Content Marketing for Orthodontists

While there are many digital marketing strategies you can use for your business, content marketing is often underestimated. It’s not just a trend in marketing circles. The goal of using content is to attract members of your target audience through valuable content. This brings prospects into your marketing funnel where you can build a relationship with them or follow up with a drip marketing campaign.

It’s a big contrast to traditional push marketing strategies where you try to interrupt and get in front of your target audience with your offer. With content, you are presenting value before an offer or even asking for a sale. You are showcasing your authority, establishing your credibility, and building your brand through the content.

How Effective is Content Marketing for Orthodontists?

Online content marketing isn’t just a strategy reserved for certain types of businesses. It is an effective strategy for all kinds of businesses from eCommerce, digital product businesses, online publishing businesses, to service oriented businesses like orthodontists. But just how effective is it?

Marketing with content has been found to cost 62 percent less than traditional marketing methods. In addition, using content as your marketing strategy results in three times more leads than conventional strategies. This doesn’t mean that you should only focus on content. What it does mean is that you should take using content and marketing seriously.

Think about your target prospect. The prospect may be looking for content about getting braces. Topics can include average time you have to wear braces, when the right age to get braces is, less invasive alternatives to braces, and more. By providing answers to these questions and topics through content, you are positioning yourself as the expert.

It makes perfect sense when you consider:

• 20 percent of online users go on to find and consume content.
• 80 percent of consumers like the process of discovering a company through content.
• 57 percent of users consume content one or more times a month.

Other Ways Content Can Be Used to Build Your Business

Content is a great way to generate leads. However, there’s are so many more ways to use content for your business. You can use content to:

• Educate and build a relationship with prospects. Prospects go through a customer cycle. Content is one of the most effective ways to move them through the cycle until they reach out to book an appointment with you.
• Prove your expertise. Prospects want to go with an orthodontist that has knowledge and experience. Content is a great way to show that you really know what you’re talking about. It will distinguish you from competitors that focus only on sales.
• Keep the attention of your prospect. It’s very likely that your prospects are shopping around for orthodontists. By constantly engaging them with content, you’re the one that will be on top of their minds when they’re ready to take action.
• Establish your brand in your local area. Orthodontists are location based, so it makes sense to use content to help you stand out from competitors in your city.

Having the Right Strategy is the Key to Success

It’s not enough to publish content. You need an effective content marketing strategy to see great results from your efforts. Without an organized plan and a clear process, you won’t see steady results. Here is a 7 step outline that you can follow to execute your strategy.

 

1. State Your Main Goals

Every business has different goals for their content. Remember that there are many ways to use content. It’s likely that one of your main goals will be to generate leads, but what else are you looking to get out of your content? Will you use it to support your local SEO campaign? Do you want to use content to start building your brand and reputation?

 

2. Research the Competition

Get an idea of what your competitors are doing with their content. What content topics have worked for them? Can you identify their content strategy? How are they distributing their content? Pay close attention to competitors that seem to be doing the right things. Ignore competitors that aren’t doing much with their content except making a few cookie-cutter blog posts every now and then.

 

3. Study Your Target Audience

Before creating your content, you must understand your audience. Figure out what your audience is looking for? Find out what they’re curious about, what their problems are, what their needs are, and what their desires are. This will help you come up with the right voice and tone for your content while also helping you connect with your audience better.

 

4. Find Winning Content Topics, Ideas and Angles

Now it’s time to find topics, ideas, and angles for your content. A great way to get ideas is to use Google’s keyword tool to conduct some keyword research (you’ll need a Google Ads account for this). You can also use the BuzzSumo tool to find the most popular content based on a keyword. It organizes the results by social engagement metrics.

Don’t just focus on topics for articles. Think about how you can stand out with your content. For example, you can create a self assessment quiz on how important it is for the person to get braces. You can create unique videos that show what it’s like to get braces. Don’t be limited to simple ideas.

 

5. Create Your Content Process and Calendar

Content is something you need to create on a regular basis for your blog. It doesn’t make sense to create a piece of content whenever you feel like it. You need to be productive by creating a content process and calendar. You need to start by building a team of writers, graphic designers, video editors, etc. Create a system for creating content so that it’s automated for you.

Then you need to create a schedule that helps you reach your goals. It may be a good idea to create two pieces of content a week to help you generate leads and connect with your prospects. If you need a lot of content for SEO purposes, four pieces may be better for you.

It sounds like a lot of work, and it is. So if you are a serious orthodontists who wants to build your business online, speak with us to see how we can help you.

 

6. Distribute Your Content

The next step is to distribute your content. Your website, blog, social media accounts, partner sites, and email list are all great channels to distribute your content. Some businesses go as far as to using paid ads via Google Ads and Facebook Ads to give their content more reach. You’ll also want to distribute certain types of content like videos to the appropriate channels (Youtube, DailyMotion, Facebook Videos, etc.).

 

7. Measure Your Results

Finally, you want to measure your results. You need to look at multiple metrics. First, you want to look at what formats, topics, and ideas generated the best results so that you can do more of what’s working. Second, you want to measure the leads generated as well as their quality. Third, you will want to measure the ROI of your campaign. You’ll basically base your metrics based on the goals you’ve set for your campaign.

In conclusion, content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for orthodontists and other local businesses. It also works hand-in-hand with other strategies like SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing. It should not be overlooked in favor of other strategies.

Find out how we can help you gain more patients with content marketing for your business by contacting us here.

Content Marketing for Orthodontists