Why Is Content Marketing the Best Bet for a Medical Practice?

It seems marketing and brand promotions are everywhere. Sometimes blocking us from watching YouTube content, and sometimes disguised as blog posts with titles like “11 Secrets to Succeed Overnight,” marketing is becoming harder to run away from.

In the middle of all of this forced marketing, medical practices have an incredible opportunity to stop interrupting and start helping their patients.

Welcome to the world of healthcare content marketing.

Healthcare content marketing focuses on driving sales by giving your patients what they are looking for while they are actively looking for it.

Let’s talk about some of the key benefits of content marketing to help you understand how valuable this strategy can be for your medical practice marketing strategy.

Why Should You Invest in Content Marketing?

1. Google Likes Valuable Content

Yes, Google is all about quality content. The search engine is obsessed with providing users with the search experiences that deliver what they are looking for. High-quality content is the best way to give that experience.

According to a study from SparkToro, Google sends 10 times more traffic to a website than Facebook.

In other words, content marketing can dramatically boost website traffic from your most effective traffic source – organic search.

2. Content Drives Sales

Increasing website traffic is useless if it doesn’t result in more revenue.

But don’t worry; the content will help increase your bottom line, too. Most of your patients will not be ready to buy from you the first time they hear about your medical practice. Patients go through a buying process before scheduling an appointment. With smaller decisions (e.g., a bag of chips), this process is quick; with larger products (e.g., a new doctor), this process takes much longer.

Before making a purchase, patients need to realize they have a problem that needs to be addressed (awareness stage). They take time to research and understand their problem (consideration stage). Then they make a decision on which doctor is best for them (choice stage).

A well-constructed content marketing strategy will help your potential patients during all three stages.

Content marketing helps by:

1. Bringing your potential patients one step closer to scheduling an appointment.

2. Building a relationship with your prospects to make them more likely to choose your medical practice over competitors.

3. Controls the Online Conversation

It’s no secret that selling your services becomes much more comfortable when your target audience is already looking for what you have to offer. The same holds true for selling everything from a sofa to car insurance, and healthcare services are not an exception.

Controlling the conversation while your most likely patients are educating themselves is invaluable. Why not control the conversation when your patients are deciding what they need? Why allow your competitors to beat you to the punch and steal your potential patients?

4. Less Annoying Than Traditional Healthcare Marketing

Your prospects do not like being interrupted in the middle of their day by people calling them trying to sell services.

According to a survey by Marketing Land, nearly 40 percent of Internet users have ad blockers, and this number is not going to come down anytime soon.

Sure, banner ads can be an excellent way to promote your brand. But spending money on newspaper ads and TV commercials that interrupt your prospects does not sound like the best way to attract them.

Content marketing enables you to build patient relationships by putting your brand in front of your patients in a way that helps them. So why pay insane amounts of money for a 30-second TV commercial or a one-time newspaper ad? Content marketing is much more productive and costs much less.

5. Strengthens Your Brand Awareness

Let’s say you run a small dental practice and decide to write a short, crisp and informative blog that ranks first on Google for “Best Tips for Maintaining Your Oral Hygiene.”

Thousands of people search for that exact phrase on Google every day. By writing this piece, you have put your healthcare brand in front of thousands of potential patients every month.

And that’s just for one exact phrase. There are millions of people who search for other phrases or keywords related to healthcare. Now, if just 0.1 percent of these readers are local patients looking for a trustworthy and knowledgeable healthcare provider, imagine the extent of your brand exposure and its potential impact on your sales.

6. Increases Brand Credibility

So your oral hygiene blog now appears in front of 1+ million potential patients every year. Out of this number, an average 25 percent will click on your blog.

Assuming you put time into making the blog helpful to your readers, 250,000 people will view your healthcare brand as a thought leader and credible source of information. Many of those people will become your patients over time or refer some of their friends to your practice.

7. Provides Compounding ROI

Encouraged by the success of your first blog, let’s assume you decide to write a second blog about “Oral Care During Pregnancy.”

Over time, you rank first on Google for this exact phrase, which is searched millions of times every year. Again, even if 0.1 percent of these readers are local patients, you’ve put your brand in front of additional thousands of prospects every year, which results in an increase of qualified website visitors every month.

Each additional blog has the potential to increase your website visitors. Also, other sites link to valuable information sources, and each of these links will help drive qualified visitors to your healthcare website.

8. Grows Social Media Followers

Each potential patient who finds valuable content on your healthcare website becomes a potential advocate for your healthcare brand.

Many of these readers will follow you on Facebook or Instagram so they can stay up-to-date on future blogs that you share. Many of these readers will share your content with their friends and family on social media, which helps exponentially grow your social media fan base over time.

9. Drives Visibility to Your Services Pages

Content marketing, directly and indirectly, drives more people to your services pages.

Directly:

Assuming you write a blog that relates to what you offer, many of those readers will go on to visit your website services pages after reading your blogs (especially if your articles link out to those services pages).

Indirectly:

When you write outstanding content, other websites link back to your content. Search engines look at backlinks as testimonials that your content is a useful resource. And each page that your blog links to is seen as a helpful resource, as well.

So How Can You Get Started with Healthcare Content Marketing?

You need to ask yourself this: Do I have the time to learn tips and tricks of content marketing and take a DIY approach, or should I partner with an experienced firm that does this every day?

If you are interested in the first approach, subscribe to our blogs that will give you a step-by-step guide to grow your medical practice through content marketing.

However, if you are interested in finding a healthcare marketing partner to help you with content marketing, then contact us and we will set up a time to get to know each other.

Simply put, there’s no better long-term healthcare marketing strategy than content marketing. It is the strategy that provides compounding ROI without annoying your patients.