With 75% of dental patients using search engines, like Google, to research and make informed decisions about their choice of a dental practice, dentists are prioritizing and optimizing their dental website and dental SEO. To maximize their optimizations efforts, dentists must implement content marketing strategies that create valuable patient experiences and improve their dental SEO.
Most dentists aren’t privy to effective dental marketing strategies—much less, content marketing strategies. These strategies aren’t taught in dental schools but they are essential to the sustained growth and productivity of dental practices. With a comprehensive content marketing strategy, you can position your dental practice’s website to be an important resource for current and prospective patients. As your web traffic increases, you will generate more leads and welcome more patients into your dental practice.
In this article, you will learn about the importance and key features of a dental content marketing strategy. We will discuss the different ways you can improve your dental SEO by implementing content marketing strategies in your dental practice.
What is Content Marketing for Dental Practices?
Content marketing is the targeted production and distribution of digital content for your current and prospective dental patients. This marketing approach focuses on creating educational and engaging marketing collateral that raises your dental practice’s brand awareness, increases the value of interactions patients have with your practice and boosts sales through lead generation.
The content generated is distributed on your dental practice’s website (e.g blog posts), social media pages, email newsletters, paid advertisement campaigns and downloadable materials such as templates, white papers and ebooks. As web users visit your website and interact with your content, they gain information that improves their dental wellbeing, learn more about your dental practice and have more confidence in your knowledge and expertise as a dentist. These web visitors can be nurtured, over time, to become qualified leads and active patients.
Why Your Dental Practice Needs A Content Marketing Strategy
1. Content marketing boosts your dental SEO
Dental SEO refers to the on-page and off-page features of your dental practice’s website that makes it rank higher and remain visible on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Google algorithms determine the ranking or position of websites on its SERPs by crawling through web pages across the internet and selecting pages that include information that answers user’s search queries.
For example, web users or prospective patients may be curious about the difference between braces and Invisalign. Their search query may be “Which is better braces or Invisalign?” To give these users the best results, Google algorithms crawl the internet to find any form of digital content (e.g. blog posts, infographics, videos, ebooks, white-papers etc.) that discusses the differences between braces and Invisalign in a way that is detailed and comprehensive. The webpages with the most relevant content will rank higher on Google’s SERPs.
If your dental website includes relevant, credible and valuable information for your prospective patients, it will rank higher for search queries made by your patients. The higher your Google SERP ranking, the more visible your website will be and the better your chances of attracting more prospective patients and generating patient leads.
2. Content marketing increases referrals to your dental practice
An effective content marketing strategy can motivate your current patients to refer people in their circles and communities to you. Your digital content should not only address concerns of prospective patients; it should also speak to the needs of your current patients. As your patients read your blog posts and newsletters or watch your videos, they share your content with their friends or networks on social media. This will drive more web traffic to your dental website.
Connect the Doc’s referral tool encourages happy patients to become proud ambassadors of their dentists and dental practice. With an effective content marketing strategy and Connect the Doc, you can automate the process of asking your patients for referrals while tracking and rewarding their referrals. The more valuable content you share with your patients, the more you empower them to spread the word about your expertise and dental practice.
3. Content marketing improves your patient experience
The more value your patients get from you and your practice, the lesser your patient attrition rate. Patients want to have holistic, positive experiences with their dentists. Content marketing positions you as a trustworthy and reliable dental healthcare provider. It allows you to continue to keep in touch with your patients by providing different opportunities for them to engage with your practice.
For example: Instead of bombarding your patients’ inbox with promotional emails, you can share a weekly newsletter with insightful tips about dental hygiene, refer them to blog posts on your website with more in-depth details and upsell your dental services within those blog posts. This non-intrusive nature of content marketing educates your patients, keeps them engaged with your dental practice and ensures you remain at the top of their minds.
4. Content marketing enhances your dental practice’s online reputation
Online reputation refers to the impression patients have about your dental practice based on the information that exists on the internet about you and your practice. You need to have an online reputation management strategy in place. This way, you can actively monitor and address your current patients’ reviews about your practice or prospective patients’ inquiries.
With content marketing, you can position your dental practice to address common trends in your patients’ reviews, comments and inquiries. When you publish videos, blog posts or social media copy that directly speaks to your patients’ questions, you show them that you listen and care about them. Good content can boost your online reputation by assuring your patients that you are the best fit for them.
5. Content marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy
Compared to many outbound marketing strategies, content marketing generates and nurtures more patient leads for your dental practice over time without exhausting your marketing budget. With content marketing, you can diversify your marketing approach, conduct A/B testing and analyze the value of each content you produce and distribute. This allows you to save time and prevents you from investing in content or marketing collaterals that won’t lead to increased revenue.
Your dental practice’s content impacts different areas of your digital marketing and public relations strategy so you can enjoy the long term benefits of ranking high on SERPs, engaging with your patients and having a positive online reputation.
What Are The Features Of A Good Content Marketing Strategy?
1. It focuses on your patients
A good content marketing strategy should focus on providing your current and prospective patients with timely, relevant and valuable information that empowers them to improve their dental wellbeing. To achieve this, you must ensure your content speaks to the exact needs of your patients and is presented in a way that allows them to engage directly with your practice. Your content marketing strategy should be conversational such that patients can get answers to their questions by moving, seamlessly, from one piece of content on your dental website to another.
2. It is niche-specific
The nature and format of your dental practice’s digital content should depend on the type of dental patients you are looking to attract. With Connect the Doc, you can automatically ask your patients to share their feedback and reviews with you. Your patients’ feedback allows you to make informed decisions on what topics and issues to address in your content marketing strategy.
3. It is repurposable
As you create content for your dental practice, find creative and targeted formats for sharing them with your patients. For example, parts of your blog posts could be used to write content for your social media pages and newsletter. You could also expand on your blog posts by creating downloadable templates, infographics or white-paper with long-form and in-depth content. The goal here is to create content that can be repurposed into different formats and keep your patients engaged with your dental practice regardless of where and how they read or view your content.
4. It nurtures leads
The more your patients engage with your digital content, the higher their level of interest in your dental practice. Each content a patient engages with is called a touchpoint. At each touchpoint, you should learn more about your patients and they ought to become more interested in your practice. You can do this by inserting Call-to-Action buttons or forms that gather salient information about your patients, such as their names and emails in exchange, for more valuable content. A Connect the Doc website manager can work with you to ensure you are learning more about your patients at each touchpoint and nurturing your leads over time.
Keep in mind that your content marketing strategy should be implemented alongside other marketing strategies. Although it is just one aspect of your dental marketing, content marketing can inform your entire marketing process and help you make the right marketing investments.
At Connect the Doc, we are committed to supporting dentists to optimize their dental marketing strategies and meet their business goals. Contact us to learn more about improving your dental SEO with content marketing.
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