Running your own physical therapy business is busy work. While your goals are focused on helping patients and guiding them towards recovery, there are many other tasks that need to be completed, from invoicing to managing your patients to marketing.
Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that can be very helpful to your business. Content provides a long-term solution to bringing in new business and is useful for informing your potential patients of your value and expertise. However, actually creating content is another matter altogether.
While content marketing provides great benefits to businesses, it also requires time and commitment to get it right. Here are some content marketing tips for physical therapists that can help you gain control of your content marketing process and find success in your efforts.
Why is Creating Content So Important to Your Online Visibility?
You might be wondering why content creation is so important to your business. The truth is that content is among Google’s most important ranking factors when determining the visibility of a business. If a business doesn’t have strong content, Google won’t rank it as high when organizing listings.
Content also helps to keep your online presence recent, relevant, and authoritative, so that Google and other search engines have the confidence and trust in your business to rank you highly. That also helps to determine what content populates for audience searches and can bring in more patients to your physical therapy business.
Quick Tips for Success
Creating content requires you to have good technical writing skills along with the time necessary to create and publish great content. There are a few content marketing essentials for success that can help you in your content creation process. Let’s go through four of the best content marketing tips for physical therapists now.
Define Your Audiences
The first tip for success is to make sure that your audience is clearly defined. You’ll need to have a clear idea of who you want to target with your content and the types of subjects they are looking for online, so you know what to write.
Is your audience more interested in the long-term benefits of physical therapy? Are they curious as to how long it will take to recover from an injury? Are they athletes looking for tips to avoid muscle strain? Or are they older patients who want to recover from hip and back injuries? Knowing the answers to these types of questions about your audience can help you determine which kinds of content topics will resonate the most with them.
Defining your audience is also an important step in building up your physical therapy business. You want to have an understanding of who you want to get in front of so you can personalize and tailor your message to connect with that specific audience.
Take Note of Your Messaging
The messaging of your content refers to the central theme that you want to communicate with your audiences. After all, a strong content marketing strategy needs to be more than just the content you create. How you communicate your message to potential patients and the exact message you are trying to get across to them matter just as much as the specific content pieces you post.
Think about how you can get across what you’re trying to say in a way that resonates with your audiences the most. What type of message is going to make them want to engage with your business? You’ll also want to make sure the message is short and sweet, so that your audiences are able to understand it quickly.
Share Your Content Across Platforms
The companies that have the most success with content marketing share their content across a wide variety of platforms in a wide variety of formats. That helps get the message you’ve crafted in front of as many potential patients as you can. In turn, that increases the odds that a new audience member will reach out to your business.
There are a number of places where you can publish content, including your:
- Website pages
- Blog
- Google My Business account
- Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram
- Business directories
The more places you can find to share your content, the more visibility you’ll earn and the more authority you’ll gain with Google and other search engines. All that leads to more leads and more patients for your physical therapy business.
Plan Ahead with a Content Calendar
One of the best ways to stay ahead of content creation is with a content calendar. A content calendar is an organizational tool that helps you plan ahead and know exactly what content you want to create and when. A great idea is to start at a quarterly level with the themes, promotions, and other categories you want to plan for.
After you’ve set the quarterly goals for your content, you can start getting more specific with monthly calendars that outline the exact content you’ll create over the next few weeks. That includes everything from emails to social media posts to the blogs you want to add to your campaigns.
5 Steps to Easily Create Your Own Monthly Content Calendar
A content calendar can seem overwhelming for those who have never built one before. However, with a few simple steps, it can be the biggest time saver and organizational tool that you’ve used in the content marketing process. Here are a few content marketing tips for physical therapists that center around perfecting your content calendar.
Step 1: Understand Your Patients
You’ve already defined your audience as part of your initial content marketing planning, but now it’s time to get to know them even better. And that’s not just who they are from at a demographic level. You’ve got to dig into their biggest pain points and struggles, their search patterns and behaviors, and the types of questions they want you to answer for them.
Step 2: Determine the Frequency
The next step of creating a content calendar is to determine how often you will publish new content. Some platforms like Twitter have the expectation that you will post more often than not, sometimes even multiple times a day. Other platforms like Instagram and Facebook allow you to focus more on quality over quantity.
The biggest challenge you’ll find in this stage is avoiding getting overwhelmed by posting to social media so often that you burn out or don’t put the right time into it to be worth the effort. Pick frequencies that are manageable but often enough that audiences have new content.
Step 3: Identify Content Categories
After picking the frequency of the posts you want to publish, you’ve got to identify the different content categories that are going to resonate the strongest with your determined audiences. Ideas for topics can include but aren’t limited to:
- Seasonality topics
- Limited time promotions and special offers
- General education about physical therapy
- How-to’s and guides
- Practice updates that people should know about (new hours, additional services, etc.)
- Local community events that you’re involved in
Step 4: Brainstorm Topics
Now that you’ve determined the categories you want to produce content for, try coming up with a list of ideas for each category. It’s alright if some of the categories have more ideas and topics than others, as that will help you build a brand voice and content style that your audiences grow to expect.
Make sure that as you brainstorm you don’t become overly salesy with your content. It’s good to put a CTA or contact us button at the bottom of a content piece, but if it just reads like a sales pitch, you can turn potential patients away.
Step 5: Create Your Calendar
The final step of the content calendar process is to actually sit down to create your calendar. Take the list of brainstorming topics you’ve put together and start adding them to a calendar with different dates marked for publication. After a time, you’ll start to be more comfortable putting together a content calendar every month.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Here’s a key bonus step to creating a content calendar: use an all-in-one platform to create and schedule your content. Not only does an all-in-one platform help you manage your content calendar, but it also provides you with analytics and reports to help you brainstorm future content ideas and determine how well your campaigns are working.
The Surefire Local Marketing Platform lets you manage the content creation workflow from start to finish all in the same place. It also helps you manage your content calendars from anywhere on any device. That means that whenever inspiration strikes, you can be ready to act.
Attend a Surefire Local platform demo today, and learn all about the content capabilities that are available to you alongside many other marketing tools that work together to ensure that your physical therapy business can grow strong.
