If there is one thing we can’t stress more to your dermatology practice, it’s the importance of developing a content marketing strategy. By creating high-quality content and sharing it across your digital footprint, it allows you to stay ahead of your competition and become more visible to your ideal audience on search engines like Google. But creating content for the sake of it won’t get you anywhere. The best strategy incorporates content marketing tips to help your dermatology practice produce content that your audience will want to read and engage with.
Let’s discuss some of our top content marketing tips for dermatologists and walk through a simple process to create a content calendar that can have you writing and publishing new content on an ongoing basis without feeling any stress.
Top Content Marketing Tips for Dermatologists
There are several ways to come up with content that’s relevant to your practice and still be content your audience wants to read. Here are some ways you can go about discovering what content your ideal audience is most interested in.
1. Focus on How You Can Help Improve Your Patients’ Lives
Some of the most widely read types of content on the internet are those that directly address and offer solutions to help people overcome whatever it is they’re looking to overcome. These “pain points” or struggles you can find by identifying the most common dermatology issues people experience and the reasons why they seek out treatment. Then you take a pain point, confirm the issue, and round out that first pain point with a solution or solutions. Then you rinse and repeat for each new pain point you create content about.
What does this do? This actually does several things for your practice. It will help build your brand and your brand’s authority in the industry. It will also give you the opportunity to help people—for free. People are eternally grateful when you provide them with a solution to their problem, especially if you give them that valuable information for free. So, the next time they need something dermatology-related, you will be the first practice that comes to mind.
Not only that…when you put out high-quality content, that content is more likely to be shared or go viral. There is one last thing using the pain points content method does. When someone asks your patients if they know a good dermatologist, they are going to immediately recommend your practice.
2. Read Social Media Comments
Another great way to come up with ideas for content is to read through yours and other practices’ social media comments. By doing this, you can learn more about what people are most concerned about, what needs are not being met, what their frustrations are, and what they do and don’t like about their dermatology experiences.
Then you simply write some content around those issues. Make sure you include how your practice does it differently or correctly versus other practices where people aren’t happy with the way things are being done.
This will help build your brand’s reputation and authority. It shows your prospective patients that your practice is different and would better suit their needs than your competitors’ practice does.
3. Identify Forum Questions
Read through industry forums to identify the questions people are frequently asking about dermatology issues. Then, you take those questions and write an article for each one addressing every aspect of that question. If you do this correctly and write the topic thoroughly enough, your content could end up being featured in the Google Answer Box, that little box that shows near the top of almost every Google results page.
Just make sure you use questions in your content. This is because the Google Answer boxes always use questions from people searching Google for answers. If your content lands in the Google Answer box, it could increase your traffic substantially. So it’s well worth the extra effort to find and answer as many questions as possible.
4. Survey Your Current and Potential Patients
Another way to come up with great topics for your content is to ask your current and prospective patients what kinds of content they would be most interested in. You could do this by asking each patient during an appointment. Then, you take that information and write content around it.
Now that you’ve found endless content ideas, let’s talk about how to incorporate that content with other types of content.
What Types of Content Should Your Consider?
Evergreen
Evergreen content includes things like how-to articles, educational content, tips and advice, case studies, and other basic dermatology information—industry-related information that may or may not be common knowledge but would be interesting and helpful to your readers. This is content that no matter how much time passes by the content is still relevant in that moment.
Evergreen content will help you in other ways as well. For example, since it’s evergreen, you can publish it once and it will continue to be relevant—possibly forever. That means, over time, it will help build backlinks to your website because others will link to it. It will also help with your website’s SEO and branding because it will continue to build brand authority.
HOT TIP: The word content doesn’t just refer to written content. Content can also be videos, infographics, podcasts, webinars, etc.
Seasonal
Seasonal content is easy! You can write seasonal-related content with topics relating to the seasons. You can also write content with a holiday-related theme and topic. For example, summer content can include tips for protecting your skin against the sun’s damaging rays. For winter, you could write tips and tricks for preventing dry skin and chapped lips. For the holidays, you could offer the top 10 most wanted skincare gifts, etc.
Dermatology Services
To write about your services, you can make a list of all your services and write a piece of content based on each service and why that service is important, and what would happen if that service wasn’t performed when issues arise. For example, write about your annual skin check service, why it’s important, and what could happen if people don’t have this done annually, or when they notice changes in their skin. You can then link each piece of individual content to the related section on your Services page. This is called interlinking and will help with your website’s SEO.
How to Utilize Content in Your Online Marketing Strategy
Content is only as good as it can be if it’s easily found online. There are several ways you can continue to market your content long after you write it—and you should do more than just write it, post it, and never look at it again.
Once you’ve written your content, you could use one or more of the following tactics to share that new piece of content with the world.
- Social Media – make a post on all your social media pages announcing that you have just posted new content with a link. Linking to your content will help with your SEO and provide your website with more backlinks.
- Press Releases – have a press release written announcing your new content if it warrants that level of exposure. This works especially well if you have just released a new product or service or have recently won an award. Additionally, this will also provide more backlinks to your website, improving your SEO.
- Coupons and Specials – include a coupon or special within your content. This could be included as part of your content’s call to action. It will also give you a way to track how many people are reading your content and taking action on that content.
- Guest Posts – this involves networking with related industry websites that aren’t in direct competition with your practice. When you write a post, ask a related website if you can post your content on their website as a guest post. This will help them because they don’t have to write the content themselves and it will help you because it gives you a backlink to your website along with more perceived brand authority. You could network with your dermatology suppliers, influencers, salespeople, or other third-party dermatology websites that have a blog where you could post your content.
There are other ways to market your content. Just think about where your content might have the opportunity to reach others. You can use just about any related avenue that makes sense.
Now that you’ve found content ideas, written about them, let’s talk about how to put all this content on a marketing calendar so you know when to promote it and to help roll it out timely and effectively.
How to Easily Create a Content Calendar
- Create or download a calendar or template for your content.
- Decide on which channels you want to publish your content.
- Determine when your calendar year will begin.
- Label each piece of content with the title, headline, content topic, name of the author, where content is to be posted, and a content posting date.
- Add the content to your content calendar.
To add content to your content calendar, you will need to categorize your content. For example, categorize all your pain points content, all your seasonal content, all your evergreen content, all your services content, etc. You will need to be mindful of your seasonal content, so it’s placed on your calendar in the appropriate months.
Next, take all your seasonal content and put those on your calendar in the appropriate months. Then take your other content pieces and mix them up before placing it on your content calendar. You don’t want all similar types of content to be posted consecutively. For example, you don’t want all your pain points content sent out in consecutive months, you should send out a pain point piece, next month send out an evergreen piece, then a services piece, etc. It’s best to mix them up.
HOT TIP: You can also use your old content sporadically. You just have to freshen them up a bit, then repost them. Additionally, it’s good to freshen your old content with new updated information from time to time. This is good for your audience’s user experience as well as for your website’s SEO.
What’s Next?
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo.
Why is this important?
Using an all-in-one platform to create and schedule your content makes your job quicker, easier, and more convenient because everything is in one place. It also gives you one-click access to your analytics and the reports that give you some insight into future topics you could write about, not to mention that it will show you how well your campaigns are working.
Other benefits of using the Surefire Local Platform include the ease of managing your content creation workflow from start to finish all from one place. And, you can manage your content calendar from anywhere with an all-in-one platform. A platform that is accessible across devices and browsers. So, whenever inspiration strikes, you can act on the idea.
