Why Should Your Practice Do Content Marketing?

For some time now, paid advertising has been used as a reliable strategy to gain new patients.

Unfortunately, paid ads are becoming less effective. 

What Patients Want?

Nowadays patients don't want to be blatantly sold to. Prospective patients want to organically learn about your practice, what you treat and other questions such as costs, to determine whether you fit their needs.

Content marketing is the answer to their prayers. 

Build Authority Online

By making your practice a credible and authoritative resource on topics that matter to your prospective patients, your practice is more likely to get discovered by the right audience.

But as you might have guessed, Big Health often have a whole team of marketers working on educational blog articles, e-books, videos, and webinars to create content that stands out. As a small practice, this might not be feasible, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on content marketing all together! 

Find out how your small practice can benefit from a content marketing strategy. 

What Is Content Marketing?

Let’s start with the basics; what does content marketing encompass? Content marketing is more than just the format of content (i.e. blog article, e-book, or video), it’s a long-term strategy in a variety of formats that builds a stronger relationship with your target audience.

Content marketing is a marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive patient action.

It comes down to this: Instead of pitching your services, you are providing relevant and useful content to your prospective patients and existing patients to help them find answers to their questions. 

How Can Your Practice Benefit From Content Marketing?

Content marketing can be extremely powerful for both small and larger group practices alike. The three main benefits of content marketing are more new patients, reduced marketing costs, and increased patient loyalty. 

But it goes beyond these three key benefits:

More specially, content marketing can help you to:

• Establish practice identity that your prospective patients connect with, which will subsequently help to maintain practice awareness and recognition
• Gain the competitive advantage over other practices who do not have a content marketing strategy
• By positioning your practice as a thought leader in the industry, you can create a long-term, trustworthy relationship with patients and prospective patients
• Generate more website traffic and better exposure without investing a large amount in advertising
• Convert more website visitors into prospective patients and patients

Does Content Marketing Really Work For All Practices?

This question is asked a lot by smaller, growing practices. As mentioned earlier, you frequently hear about larger practices pushing out content that is often used as an example of how to do it right. 

So, can you see a positive ROI from adding content marketing to your strategy as a small practice? Absolutely. And you don’t need to have a ton of money to do it.

It’s important for practice owners to note that 70% of patients would rather learn about a practice through an article over any kind of advertisement. Many patients are out there actively looking for that valuable content and answers to their questions.

If you are still not convinced that a small practice can successfully pull off content marketing, we have many examples single specialist practices who have grown their practice through content marketing.

How Can You Succeed In The New Age of Content Marketing?

Like almost every other aspects of our lives, mobile has redefined the way we read, view, and are entertained. Mobile is becoming the default device of choice not the laptop – blog articles, videos, social media etc. are now mostly consumed on a mobile device.

What does this mean for practice marketing? They need to shift their focus to “mobile-first content marketing”, i.e. creating content that is easily consumed through mobile. 

Besides making your website’s content mobile-friendly, creating an app for your practice can be a great way to serve up your content in a mobile format. The type of content marketing that might work best for mobile includes podcasts, visual posts, mobile-optimized emails, mobile video, and social media posts.

The Final Word on Content Marketing for Medical Practices

Content marketing can be a great way to organically reach prospective patients. Instead of pushing an unwanted ads in your patients face, you will leave them with a positive first impression of your practice. 

It’s all about providing value, even if you don’t get an immediate sale in return.

If you have the need we have the ideas and expertise to make it happen. Contact Us