PracticalDermatology

In a crowded online space, you need an effective content strategy to earn attention and recognition from your target audience on a consistent basis. The content must not only be unique and deeply relevant, but it must also be easily accessible to your potential patients.

To create truly remarkable and engaging content, you ought to have a good understanding of what your target audience reads, needs, and shares with others. You may consider the following ideas and incorporate them in your content strategy to win greater recognition for your dermatology practice.

Define your Target Audience

If you create content for your dermatology website, blog or social networks with an aim to engage with existing and future patients, focus only on people who may need your services at some point and who stay around the area where your practice is located. If you try to be relevant to everyone on the planet, you may end up being relevant to no one in particular.

Develop a persona of your average prospective patient, and focus your content according to his or her interests, needs and preferences. Certain segments of people may not be good fit for the kind of services you offer, and you cannot afford to invest your resources and energies on trying to market yourself to them. Therefore, it is not only important to know who your target audience is, but also who isn’t.

Seek Feedback

You may periodically ask for feedback from select patients who have been seeking your services regularly. Many of them would have read through some of your content on your dermatology website, blog or social media, or seen an article from you published online. You can ask them to rate the content and seek suggestions on what kind of content they may like to read in the future.

Such feedback will provide you better insights into the content consumption habits of your target audience. Once you know when, where, why and how they consume content, you can tailor your content strategy to fit in more closely with their needs. This can produce much better and concentrated impact and eventually generate more traffic for your website as well as your dermatology practice.

Pay Attention to Competitive Content

While getting interested in your own target audience is very important, another good idea is to review the competitive landscape frequently. Take a look at the kind of content that some of the dermatologists in your area of specialty are creating on their website or blog. Visit their social media networks to assess the kind of response their content generates in that sphere of engagement.

There is no harm in learning and drawing inspiration from your competitors in the matters of creative content development and presentation. It can be time consuming to assess the competitors’ content, but in the long run it can help to sharpen your content strategy, and produce greater results with less effort.

Monitor your Content Analytics

Over a period of time, you can note a pattern of what kind of content clicks with your target audience and what does not. A wide range of factors may appear to contribute to the hits and misses in your content, which can be difficult to decipher. However, you can still attempt to find any patterns that may form in your hits and misses over time.

For instance, you can notice whether content in one of your specialty areas draws the maximum number of views, shares, comments or likes. You may also identify whether content shared at a specific time of the day, or focused on a particular geographical area, or for a specific audience category, or even having a certain kind of title achieves more response on the whole.

This analysis will help you to constantly redefine and improvise your content strategy. You can invest more time and effort on content areas that are strong, while implementing corrective measures in the weak areas. Content analysis is an ongoing exercise, which will continue to keep you ahead of your competition, stay highly relevant and focused, and keep building your readership base on a consistent basis.

Keyword Optimization

Great content must be combined with great search engine optimization in order to achieve its real goal of increasing localized traffic to your dermatology website and eventually your practice. Most of your new readers and potential patients are likely to find you via organic online search. While you must write for your audience, but what you write must also be comprehensible to the search engine crawlers.

To begin with, you should identify 20 to 25 short as well as long-tail keywords and phrases that your potential patients are likely to search for on Google or Bing. These keywords can be included in most of your content pieces in a natural way, and should also form a part of the SEO meta-tags for your various web pages. Use Google Keyword Tool to stay updated with the latest trending keywords that your audience may be using.

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Content Formats

Make sure that your dermatology website is mobile friendly and compatible with various mobile devices. A growing majority of people chooses to view content on their mobile devices, and many of them may move over to competitor sites if they are unable to enjoy a consummate mobile viewing experience with your website. Even from an SEO perspective, if the site is not mobile compatible, it is unlikely to rank high in the search engine rankings.

Content presentation should include multiple formats such as videos, images, slide shares and infographics. Videos are an overwhelmingly popular form of content today. Include useful videos that educate and inform your audience, while retaining the interest element and creativity to keep the viewers engrossed. Infographics can be used strategically to present data and information in an eye-catching format.

High quality, search engine optimized content is the surest way to win recognition for your dermatology practice in the long run. Keep content at the center of all your online marketing and promotion activities, and it will continue to deliver good dividends for you year after year. n

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of Dermatologists.

With a team of 130+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps doctors 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 Naren direct at 877-249-9666.