It’s been a big year for online marketing – mobile has taken over and there are more ways than ever to find and engage your target audience online.
For local businesses, doing a few things well may be more productive than trying to push out everything. A practices marketing strategy should essentially be made simpler, clearer and easier to execute.
Use Social Media for Engagement
Social media is effective at engaging with existing patients, keeping them updated on what’s going on in the practice, and reaching out to them with deals and offers. Engagement keeps your practice at the top of their mind and helps with retention and branding. It does take time to do it right and time is something that not many dental practices have.
Responsive Website Designs
Mobile has already overtaken desktop in both local search and Google search so its certainly something Practices should think about going into the New Year.
Be specific with your target audience
Right content, right place, right time continues to be a key theme. Highly relevant, quality content is essential to draw in patients and keep them engaged. Targeting simplifies your message and matches your marketing with those most likely to respond. Patients are more likely to respond to personalisation in everything they view, from emails to suggested products to the content they see.
Content marketing
If you type a query into Google, the chances are you’ll be provided with an instant answer – removing your need to even visit a website. As Google’s Knowledge Graph gets smarter, websites that only provide short answers to queries risk losing out on traffic. So there will be a lean towards long-form content to continue attracting site visitors.
Quality over quantity
At its heart, developing content and content marketing as a whole is about telling a story, building a relationship, and growing a potential audience-market. For this reason, content for contents sake – oft-produced to arbitrary word-counts by an inexperienced pool of freelancers – will only lead to unengaging work which will be ignored by your audience or market. Getting smart about your content, and picking and choosing how and when it is produced and targeted to, is the smart way forward.
Reuse your content across all platforms
Small businesses are often better off creating one high-quality piece of content they can share across all media channels, rather than customizing content for each channel that suffers from inattention.
Video will continue to dominate
Almost two thirds of content consumed online is video and the number is set to increase. So if you’re not already utilising video to engage with your customers, reach your target audience and provide useful relevant content, 2016 is the year to start seriously leveraging it.
If you would like any further information then please give the Dental Design team a call on: 01202677277.