Why Your Dental Practice Needs More Shareable Content

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Mar 19, 2019

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58 sec read

For as long as we can remember, businesses have relied on advertisement medium to capture their majority audience. But much like dinosaurs and cavemen, the traditional TV and media advertisements have become a thing of the past. Today, where in a world of 7.7 billion people, almost half of the population uses internet to look for businesses and everyday things, it has become extremely important for businesses small and big alike to have and maintain an online presence.

For potential customers, one of the most important aspects of learning about business has shifted from traditional advertising and consultation. Businesses now rely on content marketing to engage their audience in the digital sphere. Adopting a carefully crafted content marketing strategy can result in greater audience engagement and leads for any business imaginable.

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What Is Content Marketing?

To better understand why content marketing has become a go-to strategy for marketing professionals, it is important to learn what content marketing is.

Content marketing a carefully planned marketing approach that focuses on the creation and distribution of content that is relevant, unique and valuable to attract, engage and retain targeted audience with the aim of generating and converting potential profitable leads.

Simply put, content marketing is any type of content, whether blogs, videos, infographics or visual content created and shared with the goal of attracting, engaging and retaining audience.

Content Marketing For Dentists

Everybody knows that they should be visiting a dentist regularly in order to maintain oral hygiene and a healthy smile, but what dentists don’t know is that 51% of their potential patients use internet search engines to look for a dentist. Just acknowledging the above fact is sufficient enough to realize how important it has become for dentists to ensure they are among the top results of search engines.

Now that you have fully absorbed just how much important it is for your dental practice to have an online presence, it’s time to look at how you can make sure to appear in the results when a potential patient is looking for a dentist.

Most people, when looking at content marketing focus on placing and using keywords throughout their websites. However, this is not a strategy that can yield long term effects for your dental practice. The simplest way to understand how a reader or searcher can become a potential customer is to realize that the people searching for dentists online are human.

Only providing human connection and building a relationship with your reader is the way to build trust and ensure they choose you.

If you have a dental practice business or are a dentist, and are still not convinced on why you should be looking at content marketing to bring in more business, here are a few reasons why content marketing can do wonders for you.

Why You Should Consider Content Marketing For Your Dental Practice?

Dental Practice

1. Improved Visibility

Unique and engaging content can provide you a better opportunity to optimize it in a way that will boost visibility. If you focus on creating content pieces that are informative and valuable, you will show up in search engine search results for when people are looking for similar topics you have covered. Once hooked, readers do not refrain from sharing the content.

Valuable content creation does not limit your visibility to search engines, in fact if you post unique, engaging and informative content on your social media, people might share it with their friends and family bringing more and more visitors to your website, and we all know what more visitors can mean for your business.

2. Reach Target Audience

One of the perks of using digital media for marketing your dental practice is that you can create specifically targeted content that can hit home run. Traditional ways of advertising have become tiresome, expensive and ineffective. With content marketing, you can target people looking for a dentist with effective content marketing strategy to attract your target audience, hence, filtering out people who actually are interested in your services so you can convert and retain them as your patients.

3. Build Trust

Choosing a good dentist is not less than choosing a life partner. It can have a huge impact on the quality of your life. Which is why, you need to let your audience know that you are trustworthy and knowledgeable, and that they can trust you to take care of their smiles.

When you create and post content that is informative, it shows the people searching for a dentist that you are not only experienced but you believe in sharing information for the greater wellbeing. Investing in good content can help your potential clients build trust in your knowledge and to show how passionate you are about your profession.

4. Build Reputation

Nobody wants to go to a dentist that doesn’t have good reviews. Everyone including you and me look for referrals when it comes to choosing a dentist or any health practitioner for that matter, which is why you should be working on building a positive reputation among your patients. Using content that talks about authentic information and facts, gives out tips and tricks, and other essential information can help your dental practice build its reputation online.

Once your audience identifies you as a reputed business, they won’t be hesitant in coming to you for their oral hygiene or recommending you to friends and families.

5. Stand Out From The Crowd

Accepting the fact that almost half of the world’s population is online, it is assumable that there must be several other dentists with online presence, looking for potential patients. Now, if everyone is already online and out there, how do you make sure you attract your fair share of the audience. Here comes quality content.

Investing in quality content will help you get noticed by your potential patients. Content that provides value instantly becomes a valuable asset that you are willing to share with your target audience and if you are willing to share the knowledge without any interest or gain, automatically sets you apart from the rest. Your audience soon recognizes you as a valuable connection to their dental health practices.

6. Provide Value

Using digital media doesn’t mean that you have to attract and retain only new clients or patients, but it can also help you keep your existing patients well informed and interested. Creating and sharing valuable content provides value for your existing patients which ensures that they will keep choosing you for your services because of the value you provide to your existing patients. It’s a win-win for all.

7. Boost Growth/Increase Number Of Patients

Effective content marketing strategy can help your dental practice attract and increase followers that may in turn convert into profitable clients.

Creating shareable content gives you an edge over your competition because the more times your content is shared, the more audience it reaches creating a follow back link to your website.

8. Brand Awareness

Among all of the digital media marketing aspects, investing in good content marketing strategy is crucial as it creates a platform for your target audience to build an association with your brand name. If you create content that has valuable information and sticks with your audience, they’ll automatically associate the piece of information with your brand name. This effect creates a beneficial word-of-mouth marketing platform that you won’t even have to work on forever.

Now that we are convinced on the wonders content marketing can bring to your dental practice, let’s take a look at how you can actually approach content marketing in real life.

How To Approach Content Marketing For Dentists

With everything in life, strong planning and execution are the keys to having desired outcome. And content marketing isn’t any different. For this blog, let’s learn from the pros. The experts at CoSchedule have broken down the content marketing process into four big buckets.

  • Planning
  • Publishing
  • Promotion
  • Measurement

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Let’s look at all of these buckets one by one.

Planning

We can’t stress enough on the importance of planning in the whole process of content marketing. Smart planning is the key and will definitely save you a lot of mistakes and hurdles later on.

Identify Your Audience

One of the first steps in planning a content marketing strategy should be identifying your target audience. To help you figure this part out, just answer the four questions below:

  1. What problem does your product solve?
  2. Who is your current audience?
  3. Who is your competition?
  4. How are you different from your competitors?

Once you’ve successfully answered these four questions, congratulations, you are now on your way to understanding:

  1. What content you need to create?
  2. Who are you creating the content for?
  3. What content are your competitors creating?
  4. How can you set your content apart from your competitors?

The answers to these questions will help you create your content core. The mixture of the content regarding what you do, and what your audience cares about. This will become your content core for all of the upcoming content pieces that you will create for your company’s content marketing strategy.

Establish SMART Goals

We won’t go into much details about SMART goals, instead we’ll just move on to the importance of establishing goals that specifically state:

  • What you’re going to achieve?
  • When you’ll achieve it?

Develop Your Content Strategy

It’s time to finally get on to developing your content strategy. To simplify, here are the questions that will help you create your content marketing strategy for your dental practice.

  • What content will you create?
  • Why will you create the content?
  • How will your success be measured?

Create A Content Evaluation Strategy

Once you have a content marketing strategy in place, you also need to figure out how you’re going to evaluate and decide what is working and what is not? To help you perform regular content audits, Pam Neely has shared a comprehensive guide which doubles as a content audit template.

Generate Ideas For Content

The final step in your extensive smart planning phase is to generate a list of possible content ideas to help you create content that becomes an instant hit among your readers.

Content Publishing Phase

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Getting your content planning done means you get to move on to the next step that is executing the plan that you’ve just made. Let’s see how your content planning will come to life.

1. Understanding Keywords And Keywords Research

One of the most important aspects of creating content is to understand how keywords and keywords research work. Keywords help you understand what your audience wants and how you should focus your content on keywords to reach maximum number of audience. But if you have not done keywords research before, don’t fret, because here are a few tools that can be of extreme help to research keywords you can rank on based on difficulty and competition.

2. Creating A Workflow

To make sure your content marketing strategy is executed flawlessly, it is recommended that you create a content calendar to plan out your dental content pieces in advance. Next, create a workflow so you and everyone on your content marketing team knows what to do and when.

A simple workflow can be crucial in accomplishing success in your content marketing strategy.

Content Promotion Phase

Now once you have planned and successfully executed good content marketing strategy, next comes the step to promote it so it is shared now and again resulting in growing audience and potential leads. Let’s take a look at how you can promote your dental practice content pieces.

1. Identify Social Media Platforms

One of the major platforms to use to share your content created for your dental practice are social media platforms. Use your social media accounts to create a following and then to share the content and bring back traffic to your website. Prioritize social media platforms on their purposes to better engage your audience with relevant type of content. Use the following infographic to help you understand the importance of social media platforms depending on their purpose.

Identify Social Media Platforms

2. Email Marketing And Search Engine Optimization

As stated by Campaign Monitor, Email marketing is 40% more effective for acquiring customers than social media, and it shouldn’t be hard to accept because it delivers 4,000% ROI. Search Engine Optimization is nothing short in yielding lasting benefits after your social media and email marketing course has been run. It is so effective that a well-crafted SEO content strategy can boost up your traffic by up to 500%.

Email Marketing

3. Outreach

Last but not the least, use a traditional PR / Outreach technique to promote your content to the audience directly that might be interested in your content. The key to not sound hard core sales personnel, try this guide to PR by Neil Patel. With your quest to outreaching to your audience directly, focus on building contacts and relationship rather than your customers, because according to Heather Anne Ritchie-Carson, cofounder of <Onboardly, it’s time to put back the human in PR relationships.

4. Measurement

To guarantee that any strategy is working, evaluation is important. To gauge how effective your dental content marketing strategy has worked, measurement through analytics tools. Using some of the most common analytics tools is the easiest way to measure the growth of your dental practice. Here are a few common ones to get you started:

  • Google Analytics
  • Piwik
  • Heap
  • Kissmetrics

5. Reporting Schedule

Evaluating your content marketing strategy regularly is the only way to learn about its effectiveness. Therefore, setting up a reporting schedule is important. But if you are even slightly like us (forgetful, shh), you can even set up automatic measurement schedule with this guide from Google.

Content Marketing Strategies For Dentists

Now that we have created a fair understanding of content marketing and its important and the process, let’s dive into some of the most commonly used content marketing strategies that have proven effective for a lot of dentists and other medical professionals along with hundreds of other businesses.

Before we start exploring content marketing strategies for your dental practice, here are some statistics to get you excited.

Content Marketing Strategies

Exciting, no?

1. Blog Posts

Creating a great blog post is the first step in your content marketing strategy, but wouldn’t it be sad if only a fewer people were reading the awesome blog post that you wrote? Having a proven blog posting strategy like the one here can ensure your efforts and valuable knowledge is reaping benefits for both you and your readers.

Blog Post

2. EBooks, White Papers and Case Studies

Creating and publishing in-depth researches are a great way to show your readers that you are passionate about ongoing learning in your profession. This helps the reader that has crossed the initial engagement period with your blog and is looking for more information to build their trust in your services. Sharing case studies prove that you are open to learning from your mistakes as a dentist and believe in growing forward with sharing transparent information that the reader can ponder upon.

EBooks, White Papers and Case Studies

3. Videos

Remember when we talked about building relationships with your customers and providing value? Using videos are a great way to do just that. Creating an informative video or a learning guide can, not only give your existing patients a gentle reminder of things they should remember minus the embarrassment of asking again, but it is also a lucrative way to attract more new patients.

Videos

4. Infographics

Much like videos, visual content gets maximum share due to their readability and the ability to pack complete information in a short space. Infographics are easily becoming a go-to content marketing strategy because of their potential to become share worthy. They only key to producing a shareable infographic is to keep it simple, readable, reliable with references and focusing on visual content. One of our favorite tips to creating an effective infographic is the one by Neil.

5. Podcasts

Another great type of content to give a little oomph to your content marketing strategy for your dental practice is to invest in creating podcasts. These little podcast episodes can become the bridge between your potential patients and you. It is a great way to connect with your audience and share valuable content.

6. Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging is a proven tactic to build credibility for yourself as a professional while getting a follow link to your website to increase traffic. A lot of websites and blogs are almost always ready to accept in-depth, well researched articles by guest authors because as stated by Social Marketing Writing, “62.96% of people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.” While planning out content marketing strategy for your dental practice, including to acquire guest blogging opportunities should be a must.

7. Media Publications

Everyone knows that being featured in a media publication is kinda a big deal for any business because it means popularity and exposure. As much as this sounds like a dream, Jayson DeMers, founder of AudienceBloom has given some fool proof tips to help you plan on getting your dental practice featured in media publications.

Mistakes To Avoid While Content Marketing For Dentists

Creating and sharing content to market your dental practice in the hopes of attracting and acquiring new patients can become overwhelming. And with possibilities of reaching your content marketing goals come a fair share of mistakes you’ll make learning on this journey. But you don’t have to make all of the mistakes yourself, which is why we are listing down a few common content marketing mistakes as stated by Jeff Bullas that dentists can avoid in their content marketing strategies to grow their online presence and business.

1. Failure To Plan

This is a no-brainer as we all know that if we fail to plan, we are planning for failure. This is the most costly mistake you can make in your content marketing strategy. It is crucial to plan clearly as to what the business aims to achieve through content marketing and exactly how it has to be executed to avoid maximum chances of failure. Our only tip is to spend sufficient time in planning to avoid failing.

2. Unclear Purpose

Many a times, businesses can fall trap in figuring out their true purpose when considering content marketing. It is important that you remember the reason why you’re creating the content and only focus on providing value to the reader and build relationships, the rest will follow.

3. Unprofessionalism

Understanding the need of content tone and style for your business is utmost important. If you create content that works for a specific industry, one cannot trust it to work for your industry as well. You need to remain professional while writing or creating content in language that is correct, clear and concise. The best thing is to keep your audience in mind, the people who you want to read your content.

4. Lacking The Social Signals

The importance of using social media to share your content cannot be neglected. However, maintaining a balanced usage is critical. Some businesses lack the use of social media for their content marketing which means they miss out on a huge chunk of prospective audience. But, at the same time, over using social media can move you away from your content marketing results. Do not rely heavily on social media platforms to market and promote your content rather create engaging, and valuable content that is share worthy.

5. Avoiding The Organic Search Factors

One of the major reasons to use content marketing for your dental practice is to enhance your search engine rankings to improve online visibility. However, if the latest SEO techniques are not incorporated within the content defeats the entire purpose of content marketing for dentists and all other professions. If you do not feel confident in your skills to optimize your content with SEO techniques, it is always better to engage a professional to help your maximize growth through content marketing and SEO.

Conclusion

Content marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness and grow your online presence in the age where if you’re not online, you’re losing business. Dentists and other medical practitioners have come to realize just how important it is to invest in content marketing for their dental practices. Thus making sure they know content marketing benefits, processes and strategies can boost their online traffic and conversion rates by ten folds.

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