media platforms for pharmacy education. Lots of pharmacists have their own individual social media accounts and are either teaching pharmacy students over Instagram or Twitter, or giving YouTube lessons for free, but at the same time promoting their own business, which is a smart thing to do. Obviously, the practical experience while at university is limited, and everything pharmacists learn is in practice. So if students are getting practical information from a pharmacy, they are going to keep following your account, and they’ll encourage their friends to do the same.”
Amir Bhogal, Pyramid Pharmacy

Keeping it current

One of the challenges of social media marketing is that you need to post content fairly regularly. This can be a barrier if your time is limited, but there are ways to get around this. First, is that you can just post high-quality content once month. For example:

“We treated 50,000 people really well this year”

“All our customers rated us as excellent”.

You can also just use it to announce services, such as:

“Did you know we provide an asthma review service in your community?”.

If you have great ideas for content but just no time to keep posting it, you can also programs that schedule social media updates so that you can upload your content ahead of time and send it out automatically.

Keeping the content current is important because it all feeds back to your website and is an essential part of your maturing your website that will enable it to move up the rankings
on Google.

“None of this is a golden bullet. If you do a load of social media and you don’t do anything else, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be number one on Google. Each element of an online presence all play their little part.”
Andy Boysan, The Independent Pharmacy

Keeping it safe

One of the key considerations for using social media as a pharmacy business is ensuring any marketing is compliant with advertising regulations for medications – the MHRA’s blue guide¹. For example, you cannot promote prescription medications you can only talk about the conditions they are used to treat. One of the key limitations therefore is that if someone is searching for a term that you are unable to use, such as a drug name, they might not find your business associated with that drug – even though you may be able to prescribe it or offer advice about the condition. So when considering your keywords, it’s important to bear this in mind, and ensure you focus on descriptors of conditions.

“The way we communicate to our patients after they have bought products is to reemphasize how to get the best out of them. We didn’t invent that, pharmacy has been doing it for years – in a face to face setting, and also more recently as the new medicine service (NMS) and medicine use reviews (MUR). We just digitized it and said to people: ‘Here are your medicines. This is how to get the most out of them if you take it properly.’ That’s why we have such open high open and click through rates because patients have learned that these communications are important and they add value.”
Andy Boysan, The Independent Pharmacy

References

1. Medicine and Healthcare Regulatory Agency, 2020. The Blue Guide Advertising and Promotion of Medicines in the UK. (Accessed July 2021)
2. Information Commissioner’s Office, Health and Social Care guidance (Accessed July 2021)
3. National Pharmacy Association, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Accessed July 2021)

Resources

Google Ads, Google Ads Overview (Accessed October 2021)