Effective Content Marketing Tips to Use in 2020

Are you currently using a content marketing strategy to attract patients or clients to your practice? You’ve probably heard the term so many times, but may still be unsure of what it actually is. 
The key to a strong content marketing strategy is utilizing relevant, useful content that really resonates with your intended audience. Sharing an important piece of content can help drive more traffic to your website, increase engagement on your social pages, and give your targeted audience insight to who you are as a business and brand.

Quality over quantity is essential because the amount of content you create won’t necessarily encourage more patients or clients to visit your site, but quality content will capture their attention every time. Keep your readers coming back for more and become a reliable source of information for them and watch as you slowly build their trust and gain their loyalty for years to come. 
We’re here to inform you about the what and why on content marketing to improve your strategy and help your ideal audience relate to the content you publish for them. Let’s begin!

What Is Content Marketing? 

Content marketing is an approach to marketing that involves creating and distributing content for your intended audience. 
This content can include:

• Infographics 
• Videos 
• Blog posts
• Podcasts 
• Ebooks 
• Whitepapers 

When it comes to content marketing, there’s no limit to what you can come up with when you use your creativity. As long as your content is interesting to your readers, they will continue to engage with it. When you research content marketing, one word that you will constantly come across is “valuable.”
What value are you providing your readers with? Is your content educating, entertaining, or teaching them to do something? Give them something they can take with them after reading, viewing, or listening to your content that they will be able to use in some way because you have added value to their life. 

 Why Use Content Marketing?

Now that you know WHAT content marketing is, let’s get into the WHY. 
It can be easy to get caught up in the same old marketing routine for your practice, but remember, in order to attract new patients or clients, you want to introduce them to as much fresh content as possible. 

 72 percent of marketers say that content marketing increases engagement and the number of leads. – OptinMonster 

If done properly, your content marketing strategy can benefit your practice in more ways than one. People have grown to expect more than just a website from businesses. They want to be informed about the products and services you provide with the use of quality content. 
Providing content on a regular basis also builds trust among your audience. The more you share with your audience, the more they feel like they know you and what you do. People trust businesses that they know and typically remain faithful to those businesses. 

Giving your audience reliable information that is timely and relevant isn’t only to attract new patients and clients, but also to keep current ones satisfied as well. You want to make sure that you aren’t only focusing on attaining new patients or clients and neglect the existing one when creating your content strategy. 
Try to think of topics that may be new or valuable to every person that is part of your audience because you want them to remain engaged. 

Our Top 3 Content Marketing Tips for Health Care Practices

So you know what content marketing is and why you should be using it at your practice, now it’s time to discuss our top tips for helping you to produce this quality content. 

1. Include Compelling Visuals

Audience +  visuals = success. It’s simple math! Okay, maybe it’s not that simple. But, it is true that people respond very well to visual content. Our brains are much better at remembering visual content than textual, and that is exactly what you want to be, memorable to your audience. 

Visuals not only help to break up the text in content like blog posts, it always helps to keep the attention of the reader until the very end. They make the information in your content easier to digest and recall. Most of us are visual learners, so when there are stimulating graphics on your website, on your social pages, in your emails, and within all of your other content, your audience will understand it better. 
Images are especially important if you are producing long-form content. If your blog posts are upward of 1,000 words, then you definitely need to include visuals to keep the reader interested. There are many types of visuals you can include in your content. 
Some ideas are: 

• GIFs
• Memes
• Original graphics
• Screenshots
• Stock Images
• Social posts

Have fun with it! Create or use visuals that you think your patients or clients will enjoy while consuming your content. 
 Learn More: The Power of Images in Marketing

2. Optimize Your Content

Optimizing your content is something we’ve talked about time and time again, but optimization is truly key. If you’re creating all this amazing content for your target audience but not optimizing any of it, how will it reach them? 
Including keywords, adding meta-descriptions and title tags to your content will help to get you noticed by search engines like Google. 
Not only should the actual text be optimized, but so should the images. Add alternate text or alt-text, to your images. Alt-text is the description you give the images included on your website. When visitors scroll over the picture, the description will show up. 
Alt-text is important for readers who are visually impaired. They may be using a voice reader and when your images have a description, these readers will know what type of images you have included in your content because the voice can read the alt-text aloud. This way you aren’t excluding anyone from being able to enjoy your content. 
When you use image descriptions, it also strengthens your website’s SEO. If Google does an image crawl, it may not always be able to identify exactly what the image is. But with the help of alt-text, it becomes recognizable. 
For example, if you’re a chiropractor and you have an image of a patient receiving an adjustment on your page, be sure to add a description such as “man receiving a chiropractic adjustment in office,” so when someone searches for this type of image, yours will appear on the results pages. 
Read On:  How to Brainstorm Keywords and Improve Your Google Ranking

3. Create Data-Driven Content

Your content can be used to not only appeal to the emotions of your audience but to also give them the information they need to solve problems. You can utilize data-driven storytelling to answer questions that your patients or clients may have. When you analyze current and relevant data to understand your audience’s pain points, you can use this data to give them the answer they’re looking for. 
Collecting this data can be done through observations on social media, surveys, or asking them through email. Once you’ve collected this data, you can create content that is exactly what your audience wants to know more information about. 
For instance, if you’re an optometrist and you send out a survey asking your patients what they’re interested in and many of them request to know more about eye diseases that are common among children, use that data to give them what they want. Create an infographic, record a video, write a blog post, etc., about this subject. 

Content Marketing Tips

Building a content marketing strategy gives you the ability to tell your practice’s story in more than one way. You can be as creative as you’d like when planning your content strategy, but remember to keep the interests on your audience in mind! 

Do you need help building an effective content marketing strategy? 

Have your content engagement increase and reach the top of Google’s first page by calling us at 800.792.8384 or click here to discover our available digital marketing solutions.