Doctors who have their own personal website and take the time to invest in content marketing are seeing excellent returns on their investment.
Aside from the technical side of content being king when it comes to SEO, it helps patients feel a genuine connection with you, the physician, before booking an appointment.
In this post, I’m going to focus on the basics of content marketing and how to create a strategy that works.
What Is Content Marketing for Doctors, and Why Is It Important?
When it comes to content marketing, you’re focusing on a very specific patient audience. Your goal becomes to create and deliver valuable content over time that helps the patients see you as the local expert in your specialty.
Rather than simply trying to get your branding in front of patients, the content you deliver on your website and social platforms helps the patients you’re trying to attract before they step foot in your office.
Doing this over time, especially if you answer health-related questions patients are searching for on Google, you will establish yourself as the local expert.
What we see right now online is that it is a wide-open opportunity for doctors who want to grow their patient base.
Advertising alone is inefficient and largely ineffective in many cases. If you really want to attract new patients and do so for a long time, consistently creating content is the best way currently to make that happen.
Here are a few tips to help you get started with your content marketing strategy.
1). Focus on Your Specialty
Even if you’re a general practitioner, you don’t need to try and be all things to all people online. Focus on what you know and do best, and create content based on that.
Plus, another major advantage of having your own website and creating content is that you can use content marketing as a strategy to attract more of the patients you actually want to see.
2). Embrace Your Personality Online
The impression of you that patients get while visiting your site should match what your actual personality is in consult. The last thing you want is for a patient to come in and meet you face to face and think you are incredibly different than what they perceived online.
If you have a serious demeanor, your online content and even videos should have more of that tone. Likewise, if you are humorous, be humorous in your tone online.
3). Make Your Website Your Primary Platform
Simply put, you don’t want to build your house on a rented lot. While social media channels can be helpful ways to share your content, it should all originate and reside on your own website. The reason being, you have no control over any other platform, but you do have control over your website.
And in the age of de-platforming that we live in, you really don’t want to rely on other platforms like Facebook or YouTube to have full control of your content.
The opportunities for doctors to benefit from content marketing are still incredible. Having your own website and producing great content will pay dividends and help you strategically from an SEO position.
If you’re considering this as a strategy, let me encourage you to get started right away. More and more doctors are beginning to figure this out, and the marketing opportunities you have today may not be there in a few years if you don’t take action now.