If you’re a doctor, dentist, or other healthcare professional, you may believe that all you need are top-notch medical skills and solid academic credentials to popularize your practice.
In fact, you may think that marketing your practice is unnecessary. However marketing your business and building your “brand” is essential to the success of your healthcare practice.
Although you may not be familiar with it, in the digital age, one of the key ways to market your business or practice is with Content Marketing. As you will learn from this article, Content Marketing is as important to a doctor or dentist, as it is for any retail store or business firm.
If you’re new to Content Marketing, you may wonder, what is Content Marketing? It’s simple…Content Marketing is a sales-enhancing marketing approach focused on creating and sharing valuable, relevant and targeted content. This content can range from blog articles to social media posts to content-rich, SEO-optimized websites. It aims to consistently attract and retain a clearly defined audience, thereby ultimately driving profitable patient engagement and action.
The facts speak for themselves…These days, about 61% of consumers feel better about a company that has a blog. Also, companies with active blogs receive 97% more leads than companies that do not have blogs. 41% of patients admit that social media influences their selection of a healthcare provider. Approximately 86% of Business-to-Customer marketers use Content Marketing to help grow their business. These numbers apply to your healthcare practice as well! If you’ve heard the phase, Content is King – well it’s true.
There are several reasons why you need Content Marketing for your healthcare practice. It not only helps you, as a healthcare professional to outshine your competition, but it also helps you establish a continuous communication with your patients and prospective patients.
How and why you should build an effective Content Marketing strategy for your healthcare practice:
So, here’s how you can build an effective marketing strategy for your healthcare practice and why Content Marketing is so important:
- It positions you as a leader in your field: Patients and prospective patients are using social media more than ever to obtain health information. Digital marketing for healthcare can improve patient engagement and can empower patients to make better health decisions. By regularly posting relevant content that educates existing and prospective patients, you build credibility for your brand and position yourself as a leader in your field.
- It provides assurance to your patients that your brand (practice) is right for their healthcare needs: According to research from the Pew Research Center, about one in three American adults have gone online for healthcare information and about 72% of Internet users have gone online to look for health information in the past year alone. Also, about 77% of patients used search prior to booking a medical or dental appointment. Keeping these numbers in mind, an effective Content Marketing strategy can result in increased existing patient engagement, as well as new patients. If you provide accurate, helpful and trusted information to your patients and prospective patients, chances are, they will consider your practice at the “top of the list” when booking their next health appointment.
- It boosts your website position / visibility in organic search results: Increasingly, the healthcare industry is slowly adapting to the online marketing era and there is stiff competition for search traffic. If you have an effective content strategy, you can increase your search engine ranking and overall web presence. This allows you to be found by prospective patients quickly, when a prospective patient conducts an online search. The more relevant content you provide to your patients, the higher your search engine ranking!
- It builds relationships with your existing and potential patients and helps turn them into “brand advocates” for your business: To build relationships with your existing and potential patients, you need to actively engage with your audience by replying to their questions, sharing informative posts, posting videos about various health issues, and so on. You should regularly post articles, tips, blogs and messages to educate your patients. High-quality content that can be easily shared, helps build loyalty along with a positive reputation and this can result in a substantial growth of your practice.
If you are a doctor, dentist or other healthcare professional, you should remember that your prospective patients have choices when it comes to their healthcare provider. You can use Content Marketing to become the healthcare provider of choice for your patients.
For more information on how you can use Content Marketing for expanding your healthcare practice, contact Kristine Grace DDS, MS, MBA at kristineg@intellahealth.net.
by Kristine Grace, Sep-12-2016