Content Tips for Your Optometry Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is one of the most prevalent methods of engaging with your target audience, increasing traffic to your website, and getting them interested in your optometry practice. Content creation has been around for quite some time and through the years has transformed from blog posts to infographics, podcasts, video, patient testimonials, ebooks, and so much more! 

With so many active users online, you have a huge opportunity to have people interact with your content, get new patients, and grow your practice. Creating a marketing plan as your foundation for what you want to create, publish, and distribute online is an important part of sustaining your current patient base while reaching out to new business as well. Follow along as we list our top content tips for optometry marketing!

1. Be Clear About Who Your Optometry Practice’s Target Audience Is

As the owner of an optometry practice, you and your staff know who you are servicing. But, it’s critical to understand what your patients’ interests are and to pique those interests. Your ability to know your audience means everything for creating compelling or educational deliverables while generating revenue and traffic to your optometry website when you share content through social media, email, or other means. 

Are you an eye care provider that specializes in services for children? If so, you want your content to be directed to parents of young children who would benefit from the eye care information you choose to share. 

For example, if you want existing and potential patients to know more about eye health for their children, you could write a blog post about the milestones of their eye development and at what age they should visit your office to get their first eye exam. 

Another example would be if you provide services to patients of all ages, you could produce a video on any of the following topics: 

• Protecting your vision from UV rays
• Common eye diseases like glaucoma
• Knowing the signs of eye problems
• How your vision changes as you get older
• Optometry FAQs
• Best frames for each face shape

Once you understand who your audience is, now it’s time to start directing your marketing efforts towards those people. Get their email address, get them to follow you on social media, or any other method to encourage that first point of contact with potential patients in your local area. When you begin communicating with those patients, it’s now time to start sending content their way. 

Whatever subject you choose to create content for, make sure that it meets your patients’ needs and is providing some sort of value by being educational or interesting. 

Read On: 6 Optometry Marketing Ideas to Inspire You in the New Year

2. Stay Consistent With Your Content Marketing Plan

A great way to stay consistent with your optometry marketing strategy is to design a plan! When formulating a plan and brainstorming your marketing ideas with your office staff, be as precise as possible. Avoid any unnecessary information and define exactly what you want to accomplish. 

In your digital marketing plan, you should include: 

• Focus on who will be consuming each piece of content
• What type of content you want to create (blog post, video, infographic, etc.) and the purpose of the piece
• What channels you’ll be distributing the content through (email, social media, your optometry website, etc.)
• How often you will be distributing 
• How you will manage and organize all the content you create

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of the most effective B2C marketers have a documented content strategy.

A marketing strategy will help your optometry office to be accountable for consistently producing valuable content for your patients while also helping to grow your business. 

Just like you expect your patients to come in for yearly exams, you can make the commitment to constantly deliver engaging content to help them remember your practice.

3. Always Include a Call-To-Action 

Every piece of content that you create for your optometry marketing plan should have a specific objective. 

Ask yourself these questions: 

• Are you trying to drive more traffic to your website? 
• Do you want more patients to follow or share your content on social media? 
• Are you attempting to increase your ranking on Google search results? 
• Do you want to improve your online reputation?
• Do you want more business reviews on listing websites like Google My Business and Yelp? 

Be as clear as possible with your call-to-action (CTA) so patients know exactly what to do after reading or viewing your content. Also, remember that many of the people in your target audience may be skimmers so you need to be strategic about where you place your CTAs. 

For instance, let’s say you are sending an infographic through email about the importance of an eye exam for a patient’s visual health. You should include a CTA in the email about scheduling an appointment for a comprehensive eye exam in the email. 

Your content has not only educated these new or existing patients on the benefits of caring for their eye health but also encouraged them to go to your website to find your office’s phone number or booking page to schedule a visit. 

As a general rule of thumb, you either want to place CTAs above the fold (the text you can see before having to scroll down to view more information) or at the very bottom after the conclusion. 

When crafting your CTA, be compelling! Grab the attention of your patients and give them an actionable item to follow through with so they aren’t left wondering what they need to do. 

Learn More: Why Your Eye Care Practice Needs An Email List

4. Optimize Your Optometry Marketing Content for SEO

Are you familiar with search engine optimization? Search engine optimization, or better known as SEO, is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of your website’s organic traffic. By quantity, we mean the number of users who visit your website, and quality refers to users who were directed to your website from Google by potential patients who are genuinely interested in your products and services. 

Google has a crawler that looks over all the information on your website and analyzes how valuable it is to those looking through search engine results for businesses like yours. A website isn’t complete until it includes content for its visitors. 

Optimizing the content on your optometry website is critical for improving your ranking on Google search. In order to do this, you need to include keywords in your content that are relevant to the eye care industry and what users are searching for. 

Here are some examples of eye care keywords that someone might search for on Google: 

• Location-Based Searches: 
  • Optometrists (specific location)
  • Contact lenses (specific location)
  • Eyeglasses (specific location)
  • Eye exams near me

• Eye Care Symptom Searches:
  • Why is my eye red?
  • Do I have pink eye?
  • Do I need glasses?
  • What are refractive errors? 

Doing some extensive keyword research is the best way to discover what words are relevant and best suited for your optometry practice. All of your new content as well as the content that already exists on your website should be optimized.

If you are unsure of where to begin with your research, we can make it easy and do it for you! This way, you’ll have an optimized optometry website that generates the traffic you want from the search results pages. For more information on how we can help, visit our website.

5. Share Your Optometry Content to Grow Your Practice

This is one of the most important steps of your optometry digital marketing plan. You need to determine how you will be sharing your content with patients. Just creating the content is not useful if you do not share it with your patients. 

According to Ahrefs, 91 percent of the pages they surveyed (over a billion pages) attracted no Google organic traffic. No one wants all of their hard work to be for nothing, and this is why promoting your content is important. But don’t worry, there are plenty of great ways to promote your amazing optometry content!

Here are the most common and effective methods to reach your audience: 

1. Email Marketing –  Any time you create a new piece of content, make sure to send it to all the email addresses in your practice’s database. 

2. Social Media Marketing – Social media platforms are the perfect avenue to post your content and direct some of that traffic back to your website. This also exposes your practice to a wide variety of users online. The more useful content you produce, the more you’ll be regarded as an authority figure to turn to for information about eye health.

3. Add Social Media Buttons to Your Website – Aside from posting the content to social media yourself, give your audience the opportunity to do the same. By adding social buttons to your website, people will have the option to share your posts on their own social media pages for all their followers to see. 

4. Produce a Video With Details About the Piece – Let say you create an ebook, or an extensive blog post, you can create a video that gives a quick synopsis of it. 

5. Incorporate Graphics Into Your Optometry Plan – A picture is worth a thousand words may be a cliche but it’s absolutely true. Images make your content more enticing to users. So adding an image here and there can be just what you need to improve your content. 

6. Advertise on Social Networks – That’s right, you can promote your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram through paid ads. Craft an ad that centers a specific piece (blog posts, ebook, white paper, etc.) that will attract users to your website. 

6. Analyze Your Content’s Performance

So, you’ve gotten started on your plan using our optometry marketing content marketing tips, but do you know how your campaign is performing? Knowing the success of your efforts can give you insight into what methods are working and some that may need some fine-tuning in order to get the results you want for your business. 

Overall, you want your content to drive traffic to your website. A great way to keep track of these metrics is by using Google Analytics. This tool allows you to track all site traffic in all-encompassing reports. 

You can also look over your social media insights provided by each platform to see how well each post that you share is performing. Assess your content’s performance over time to make sure you are crafting informative content your patients care about. 

Get Started on Optometry Marketing Ideas For Your Practice

As a local business, content marketing is a powerful tool that can take your office to the next level and open up even more opportunities to generate more revenue. Just remember to:

• Always have your audience in mind
• Make your content as interesting as possible 
• Use optimization
• Promote, promote, and promote some more

Are you interested in having us help you with your practice’s content marketing? Give us a call at 800.792.8384 to discuss your objectives for your digital marketing plan, how to improve your ranking in the Google search results, and how to attract new patients now.