People search daily for information about their dental health. A toothache, a broken tooth, a missing tooth, yellowed teeth…they’re looking for relief from pain, embarrassment, and poor health.
Their search might take them to your website’s home page. But it’s more likely that their query will take them to a more solution-focused blog post. Here’s a few ways to make sure your practice’s blog has valuable content that will help lead to patient conversions.
1. Answer questions your patients (or the public) are asking
Questions form a bread-crumb path to your content. They ask-you answer. They search-you provide content.
Your “static” content (Home, About Us, Services pages) doesn’t often change. It remains the same pretty much since the day you hit “publish” on your website.
Your blog content, on the other hand, is responsive to what’s being asked in “real-time.”
Heidi Cohen lists the five types of information your audience (including your patients) seeks:
- Product information
- Customer FAQs
- How-tos
- Best-in-class practices
- Ratings and reviews
Build a master list of topics relevant to those inquiries. Create blog content that answers and provides solutions. And use language that taps into your patient’s emotional desires and needs.
2. Publish consistently
This creates a top-of-mind relationship when your patients have a dental need, question, or problem. Right, they aren’t waiting around for your next blog post to be published but…
They will know where to search when a question or need arises.
- Listen to patient questions chair side, scan your reviews (good and bad), have a journalistic mindset about the latest-breaking patient “news” (their concerns, questions, problems, complaints
- Publish according to themes and “seasons.” April is Oral Cancer Awareness month, May is wedding season, late summer is back-to-school, fall ushers in the holidays and the end of year.
3. Repurpose your content
Blog content is more than a one-and-done marketing strategy. A single blog post can be “chunked” into other valuable content.
- Send an email to your patient list with a teaser headline and lead linking to a new, published blog post on your website. It generates website traffic and keeps your patients connected to your digital content.
- Publish a monthly e-newsletter on theme using a relevant selection of published blog posts as the content. A one to two page e-newsletter with informative nuggets of useful info will keep your content active in your patient’s minds.
When they’re ready to schedule it will be because you appeared on their radar as a resource – and one they’ll potentially tell others about.
