Ira Pasternack President, WebForDoctors
Content marketing is the process of creating online content related to your products and services, and then sharing that content with both your prospects and customers. This allows you to educate people about what you do, helping to create and build consultative business relationships. By using content to reach out and then engaging with people whose attention you grab, you will have a powerful tool to build your practice.
Planning Your Occ Med Content Strategy
When it comes to occupational medicine content marketing, the first step is to have a clear strategy in place. That means understanding your goals and who your target audience is. While the long-term goal will generally be to promote your full spectrum of occ med services, initially you should focus on the services with the most upside.
Think about the services that provide steady revenue potential throughout the year, along with those seasonal services that people are about to start needing. For example, if you offer onsite flu clinics to companies, by July you should be planning content that can be published by early August, when companies are starting to think about scheduling events at their locations. As flu season proceeds and most people have gotten their shots – or as you schedule enough clinics to reach your goals – you can shift your content to other priorities.
When it comes to your target audience, you need to consider 2 levels. First, what industries or types of companies are likely to need a specific service? Second, who is the likely decision maker in those target companies? Depending on the service in question and the size of your prospects, occ med content is generally directed at HR and Safety personnel, Plant Managers, Office Managers, as well as Business Owners, CFOs, and other C-level executives.
Creating and Publishing Content
Once you have determined your priorities, you can start creating an outline or calendar showing the content you will develop. This should include blog posts, articles, infographics, emails, videos, and other long-form or complex content, as well as images and short blurbs for social media.
The majority of your content should be publicly available, but you should also create “lead magnets” – valuable content that is given away for free, in exchange for contact information from prospective customers. Most people who are interested in some of your valuable content will also be interested in other relevant content, which you can deliver more directly by email or other means once you have their contact information. As you deliver more and more value, you build authority and familiarity. This leads prospects who have new needs or become dissatisfied with their current providers to have confidence in their abilities. It also helps with customers who may be using you for some of your needs, as they consider utilizing your services for ALL of their needs.
When it comes to where and how often to publish occ med content, as a baseline you should consider a monthly blog post (and/or LinkedIn Article). You should share this, along with content curated from others on your personal and/or LinkedIn profile – aim for at least a few posts per week, and grow from there. Next, consider joining and posting to relevant LinkedIn Groups – just make sure to follow the Group’s rules while providing as much value as possible. If you or your company have an active presence on a Facebook Business Page, Twitter, or other social media platform, then repurpose the LinkedIn content for these other platforms.
Engage!
Once you have created and shared your content, your marketing has just begun. After your content is out there, you might start getting calls and messages from your prospects. But in most cases, there will be many micro-moments along the customer journey that lead up to those calls or direct messages.
After your content is out there, you might start getting calls and messages from your prospects. But in most cases, there will be many micro-moments along the customer journey that lead up to those calls or direct messages. These include liking or commenting on your posts, visiting your website, and requesting lead magnets.
By monitoring this engagement and interacting with these people, you can speed up their customer journeys. Remember – we aren’t talking about traditional media, this is SOCIAL media. If you don’t interact, you are missing out on much of the relationship-building that is possible.
Measure Success
As the ultimate goal of marketing is to add new accounts and expand business with existing accounts, patient numbers and overall profitability metrics will always be vital. That said, you can measure specific aspects of our content marketing to better inform future efforts.
For example, you can examine growth in the number of followers as well as the amount of engagement from those followers on social media platforms. On the web, you can track which service pages or blog posts are viewed the most, as well as which of those pages are most likely to lead to conversions in the form of phone calls or filling out a contact form.
Once you collect contact information from people, you can track them in a CRM. This allows you to tie everything together, and assess which pieces of content are associated with the new business that you develop.
This has been a brief introduction to occ med content marketing. We’ll be exploring this topic further as part of the full-day Marketing Workshop on the Wednesday of the upcoming NAOHP Conference.
