Generating leads online is at the core of every business today, but all lead-generation efforts don’t yield the same results. This is because there are no standard, protocol-like regulations to make things absolutely clear for digital marketers.
Online dental marketing is more about giving your strategy a personalized touch. One highly effective way to grab more eyeballs is investing in high-quality content. In contemporary SEO landscape, there is a constant demand for high-value content. It acts like a profitable means of lead generation and has more credibility than short-term digital campaigns.
With quality content at the core of your online lead generation strategy, you have a higher chance of attracting the attention of readers to your dental website and creating more brand awareness.
No matter what social media marketing methods you follow, you need better, fresher and highly anticipated content. Plus, you need to understand how you can maximize your inbound leads by using content as the primary fuel.
1. Basics First: Focus on Market Research
Content marketing is not different from anything new that a business or organization wants to adopt. It needs to be prepped with the right approach. This means extensive research across possible points of sales, including traditional & upcoming sales platforms and reasons that are impairing lead generation.
Today, businesses are spending heavily on data analysis because it is the more systematic way of analyzing every aspect of a marketplace. It helps to drive decision-making with data that helps to reach conclusions.
Essentially, your practice should be ready to conduct extensive marketing research before starting out with its content marketing efforts. Comprehensive research also helps to gain more consumer insight. You can prevent situations where a poor feedback or unanswered query leads to sinking a highly possible sales lead.
Content-fueled lead generation strategies need this in-depth analysis that also provides preparedness about the future as you get to know more about what potential patients are expecting and how their desires are being fulfilled by your direct or indirect competitors.
A digital marketer should be ready to turbocharge a new set of ideas that will make a product more consumable. This includes in-depth analysis of the most critical keywords that channel more readers towards your practice. Such keywords can be the lifeline of your content marketing efforts.
You can call them commercial keywords because more than boosting the quality of content, they tend to bring-in more online traffic that can stimulate more online queries or bring-in direct sales.By hyper-segmenting the preferred list of keywords, you can prepare more aggressively positioned content for each domain within your targeted demographic.
This is a continuous process. It needs regular tuning, on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. There are some keywords that are more informational, i.e. they bring-in more clicks to your practice website but might not provide a serious sales increment. Incorporating tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner helps you find the most contextual and highly competed list of commercial keywords that can boost the online engageability of content.
Better market research also helps to provide closure about the outcomes of previously-conducted analysis. Marketing teams get a reality-check about things they missed earlier. Detailed research can clearly highlight areas that need better customer service standards.
2. Lay Lead Baits with Content Groundwork Firmly in Place
Content marketing is about laying the baits smartly, camouflaged and concealed in such a manner that the most reluctant site visitor cannot help but spend more time reading your content. This directly raises probability of sales lead generation.Whether your preferred content marketing tool is email or social media, you need bait-loaded content to get the desired outcomes.
Email marketing also helps in reconnecting with past patients, ensuring the branding efforts don’t erode away. It is worth discussing that marketing emails too suffer from low propensity to read the entire content. Usually click baits attract readers towards a landing page or a preferred web page and then, the ability of content to sustain the interest levels takes over.
Sometimes, one content marketing medium contributes to the other. For instance, social media marketing might mean more newsletter and email sign-ups. Similarly, brilliantly crafted emails might lead to more social media traffic. This largely depends on the beauty of content and how well it lays out the baits. Consumers are getting extremely choosey, spoilt for choice.
Your content needs to stand apart from the crowd if you seriously expect any gains from your content marketing efforts and the baiting has to be done with targeted precision. The bait can be anything that seems valuable to the reader. This can be an online calculator. It can be the promise of getting more discounts upon making social media comments or by Liking the page.
Sometimes, lead baits are nothing but a short but great story that leads the browser towards your brand. Here, the bait is more subtle, more suggestive rather than leading the reader by the horns. In some cases, the bait is just the promise of connecting with a similar-mindset online community on the social media platform. You need to find which and what type of lead baits work better for your demographic!
To sustain subscriber interest, you can tone-down the baits and emphasize more on free but high quality content. This is akin to grooming a sales-likely demographic that has immense brand familiarity and can be nurtured without high-octane online marketing campaigns.While laying content baits, take care of how these digital marketing efforts are measured.
For instance, realizing more subscribers for your weekly emails might not mean a boost in sales, at least not immediately. However, that does not make the email marketing effort less effective. Conversely, a seasonal clearance sale email campaign might need more sales and more traffic towards the product pages rather than just subscriber volumes. Have these goals specified at the outset for better evaluating the outcomes.
You also need to understand the value of nurturing a relationship with your emailing demographic. Having more subscribers does not always mean more customers. The rise in email sign-ups might be just out of curiosity. Many times, social media marketing delivers loads of sign-ups with low sales conversions.
However, these are not wasted marketing efforts. When your brand is showing-up more regularly, across more and newer inboxes, you are winning in some way.This is when you can nurture consumer relationships. This helps to sustain the connection and can transform many subscribers into actual buyers down the line.
3. Content that Adds Value & Drives Digital Marketing Results
Content marketing has one simple, undeniable requirement – high-quality content. But what is good content? What makes your email copy more readable or what type of social media content drives infinite clicks? The answer lies in having a content strategy that is dynamic and contemporary, ready to scale-up and evolve with changing consumer mindsets.
Your practice might have sufficient content to attract both end users and industry professionals. However, unless this content is not put out there, its relevance is handicapped.While industry professionals would like more researched data, end users might prefer content carrying more product information or customer reviews and comparisons.
This is why digital marketing fueled by high-quality content needs semi-targeted and hyper-targeted content. It cannot always make sense to a very small group and neither it can be too generic. To ensure more content engagement, keep your content strategy flexible.
There are some content creation basics you cannot ignore. For example, headlines – they seem easy but ask a PR professional or an ad agency copy-writer and you might get a feedback that creating titles and sub-headings from scratch can be very difficult. There is a certain reader-centric chemistry that good headlines create and this needs some effort.
You need to be certain about what type of content is more shareable. If your demographic likes infographic-heavy content over regular articles, make the content more graphic, with more industry figures, images with captions and diagrams. Repeat visits and recommendations for content that you have already published and now lies warehoused, no longer trending, also warrants evaluation.
The content should never be over-promotional. This helps to control the bounce rate and encourages more click-through.Yes, the content should have search engine styling with an emphasis on commercial keywords but this too needs restrain to ensure that the overall quality remains good.
Social media marketing baits within the content is a smart move but too many bait links, excessive hyperlinks, repeated pop-ups or advertorial sections can spoil the impression. More time on your web page, more click-through for the landing page is good and getting regular feedback can be the best way to monitor this. Creating a profoundly easy feedback tool makes sense!
Try to publish across all mainstream content formats to ensure you always own a type of content that a browser prefers. Ensure there is quality content for white paper readers to e-books, articles, slide shares and videos to consumer surveys, short pictorial blogs and infographic-heavy discussions. A good way to boost the engagement is providing some freebies. This can be a free download to an industry report, free pass to an upcoming podcast or discount coupons.
Conclusion
The secret of content marketing lead generation lies in ensuring that you stick to only high-quality content that is easy to share and promote. Optimize each content for search engines, contextual accuracy and user behaviors. Try to stay true to these three content marketing recommendations shared here for sustainable and effective results from your dental online marketing strategy.
About the Author
Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education, and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of 180+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dentists who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.
