Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
Let us paint you a picture: let’s say you have a birdhouse in your yard that you enjoy having feathered occupants in each year — but this year is different. This year, that family of bluebirds for whom you so graciously built a home to attract last year has decided your birdhouse is not up to their standards anymore. No, they’d rather upgrade… to your house. That’s right, while you were at work, they went to town on your siding, and you now have non-paying tenants who love nothing more than to rise with the sun each morning.
Fortunately, all this did was accelerate the inevitable fact that your siding needed to be replaced within the next year or two, birds or no birds. So what’s the first thing you do to figure out what type of new siding you should purchase? You search the Web for answers to a number of questions: What’s the best siding material available?; What are the benefits of HardiePlank vs. vinyl?; Who should I hire to replace my siding?; How much will it cost to re-side my house?; and so on and so forth.
Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you came across one company’s website that could answer all your questions, as well as provide you with key information about which you didn’t even think to ask? A website that’s literally a one-stop resource for everything you want to know about siding. If you did stumble upon such a site, you’d most likely be more inclined to contact this company for an estimate, wouldn’t you? After all, they certainly seem to be the experts in siding.
That’s the beauty of content marketing. By developing an effective content marketing strategy for your medical or dental website, you can help position your practice as an expert, grow your brand awareness, and increase your opportunity to be found online. Additionally, following an editorial calendar can ensure consistent, relevant information is being added to your site, which helps to engage patients while educating them on everything they want to know about a particular treatment or procedure of interest. When executed properly, content marketing can lead to greater patient loyalty, ultimately resulting in consumer action (e.g., scheduling a consultation/appointment). To help you get a better idea of what this looks like and how it can help boost business for your practice, let’s dig a little deeper into some of the benefits:
Answering Common Patient Questions
As demonstrated above, patients who are considering one of the elective procedures you offer are likely to have a lot of questions. If you turn your website into an educational resource for them by answering frequently asked questions, not only will they tend to spend more time on your site, but they will also be likely to have more confidence in your abilities — meaning the chances of them selecting you as their provider will be greater.
Keeping Your Site Regularly Updated
Using an editorial calendar, a content marketing plan can map out projects throughout the year so you have more consistent updates to your site, which search engines like Google love to see. With a strategic plan to regularly publish blogs and expand informative pages on your site, you should start to see an increase in your ranking position.
Enhancing Your Visibility in Search Engine Results
Once again, the goal of having a content marketing plan in place is to achieve greater visibility in search results (ultimately helping you gain more business for your practice). Thankfully, Google tends to reward sites that have informative, viewer-friendly content that is routinely updated or expanded — in fact, in many cases, this type of content may even be spotlighted in a featured snippet directly on the results page, which can drive more traffic to your site.
To learn more about the benefits of content marketing for medical and dental practices, be sure to keep an eye on our blog. Or, if you’d like to speak with one of our consultants about setting up your own content marketing plan, feel free to contact Rosemont Media today.
Editor’s note: The original version of this post was published on May 9, 2014.