5 Foundational Elements of Content Marketing
Is your practice leveraging content to reach more prospective patients and ultimately grow your business?
Content marketing is a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy, and for good reason:
- It gets three times more leads than paid search advertising
- It costs 62% less than outbound marketing
- 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders
So not only is content marketing more effective, it gets more bang for your buck and is what your audience is looking for.
But, what are the foundational elements of an effective content marketing strategy? Let’s take a look.
1. Create Value
You don’t want to create noise, you want to create valuable content prospective patients will want to read (and hopefully share). Ensuring value is the bedrock of your content marketing initiative will set you up for success. Not only will you be providing your target audience with useful information, you’ll help answer common questions that may have led your website visitor to you in the first place.
2. Know Your Audience
You can only create the right type of content if you know your audience, so make sure you know exactly who you’re targeting. One great way to figure out who you should be marketing to is to look at your current patients. Why did they come to you? What were their concerns? What are their demographics? This will help you better zone in on who you want to find your practice, and therefore what content you should be writing to attract them.
3. Promote Properly
Knowing your audience will also help you with this—the better you know them, the better you’ll know where they’re at online. The second part of “content marketing” is marketing, so although you should be spending a good amount of time on the “content” part, the “marketing” piece is just as essential. After all, what’s the point in creating content if you’re not promoting it? Once you know where and when your target audience is online, make sure you’re promoting your content on those sites when prospective patients are actively engaged.
4. Hone Technical Skills
Unfortunately, writing and marketing content isn’t enough these days to stay ahead of the competition. Having an understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices can really up your game. Not only will implementing SEO best practices into your written content make your content more user-friendly, it will attract more traffic to your practice’s website. These techniques can also help with the overall user experience (UX) of your site.
5. Analyze What’s Working
Last but not least, make sure you’re measuring your content marketing efforts to see what’s working and what isn’t. After all, how will you know which type of content to create more of or what topics are most popular unless you’re tracking performance of each piece? As metrics systems are becoming more popular and widespread, they’re becoming easier and easier to use (and cheaper). Pick one that suits your needs and use the data to inform your content marketing strategy.
By implementing these five foundational elements of content marketing in your practice’s overall digital marketing strategy, you’ll be sure to see a more engaged online audience that converts into real-life patients!
