Use dental content marketing to attract more fee for service patients
If you are a fee-for-service (FFS) practice, a typical dental marketing strategy may not be enough to produce the kind of results you need to thrive. If you are looking for a better way to attract more FFS patients, your answer may be dental content marketing.
Why use dental content marketing?
Since the patients you are seeking will primarily be paying out-of-pocket for the services you provide, they will have a lot of questions surrounding how much value they are getting for their money, and if your services are even something they want or need. That means you’ll need to educate them, and that’s what content marketing is all about.
The fundamental keys to successful dental content marketing are reaching the right people with the right information at the right place and time. Let’s break that down.
Right people
Obviously, your dental practice isn’t the right choice for everyone. Most who have dental insurance coverage will prefer to visit participating dental offices to take advantage of full or partially reimbursed services. But your real target audience behaves more like consumers. Recognize who they are in terms of their demographics, behaviors, interests, and needs. Ideally, you’ll create a persona, or semi-fictional profile to represent who those people are. You’ll use that persona to determine what information they’ll be seeking, and where they’ll be most likely to find it.
Right message
Once you know who your dental personas are, ask yourself what questions they might have related to the services you offer or your practice in general. Also think about what you want them to know. What you’re looking for is a list of relevant content that you can develop. Relevant would be defined as any topics that fall into BOTH the information they are seeking and the information you want to share.
Right place
The best opportunity for you to present your content is through dental blogging. A blog will allow you to write highly focused content that dives deep into a specific topic. Social media posts, website pages, and marketing emails are also great places to share information and provide answers to their questions.
You also need to make sure the information your personas are looking for is easy to find online. Search engine optimization (SEO) is of utmost importance for the success of any content marketing strategy. Take your topics that you discovered in the previous step and match them up to the keyword phrases that present the greatest opportunity for you to be found through your dental SEO.
Right time
When you’re trying to attract more FFS dental patients, it can take some time. There is a journey most of them go through that can be broken into three stages. During the Awareness stage, they are just discovering that they have a want or need for a particular service. The Consideration stage is when they evaluate their level of desire and learn more about the service. The final stage, Decision, is when they either take action or not and choose the best option for a service provider.
To meet patients at each of those stages, you can match up the content formats you use with the stage they are in. dental social media, for example, is a great opportunity to catch someone’s attention and get them thinking about an elective procedure like whitening. Once they are considering it, you can educate them about the benefits and overall process of whitening on your blog, where they can possibly complete a form and download a brochure that explains everything in detail. Once you capture their email address, you can follow up with automated emails that can help them over the final hurdle of scheduling an appointment to visit your office. Coupons and other promotions are especially effective at this stage.
Want to talk strategy?
We love talking to fee-for-service practices and matching them up with the right marketing strategies to attract more FFS dental patients. Schedule a Marketing Breakthrough Call today to find the results you’ve been looking for.