Many dental practices find themselves in a unique position—while they can rely on many of their patients to consistently schedule appointments every six months, they must still battle the idea held by many that visiting the dentist is no walk in the park. Fortunately, content marketing allows dentists to reach out to potential patients to both connect with and educate them. Here is a look at how your dental practice can use content marketing strategies, including blogging and social media networking, to boost your website’s visibility in search rankings and cultivate a positive reputation within your community.
Set Measurable Goals
Like any advertising method, you should have clear goals in place for your content marketing campaign. Find out how your business’ website is currently performing, and identify what you’d like to improve. To start, determine how many users are visiting your website each month, which pages they are visiting, and which keywords are drawing them to your site. Then, talk to your content marketing strategist to decide the best ways to improve these metrics and use content marketing to generate new patient leads.
Post Useful Content
Dentists have a great opportunity to connect with and inform patients through content marketing. You can post blogs, infographics, and links to resources that provide the answers to common dental questions. Share patient-centered content that illustrates the importance of flossing, explains why wisdom teeth are so often removed, or breaks down the differences between various types of toothpaste. By posting informative content, you will not only help your readers learn how to maintain their oral health, but will also give your website visitors a reason to keep coming back. In addition to posting educational content, you can use content marketing to spread the word about promotions, office news, and your newest treatment options.
Keep the Tone Engaging
Like all medical fields, the field of dentistry has its own set of vocabulary—and this can be intimidating to readers. While it is important to keep the tone of your content informative, you should avoid using too much medical jargon in your online content. Instead, maintain a tone that is welcoming and easy to comprehend. This will not only attract readers to your blog, but can also help potential clients feel more comfortable with your dental practice—even before their first appointment. To help keep your content interesting, avoid using generic titles for your blogs; instead, focus on headlines that will grab your readers’ attention, whether they see them on search engine results pages (SERPs) or in their Facebook feeds.
You can use your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles for more than just sharing your blog posts. Your social media accounts offer you a great opportunity to let your followers get to know your dental team better. Patients interact directly with their dental hygienists and dentists, and getting to know them better can make patients feel more at ease when sitting in the dentist’s chair. Post profiles of your various staff members, including a photo and a blurb that describes their interests and what drew them to the dental field. If one of your team members has a big announcement, such as an engagement, pregnancy, or personal accomplishment, ask if you can share the news on your social media profiles. Giving followers a chance to get to know your dental office better will help them feel connected and loyal to your business, encouraging them to become regular patients. You can also use your social media to get to know your followers better—post polls, hold photo contests, and even consider having a “patient of the month” to foster a greater sense of community.
Include CTAs
If you don’t include CTAs—calls to action—as part of your content marketing strategy, then you are missing out on a major opportunity to bring in new patients. At the end of every blog post, include three to four sentences that explain how your dental office can help with the issues discussed in the blog, and provide a link to the relevant service page on your website as well as your contact information for booking appointments. In social media posts, you can include a very brief CTA encouraging readers to contact you, visit your website, or sign up for your email list. By including a CTA in your content marketing pieces, you can prompt readers to get in touch, stay in touch, or even book an appointment right then. If you omit CTAs, then visitors are likely to simply click away from your website or scroll past your post when they are done reading.
Stick to a Schedule
Just as you encourage your patients to stick to daily and bi-annual oral hygiene schedules, you should develop an editorial calendar for your content marketing strategy that includes daily posts on social media and weekly posts on your blog. You can certainly post more often, especially if a unique event or new treatment pops up—but avoid falling behind with your schedule, or your followers may lose interest and your website traffic may decrease as a result.
Are you ready to take advantage of the benefits that content marketing has to offer? You don’t have to try to master this process alone—instead, let Pennington Creative develop and implement a content marketing strategy for your dental practice. Our team of marketing professionals can create everything from evergreen website content and shareable infographics to weekly blogs and daily social media posts. We can also fulfill large-scale orders for marketing agencies. To schedule a discovery call, fill out our contact form today.
