We’ve all heard the term content marketing, and it’s growing more and more popular as we consume more and more content on a daily basis. But if you’re not to sure what it is, or want to know more about how to use it, read on!
What is content marketing?
To put it simply, it’s a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing online material that includes videos, blogs and social media posts. Mostly though, these do not directly promote a product/brand but instead, stimulate interest in its product or service.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that uses words, pictures and video to build relationships with your target audience, capture their attention and improve your engagement with them.
Types of Content Marketing
You can achieve this type of marketing in many ways. Here are just some of the most popular options.
Social media
With over 3.7 billion users, social media content marketing is one of the most used forms. With multiple platforms, there are multiple ways that content can be created and shared on each of them. The most popular content that can be created on these platforms includes posts, photos, live and pre-recorded videos, and stories.
Make your social posts visual! Post videos of your practitioners demonstrating exercises, your clinic, staff or more generic photos when posting about injuries, education posts and other information. Don’t be too salesy. Instead, give your followers ‘something’ when you post – education, laughter, emotion, interesting info and more.
Infographic
Infographics are display content. They are information and data in graphic form. Infographics are simplistic and easy to understand through a mix of simple wording, short statements and clear imagery. They give you a creative way to effectively communicate your info in an easy-to-digest way.
Use infographics to display statistics, injury data or other complex information.
Blogs
Blogs are great for inbound marketing and sharing. This powerful content provides relevant information, whether it be educational or product-related, for your target audiences. Depending on the goal of the blog, they can be used to convert readers into customers, boost brand awareness and build relationships with your audience. Blogs can be also used to link to your social platforms, other pages on your website, or partner websites. And don’t forget SEO – search engine optimisation. Blogs, when written correctly, are great for improving your SEO ranking in Google.
To write an effective blog, learn to write with SEO in mind. Choose topics that your clients will find interesting, use simple language and add a photo, video or two!
How will content marketing benefit my business?
Build an online presence and attract followers
Content marketing helps attract your ideal customer to your online channels. It helps build your followers and increases social sharing, which helps build your reputation. Usually, this translates into more enquiries and more appointments!
Builds trust
Trust is one of the most important elements of content marketing. Trust not only helps build loyalty to your brand but can lead to more individual sales and improves their lifetime value. Trust is something that often starts online through content marketing, and then progresses into the clinic where the practitioner gets involved in trust-building and continued nurturing. A report shows that nurtured customers generate 47% of larger purchases than any other customer. You’ll find this would be similar in a clinic setting – return clients cost less money than new ones. So if you build trust online, and then nurture in the clinic, and engage again online – you’re business thank you.
Boost organic search visibility
Creating quality content is important, but is it still important if nobody sees it? So how do we do this? The first step to boost your organic search visibility. As we said earlier, SEO is important! When developing blogs, try defining a keyword list. If you target appropriate keywords for each page based on what your target audience is looking for, as well as what you’re trying to communicate, your organic search visibility will vastly improve. Some more ways to increase your visibility include optimising page titles, using your ALT tags wisely, using sub-headings and using those appropriate keywords throughout your blog in a way that makes sense.
Content marketing can have a significant impact on your business and is something that every clinic should be doing. Not only does it create a higher level of engagement, its long term influence on your business can give you the edge that your competitors might lack.