It is well known that content marketing is extremely useful in:
  • Increasing Revenue
  • Boosting Search Engine Rankings
  • Enhancing Visibility
  • Establishing Authority in your field
  • Strengthening your Brand

Kraft has said their content marketing is worth 4x more than their most targeted ad.

The question is how to create content marketing that is highly effective and not just fluff.

 Strategy

Here are five tips for making content marketing effective and successful.

1. Keep it Fresh

Produce new content on a regular basis that is aligned to who you are and the services that you provide.  The content must be relevant to your target audience and challenge them to engage with you and your information. Create an avatar of your patients and audience and speak to them when you create the content.  Build a customer persona.

Having your content in blog posts attached to your website helps drive traffic to your site.  In addition, search engines view each post as fresh content for the website itself.

Create an editorial calendar so that you can visit specific topics throughout each month and assign topics to staff members that may be involved in them.

It might seem counterintuitive to write long-form instead of short notes that people could read quickly, but studies show that long-form is actually read more because it is viewed as authoritative.  This requires a word count of 1800 or more.

2. Keywords are Key!

Identify your keywords.  These are words that your patients and clients are typing in the search box to find you or someone like you that provides your services.  Long-tail keywords are most effective and are 3-4 words together that best describe you.  Instead of “gynecologist” for which there are reams of others in that specialty, by adding your location and your subspecialty, you stand out (i.e. Palm Beach infertility gynecologist).  It makes you stand out and brings you the clients that are best suited to your practice.  It eliminates the guesswork for them and brings you the clients that are most receptive to your practice.  Another example is Oklahoma cervical spine chiropractor instead of chiropractor alone.

Don’t know how to identify your best keywords?  Try KWFinder and SEMrush  as research tools.

McCoy uses KWFinder to discover low-competition keywords.Infogram by Julia McCoy
 Use SEMrush to track your rankings and Google Analytics to track content on your site. Content that ranks well can be considered for more articles and don’t waste time on topics that don’t rank well.

3. Curate Content

Curation is a great strategy for content marketing including strengthening one’s brand and boosting ranking with search engine optimization (for the top 3, Bing, Yahoo and Google).  Additional benefits include:

  • Authority and Thought leadership: You become the go-to person for solutions that people are struggling with.
  • Indexing: The more content, relevant sources and incoming traffic you have, the greater the opportunity for search engines to index your web pages. Hence, more viewers are directed to your site.
  • Backlinks, Increased Visibility and Affiliation: You’re now linked to name brands
  • Presenting Yourself as a Server of others, not merely a seller: Instead of specific services and me-first marketing, you’re viewed as a topical authority and expert in your field.
  • Social boost: You have many more resources to share on social, encouraging subscriptions, follows and engagement.
 Here are some tools to consider for content curation automation (which frees up some of your time):

  • Curata  Its curation software is becoming an industry standard. Curate promotes itself as the “fastest way to find and share content gold.”
  • Storify comes with a WordPress plugin that quickly allows you to move curated content directly to your CMS. You can scan visual storyboards to see the breaking news, blogs, hashtag campaigns and events are trending.
  • BuzzSumo allows you to research by keywords and keyphrases to see what’s trending, who’s sharing it and how much engagement social posts are receiving. You can also set up automated alerts to be notified whenever new content in your topic area and share content directly from your BuzzSumo account through a Buffer integration.

  • Feedly is mostly used for surfacing blog content and following industry insiders, while also providing integration features with Slack, Trello, Evernote and others.

  • Twitter Lists is perfect for monitoring influencers and keeping trends organized by topic. Twitter categorizes the people and information you seek into lists so all content is at your fingertips.

4. Widen Your Exposure

Guest blogging enables you to get in front of a wide audience that you may not have had access to.  It’s a great

opportunity for every content marketer. Best of all, there is no expense.  You need only spend time.

Try to contribute posts on an consistent basis, since one piece won’t stand out as much as an ongoing column. Consider writing a column for a local paper in your area which gives you instant credibility and additional visibility.

5. Foster a Presence on Social Media

Check out forums and chatrooms where your patients and clients go to discuss their problems, symptoms and questions.  You can be the “go-to” person that provides the solutions to the problems that they are struggling with.  Once you develop a presence on these sites, and develop a relationship with viewers,  prospective patients will seek you out and make appointments at your office.

Content Marketing is a Long-Term strategy.     Fresh content must be created and posted on a regular basis.  You will only reap rewards by consistently working at it over a period of time.

According to Joe Pulizzi, a leading content marketing influencer and expert, has said

“Time and again, we see that it takes 12 to 24 months to get results — which is why commitment is so important. It’s a critical piece in building your subscriber base.”

The greater the volume of engaging, relevant and useful content that you produce, the greater the  chances of seeing more results over the long haul.

Want to know more about content marketing?

Check out this book “Content Copy Made Easy” at Amazon.com in soft cover or Kindle versions.  It is also available at Barnes & Noble.

 

Need more help?  Contact me at Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com for a free consultation.