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Content Marketing for Your Practice

September 8, 2020

Ashley Buehnerkemper

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In the marketing world, content is still king. Content marketing is a big part of attracting and retaining customers for all businesses, including dermatology practices. Whether on a website, social media, blogs, etc., content marketing for your practice has become a necessity.

But your focus is on patient care, so spending extra time on content marketing for your practice can be challenging. That’s one of the many obstacles of running both a practice and a business. If you fall in that realm and are struggling to get your content marketing off the ground, here are a few steps that can help.

Build your strategy.

You may already have a content strategy for your marketing plan, but if not, it’s important to consider a few things before jumping into creating and sending out content. And even if you do have an existing strategy for content, you may still find a few helpful ideas. For your strategy, consider:

  • Who’s your audience?
  • What actions are you trying to create?
  • Topics to feature?
  • Best channels to distribute content?
  • Timeline and plan of execution?
  • How will you measure the success of your content?

Create your content.

Once your strategy is in place, you can start creating your content. But don’t just dive right in, this also requires some planning. With lots of different tasks needed and each requiring different amounts of time dedicated to them, trying to do everything at once will only cause more struggles or subpar work. Whether you’re writing a blog, social media post or whatever else, take time to research your topic, outline what you want to do and prepare your points. This will make the process a lot easier, and holds true with other things like podcasts and videos too. Decide the level of importance for your pieces and tackle them in smaller steps with realistic timelines.

Think about what makes content high-quality in today’s day and age. Stuffing as many keywords as possible into your online work is no longer a best practice. Today, people want informative, in-depth and well-written content they can engage with. Certainly, different pieces of content will be better suited for different sizes (blogs will be longer than social media posts or online ads), but always have the goal of quality in your mind rather than just getting clicks.

That being said, optimization is still very real and important for your online content. You still want your high-quality content to be searchable and easily found. If you’re trying to generate patient leads, be sure to promote the right spots and offers. Or if you’re attracting people through SEO, make sure your targeted keywords are relevant. But you can still optimize effectively without sacrificing the quality of your content.

Distribute your content.

Now that you have your quality content ready, people still need to know about it. Depending on what you outlined for your plan, push your content out with the right channels. If you wrote a blog, post it on your blog site (or create one if you don’t have one), then share it on your social media. For practice email marketing, share your content through your distribution list. If you made a video, post it on your website and link to it on social media sites, etc. The point being, decide what channels work best for your content and take advantage.

Repurpose your content.

You don’t always have to build content from scratch either. Find ways to repurpose your content across different channels. This will save you a lot of time and manpower, and can still get you great results. While content distribution is more about bringing people from other platforms back to content on your website, repurposing is about bringing the website’s content to the people on other platforms. Both can be done right after the content is pushed out. Here are some repurposing examples:

  • Reformatting a piece to another, like from copy into video, podcasts or graphics.
  • Breaking up long-form pieces of content into smaller pieces.
  • Combining shorter pieces of content into larger pieces.
  • Republishing a piece to other channels.

Get help if you need it.

As mentioned before, you’re a dermatologist, not a marketing professional. And unless you have experience as a marketer, you may feel like taking care of all of this alone, or even with your team, is daunting and just not feasible with your already busy schedule. That’s more than fine. Your goal is to take care of patients, so you shouldn’t have to be a marketing guru at the same time. There are many resources out there that can help with your marketing and content efforts.

Need help with content marketing for your practice? We’re here to be your source of marketing support too. We’re always a phone call or click away to help. Schedule a consultation with one of our practice management experts today!

 

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