When it comes to attracting new patients to your optometry practice, you might be relying mostly on word-of-mouth referrals or positive reviews to help bring people through your front door. While both of those are certainly important elements in your overall marketing and reputation management strategies, neither is likely to make a dent in the digital real estate that is the internet. You need to do more with the resources available to you to ensure you’re creating content that your audience wants to engage with. When you do, you’ll realize an increase in traffic to your website and, likely, more new patients visiting your waiting room.
Content marketing tips for optometrists are just important as they are for any other industry. Sure, the target audience is specific to people who need a doctor to care for their eyes, but this specificity lends itself to great opportunities for personalization within your marketing efforts if you know how to leverage information about your patients.
Why is creating content so important to your online visibility? The answer is actually quite simple: content is among Google’s most highly considered ranking factors when the company determines visibility. Content helps keep your online presence fresh, relevant, and authoritative, so the search engines have confidence and trust when it comes time to rank your business at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Today, content marketing is one of the most predominant ways in which businesses of all sorts engage with their customers and drive revenue to their bottom lines. This is no different from your optometry practice than it would be for any other industry; the key lies in cashing in on the many active online users who are looking for your services. Once you have a marketing plan, you’ll be able to seamlessly create, publish, and distribute online content in ways that help you sustain your current patient base while attracting whole new sets of eyes to your practice.
With all this in mind, let’s take a deep dive into what you need to do to create a content calendar and craft impactful digital marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing Tips for Optometrists: Quick Tips for Success
If you’re new to the game of content calendar creation, the idea can be a little overwhelming at first. Fortunately, you’re not the first eye doctor to tackle this task, and you won’t be the last. Remember these simple tips to help you get started and get your process moving forward:
- Define your audience. Determine who you’re creating content for and what they’re looking for online
- Take note of your messaging. It’s not just about what content you create, but also how you communicate the message you’re trying to get across to the world. How can you say what you’re saying in a way that resonates with your audience the most?
- Share your content across platforms. Where should you publish content? Your website, blog, Google My Business, social media, and other business directories allow you to share text, photo, and video content with patients in ways that invite engagement. The more places you can share your content, the more visibility you’ll earn.
- Plan ahead with a content calendar. You can go quarterly at a high level with themes, promotions, and other categories. Then, you can get more specific with a monthly calendar that outlines the exact content you’ll be creating over the next few weeks.
Key Components of Your Content Calendar
When it comes to content calendar creation, there are several elements that go into your overall digital strategy; each of these should have some attention paid to it when you’re designing your strategy. As you start your planning, consider the following components:
- Your blog
- Social media accounts
- Email campaigns
- Lead generation efforts
- Paid campaigns
Blog
Your blog is your main content hub. When you provide readers with well-researched, valuable blogs, you can then complement your social media and lead gen campaigns with this content. By doing so, you’ll show you’re an authority figure in the world of optometry so your prospective patients will trust you. Be sure your blogs include calls to action (CTAs) that are applicable to your audiences’ interests.
Plan your social content calendar around your blog posts so all of your digital marketing channels are displaying consistent information when prospective patients engage with you.
Social Media
Some optometrists decide to have a dedicated social media calendar in addition to their global content calendars. Remember, social is one of your most important places to house content; it can also be helpful in determining what you do with your other digital marketing efforts.
To begin, start out by auditing your current social network activity and determine which are your top channels. From there, put analytics tracking into place so you can start to measure metrics and really understand what types of content people want to see from you.
Your content calendar will tell you how often you’re sending emails out to people, whether they’re related to a current campaign or just part of a standard monthly newsletter.
Emails help bring traffic back to your website and are often a great way to interact with your patients on a more personal level.
Lead Gen Campaigns
In order to grow your optometry practice, it’s important to get fresh eyes to your pages. Include your plans for each lead gen campaign in your steps to create a content calendar. These campaigns offer a more targeted approach so you can reach patients who have taken certain actions with your various campaign components.
Paid Campaigns
Of course, you don’t want to forget to add great content to your paid campaigns. Be sure to integrate these into your content calendar so you know where and when you need content.
5 Steps to Easily Create Your Own Monthly Content Calendar
Now that you know a little more about what a content calendar is and why you need one, let’s talk about how you can create one for your own optometry practice.
Step 1: Understand Your Patients
You’ve defined your audience; now, get to know them even better. Don’t just focus on who they are, but also home in on what their biggest pain points and struggles are. What is their search behavior? Can you identify any patterns using the data available to you? Do you know what questions they’re asking?
Step 2: Determine the Frequency
How often will you publish new content? On some platforms (such as Twitter), the expectation is to post more often than not; conversely, on other platforms (such as Instagram and Twitter), you’ll want to focus more on quality over quantity. The biggest challenge is to not overwhelm yourself with posting to social media so often that you burn out or don’t have the time to do it appropriately.
Step 3. Identify Content Categories
What are you going to post about? Here are a few ideas to help you as you’re brainstorming:
- Seasonality topics
- Limited-time promotions and special offers
- General education and how-tos
- Updates about your optometry practice that people should know about
- Local community events you’re involved with
Step 4. Brainstorm Topics
Now that you have your categories, try coming up with a list of ideas for each category. Some categories will naturally have more ideas than others and that’s okay. You don’t want to be overly sales with your content.
Step 5. Create Your Calendar
Once the categories and content ideas have been concocted, take your list and start adding to different dates you’ve marked as publication days.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
If all of this sounds like too much for you to handle, don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with this bonus step: use an all-in-one platform to create and schedule your content while also gathering analytics and running reports to help you brainstorm future content ideas and determine how well your campaigns are working. Surefire Local’s marketing platform lets you manage your content creation workflow from start to finish, all from one place. You can control your content calendar from anywhere with an all-in-one platform that’s accessible across devices and browsers, so whenever inspiration strikes, you can act on the idea! Request a demo today to learn how Surefire Local can change the way your optometry practice operates forever! Once you see how simple it is to attract new patients, you’ll never go back to relying on old-school methods of advertising and marketing again!
