How Can Content Marketing Take Your Dental Practice To The Next Level?

By Lucy Wyndham

Around 77% of prospective patients conduct research via online search engines, and around 76% do so on a provider’s website, a Google study has found. Moreover, some 71% of those who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend it to friends and loved ones. Content marketing has become a crucial component of dental digital strategies, with 94% of people surveyed saying they would purchase the products or services of a business they followed. Creating and publishing quality content is no longer a luxury for any business in the medical field. Rather, it is increasingly playing a leading role in marketing strategy, since search engines are fast becoming the primary way that new patients are first coming into contact with dental services.

Content Marketing Tactics: Making Your Selection

There are many ways that your dental practice can cater content to existing and prospective patients. These include blogging, social media channels (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter), case studies and white papers, videos and webinars. It is important to experiment with different tactics and rely on analytics to test which are resulting in the highest lead and conversion rate. Most renowned clinics have a blog and social media accounts to start off with. Yours should contain various case studies so that patients can view your work via ‘before and after’ photographs. If you do write white papers, offer them for free download in exchange for your audience’s emails. This will enable you to target emails at different groups depending on the nature of the papers downloaded.

Investing In A Good Writer

Not all medical professionals enjoy writing, so enlist a talented writer in your marketing team for content writing, or rely on a trusted, recommended copywriter for your website and blog. Ensure that you either pick a writer who is skilled in a variety of writing roles or rely on two different professionals for copywriting and blogging. The two tasks are actually very different: content writers will be in charge of your advertisements, as their aim is to write copy that results in immediate action or conversion. Content writers focus more on providing information, entertaining audiences, and building a loyal follower base that will tune in to your social media channels, and blog regularly.

Planning Your Content

Once you have experimented with different types of content and (in the case of social media) with the timing of your posts, you should set a detailed schedule of when and where to post content throughout the week. Ideally, you should have a new blog post every few days or, at the very least, once a week. Upload new stories and images to Instagram and other apps to show off your work and consider occasional vlogging. Software such as HootSuite allows you to pre-upload and program the posting of content across a wide array of social media channels. These tools improve time efficiency by allowing you to take just one morning or day to program an entire week’s (or longer) worth of content.

If you have a dental practice, then content marketing should undoubtedly be a big priority in terms of reaching a wider audience and maintaining a loyal patient base. Dental offices can rely on various content types – including blogs, white papers, and social media images and stories. Experimentation will be important in the early stages, but once you identify the type of content that resonates with patients, ensure you cater your uploads to them and rely on software to pre-program uploads to different media – in time you’ll have built a successful content marketing strategy.