Generate Business Outside Of Google
How can you expand your website traffic by boosting revenue and awareness without the search engines?
Join Your Patients Largest Communities and Forums Online
People won’t find out about your practice unless they actually see you. In order for them to see you, you’re going to have to go where your patients are. Social media can certainly be a great place to start gaining exposure and to drive traffic, but it’s not where the topical conversations are happening. Facebook is a place for friends and family to share personal images that make them laugh. As for Twitter, it’s a great place to find influencers but isn’t really a place where in-depth conversations are happening, especially not about specific topics.
You should start thinking about places on the Internet where your patients might be:
- Internet Forums and Message Boards – These are some of the most important places you can get involved. People actually spend more time on Internet forums than they do blogs.
- Blogs – Obviously, blogs are still hugely important. Any blog that has an active comment section is a good place to join the conversation.
- Google+ Communities – These are topically oriented discussion groups, similar to forums, but the accounts are tied directly to real people. This is where some of the most in-depth conversations are taking place about specific subjects.
- Reddit Subreddits – Reddit is supposedly a social bookmarking site, but as it’s grown it’s becoming more of a discussion forum. Reddit however is extremely anti-commercialist and you could get banned from the site if you use it to promote yourself too frequently. If nothing else, Reddit can be a great place to learn more about your patients.
- LinkedIn Groups – This can be a good place to find topical discussions.
- Facebook Groups – While these aren’t typically as active as Google+ communities, they are at least topically oriented.
You should only be posting links when they are relevant and helpful to the discussion. It’s important that the members of the forum feel like you’re “one of them,” and that’s not going to happen if you only post something that’s going to benefit you.
One more bit of advice: focus your attention on a limited number of platforms. It’s much better to completely win over a single community, than it is to have a scattered presence on a large number of platforms.
Capture Attention with Problem-Solving Content
You need great content in order to capture or keep an audience. In fact what you really need to do is produce content that solves a problem for your patients. You need to think of the content itself as a product, and that means defining its unique selling proposition, figuring out its target audience, and working through exactly how it’s going to help the person.
A few ways to discover the problem:
- A good place to start is with your product. What problem does it solve?
- Once you’ve defined your target audience, the best way to figure out what problems they have is to simply ask them. If you have an email list, there’s no harm in emailing your audience and asking them what problems they are struggling with.
- If you don’t have an existing audience already, pay attention to what people are talking about in the forums and online communities. What kinds of questions keep coming up over and over again? These are the kinds of problems you want to solve with your content.
- Additionally, you can run surveys using a tool like Survey Monkey to find out what people are struggling with.
Once you’ve found your problems, the next step is to solve them in ways that haven’t been done before.
If you would like any further information then give Dental Design a call on: 01202 677277.
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