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Is blogging still relevant?

Article-Is blogging still relevant?

Whether or not your blog is still relevant depends on whether or not you still care. As long as your content remains relevant to your patients’ needs, your blog will remain relevant to achieving your business goals.

And for as long as your blog functions as a part of your website, not someone else’s (which should be forever?), it will offer more opportunities to attract, engage, convert and retain an audience than any other channel — not to mention — for a fraction of the cost.

So how do you “still care” about your blog? It all starts with a choice — three of them, actually:

1. Generate Demand

2. Stick to Your Strengths

3. Champion Consistency

 

1. Generate Demand

At the end of the day, you’re still marketing something with your content. While your blog should do the hard work of entertaining and adding value to your patients’ experience in a different way than your products or services do, it should still generate demand for those services, too.

Quality content increases the size of the market, not your market share, by helping patients identify problems before they know they exist and setting them on the path to investigating a solution.

You’re not using your blog to convince your prospective patients that they need to solve a problem that doesn’t exist; instead, you’re becoming their anchor of expertise by making them aware of a problem they never knew they had.

NEXT: 2. Stick to Your Strengths

 

2. Stick to Your Strengths

As much as you think your recent blog post titled, “The Skinny on Body Contouring” matters to your patients, it doesn’t. Your content competitors (WebMD, Wikipedia, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Women’s Fitness, etc.) already own your audience’s attention for broad topics related to your industry, not to mention the real estate on search engines.

Instead, if you expect your blog to cultivate and engage an audience over time (and drive profitable traffic), it needs a hook. Go where your national content competitors can’t; go where you can actually compete: your location. In other words, make your blog posts uniquely relevant to your community, not to everyone.

Your patients can find content on body contouring all over the web, but can they find ways to contour their body by working out in, say, Portland?

So instead of “The Skinny on Body Contouring,” take a risk and try, “Thanks for Nothing, Portlandia: How to Sculpt the Body Beervana Built.” Which do you think a Portland-native will empathize with more?

NEXT: 3. Champion Consistency

 

3. Champion Consistency

If you expect your blog to satisfy your business goals and fulfill your patients’ needs, then it needs to champion consistency across the board. Consistent frequency. Consistent quality. Consistent everything.

Choose one frequency that you can consistently be great at, and stick to it (yes, even if that means once a month). Otherwise, your blog will slip into irrelevance, wasting your time and money as it falls from grace.

Creating a blog means creating expectations. So once you set an appointment with your audience, you need to show up for it. And once you establish the rules of engagement (literally), you need to play by those rules, always.

What would happen to your practice if you only showed up for half of your consultations? Or worse, you showed up for all of them but told half of the consults that you didn’t have time to answer their questions? You’d lose patients, right? The same goes for your blog: once you set the bar, your only options are to meet it, or, if you’re serious, exceed it.

If you want to build a relevant blog that attracts, engages and converts new patients, it won’t happen overnight. Relevance is the outcome of a series of choices you make about your content: the choice to champion consistency across the entire supply chain, and the choice to target a hyper-local audience with content that generates demand for your products and services.

Only then will your blog blossom over time, leaving you with an asset that adds all sorts of new value to your patients and your practice.

But it all starts with a choice: the choice to still care. 

Drew Leahy is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Incredible Marketing where he plays a pivotal role in helping cosmetic medical practices attract, engage and convert new patients online with content marketing. 

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