As a dental practice owner, you know that dentistry is a highly competitive industry. How many other dentists are you competing for business within your area? If you're like many practice owners, the answer is probably higher than you'd like it to be. 

Digital marketing is a valuable strategy to use to stay competitive and grow your dental practice, but where do you start?

With a few tips in mind, you can begin crafting a successful content marketing strategy. Here's what you need to know. 

What Do We Mean by Content Marketing for Dentists?

Content marketing is the strategy of creating written or visual content that promotes your business. Unless you have a videographer on hand, you'll likely want to start with the written aspect of content marketing. 

Written content can come in the form of:

• Website pages
• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Emails
• Text messages

Your written content should be tailored to your target audience, keyword-driven, high-quality, and authoritative.

Checking all these boxes can help your content have the most powerful effect on potential patients. 

Tips for Writing Successful Content

Creating a lead-generating, patient-acquiring content marketing strategy is about more than just putting written words on a page. You need to consider factors like patient confidentiality, search engine optimization, and dental authority. 

Before you start writing, consider these tips for content marketing for dentists.

Put Your Knowledge and Authority to Use

You dedicated many years of schooling and residency to becoming a dental professional, and you put your skills to good use every day at your clinic. But you can also capitalize on your knowledge base with your content marketing strategy. 

Potential patients should view your website as an authoritative source to learn about the various aspects of dental care. You want to make sure everything you include is accurate, grammatically correct, and professional to build this reputation. 

Even if the content you include is technically true, if the writing is low-quality or riddled with errors, it will make your practice look bad. We recommend having a knowledgeable content editor review all your social media posts, blog content, and web pages before publishing them. 

Craft Social Media Posts Strategically

Social media is a direct outlet into your potential patients' daily lives. Using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn strategically can grow your organic website traffic and build your patient base. 

When posting to social media, you want to post consistently, create posts that provide value to your followers, and understand the trends of each platform before posting.

Finally, if you're going to let employees post on your dental practice's social media pages, you'll benefit from creating a social media policy. The ADA indicates a few rules of engagement for dental practice social media policies¹, including tips like:

• Don't post copyrighted content without permission. 
• Don't post any patient information without the patient's consent. 
• Give the final go-ahead for all social media posts, even if you let employees draft them. 

Make Keyword-Focused Content

You should be writing about topics relevant to the dental industry and your practice as a whole, but to narrow your topics further, make sure you're writing about keywords that your website should be ranking for. 

In short, keywords are the terms that users put into their Google search queries when they're looking for information about a specific topic. The keywords your dental practice may try to rank for include terms like:

• Dental services near {CITY}
• Dental cleaning
• Dental exam
• Schedule a dental appointment

By using keywords in your content, you tell the search engine crawlers to include your website in relevant search results. Begin by using a tool like Google Keyword Planner to identify keywords your practice should be using. Be sure to use your keywords strategically in the body content, meta title and description, and headings. 

Dental Marketing Solutions That Grow Your Business

Content marketing isn't the only strategy involved in an effective dental marketing plan. When you work with Dental Intelligence, you gain access to a full suite of dental analytics and engagement solutions ranging from Online Scheduling to 2-Way Communication.

Creating a strategy for content marketing for dentists with the help of our experts at Dental Intelligence can help you achieve your marketing goals faster and more effectively. Schedule a demo today to learn how Dental Intelligence can benefit your dental practice.

Resources

¹ ADA