Scott: I’m Scott Edwards, and today I have Charles Makarewicz with me to discuss content marketing, and how it is an essential activity to demonstrate to Google and the other search engines, that your dental practice is proactive and providing relevant information to users searching for information relevant to your dental services.

Charles is a founder of Dental Marketing Expert, a company which specializes in local marketing for Australian dentists, and is responsible for many dental practices across Australia dominating their local competition, and attracting up to 15 patients each and every week. Welcome to the show Charles.

Charles: Good morning everyone.

Scott: First of all Charles, in the context of local marketing for dentists, can you explain what we’re referring to as content marketing?

Charles: I’d like to digress just slightly off the topic. I was looking at where the current state of the internet is, and where the attention of the consumers is, and I came to the conclusion that we’re all as the businesses need to be a media company first, and then our services.

So for dentist that would mean a media company plus dental practice, and I know a lot of you including probably you Scott will be a little sceptical, because it is not your normal day to day thing you hear off.

We tend to just look at running our businesses, running a dental practice and doing what we have to do, and doing some perhaps little bit of content, or creating some videos, and perhaps taking some photos to put on Facebook. And we don’t think about that as the media, being a media company, do we Scott?

Scott: Not at all Charles.

Charles: So, I’d like to look at that from that perspective, because I think the market place attention span have shifted. So our consumers, our patients they’re looking at a different media then before. In Australia, the TV was really the number one media, radio, newspapers, as we all know that shifted more to the internet and social media. The social media content is consumed differently. And now as you look at it, it’s just opens up new opportunities for dental practice to become a media company.

Facebook is free to publish your content. Yes, I would recommend to run Facebook ads, but that’s not something you have to do straight away. The step number one is just understanding that we need to look at ourselves as a media company, and to produce regular content.

You might ask why would you do that? Is that important? Is that something that’s going to make a big difference to my dental practice?

I guarantee that it will…

We’ve been working with dentists for over six years, and all of our clients have regular content posted, and regular social media activities, and we found that they, that it is creating completely different perception of the dentist in comparison to someone who is very static. Our clients do rank better even you may think that Google will not look at social media activity as a ranking factor, but they do!

And that’s pretty much our basis of the content marketing. If we’re looking at the local aspect the number one is Google search, and Google search as a Google organic search as well as Google maps search, and they all impacted by content and content marketing.

And now Scott to answer your question…

Content marketing is in simple terms, it’s a regular activity in regards of creating content and looking at their various aspects of this process including the type of content you need to create.

In regards of dentists, the content will be related to the services and to questions their patients might have. It’s really important to do multimedia that’s in written format, photos as well as the videos and podcasts. Multimedia content highly tailored to your audience. We like the regularity of it to be at least on weekly basis, and on a social media perhaps even more frequent every two to four days will be ideal.

Scott: So Charles how does content marketing impact the ranking of a dental practice website within Google?

Charles: If you look at online and you do research, there is not too many facts in there when the Google admits, that number one ranking factor on Google is content and content marketing. That’s not really evident, but we simply looked at our clients and we used this strategy for our clients and we know it works. So that’s pretty much what we’re doing it for over six years, and majority of our clients rank well in Google, and this is a real proof that the content marketing works.

Scott: Charles what’s the best practice when implementing content marketing? I know you mentioned earlier that you should be adding content regularly and keeping pages updated, but how regular and what is the process?

Charles: Our internal process is based on regular content. We create content calendar, and there are various sections of it. Number one is obviously your website and your blog. We would like to see two monthly articles published as a minimum. So that’s already if you look at your competitors, there will be only small percentage, which will go that far. The fact is that majority of dentists will have no blog content updated regularly.

Some of your competitors might have a one blog per month. So ideally you do more than your competitors. Analyse how competitive is your current location, and do more than your competitors. So as I stated before, majority of your competitors who either do no content or one per month and by you doing a two articles per month, you’re already will be doing lot more than what they are.

Additionally, create monthly videos and monthly infographics. Bi-monthly look at what’s happening in your local community, and creating a multimedia piece which ties up with the events, your local events. So this covers your blog section on your website and your regularity of it, and type of content we publish.

Second thing, your new content needs to be promoted, and we call it amplify. So we need to look at it where your patients are, and have that content presented there. Number one place to promote your content is Facebook. If you have images and perhaps even videos, Instagram is another place as well as a Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, SlideShare, that some of the platforms we utilize, and for videos, YouTube and Vimeo.

Scott: Charles, what sort of content should a dentist be preparing and distributing?

Charles: There is a various content and various type of contents we produce, and the most important one is FAQ’s. I highly recommend that as a dentist you start writing questions, your common question. Start taking notes or use a phone to record audio, whatever is the easiest way for you. Start recording the most common questions that the patient ask, and they don’t need to be any personal, just a generic questions, and there’s always the same question pops up every day.

By the time one or two weeks passes you should have 10 – 20 questions. I don’t think there will be a problem to create those, and we would like to work with those questions. The dentist ideally can answer them, but we can help, our writers can help to create additional content for that. So this gives you a really good quality content, as well as if you look at the Google searchability of it, it’s gonna be really good.

Because that’s the exact questions patient ask, and they will ask that on Google as well when they’re doing search. So this process drastically increase your search visibility.

Number two, is looking at the treatment pages, and looking at what your top 10 treatments are. So firstly, we need to create the pages, but that’s not exactly regular content. That’s in a way is almost one off. There’ll be increases where the new treatments page is created because the dentist has a new treatment, has introduced a new treatment.

Additionally, some of the equipment gets updated and all that. That’s more of the updates rather than regular content.

But how regular content ties up with dental treatments? It’s actually very simple. You look at a question someone has in regards of the treatments, and you offer answers (similar to faq’s).

If I have a missing tooth, what would the best treatment for me in this particular situation? Would be the dental implants or something else.

Or should I remove the tooth? If I have a problem and I don’t know that should I do root canal treatment, or maybe perhaps just taking the tooth out is the best option? So having that questions answered which are tied up with a dental treatment, it’s really highly beneficial, and we like to do that on regular basis.

Additionally, there are topics very easily find internally. At dental practice you have events, you have birthdays, you are running evening events. That’s a great topic you can already start writing that more like a prelaunch, and talks about what’s happening, where the event’s gonna take place. So that can be easily published on the blog post, and then you have the second part of that which is the actual event.

You can also create a series of content based on the events you’re running internally. There are events which could be tied up with a specific type of a monthly recurring event. So what’s coming soon? Like just looking at our calendar, we have, in August we just had dental health week, and Australian Dental Association has some great resources they’ll have every year, have great resources for dentists you can use on social media platforms and even offline.

We always look at that a month prior to that event, and we create a blog post because every year there’s a different theme, so you obviously can really tied it up nicely with some great content, team based content and we will write an article and we’ll create original banners as well and images. So it’s something it’s a little bit more unique, and we also use some of the resources from ADA or others as well.

Scott: Charles, can content marketing alone guarantee any results, or is it just part of one broader strategy?

Charles: It’s definitely a broader strategy. It is something we like, it’s a must! Firstly, if you look at some of the dentists they actually don’t do it, or they may start and do when they build their websites and the marketing company will say to them, yes, you need the regular content, and you’ll see on a lot of dental websites there’s three blog posts from 2013, or from 2000. So they get excited and they do perhaps first two, three, four blog posts and then they stop.

Or maybe they do even 10 and they say, but we’ve done 10 blog posts in one week. Well that doesn’t work like that. It’s really regularity of the content which matters. So it is critical that you create the calendar, or you work with the agency who create the calendar, regular calendar for the next six months or yearly calendar of all topics you want to cover. And this is what we recommend.

Scott: That’s a lot of information you shared with our listeners today Charles. Again, thank you for your time.

Charles: Thank you.

Scott:  That wraps up today’s show, folks. Stay tuned for next month podcast, when we discuss citation directories, and their place in the overall local marketing strategy for dentists. Until then, bye for now.