1. Define Your Content Marketing Goal

Content Marketing Strategy Create for Your Audience

Before you sit down and create your content, take the time to set goals for your content. Do you want:

  • More leads (patients)
  • Social shares
  • Podcast downloads
  • Video views
  • Conversions (appointments or purchase of your products)
Seth Godin of  The New Business Toolbox, explains why setting goals is crucial to the success of your content strategy.

“You have the freedom to make these choices at the beginning when they’re free, fast and easy. Not later on when you’ve made commitments to other people and yourself.”

Without a strategy, you are just wasting your time.

As Godin points out,

“Matching what you build to where you put it is more important than what you build in the first place. That’s why we need to start by understanding what is this for?”

Typically, the goal is a sign up for a free guide or whitepaper.  This way, you have the subscriber in your database to send fresh content to at a later date. Getting your blog readers to become email subscribers builds relationships, engages them and gets them to the Call to Action that you want.

Checking out the analytics, you can figure out your conversion rates to determine how many people you need view your published content in order to meet your signup goal, driving traffic.

Once you have this larger goal in place, it’s easier to determine—based on your average conversion rates—how many readers or listeners, viewers, users, you need to attract to the content you’re publishing, in order to hit your signup goal.

Increase traffic to your blog by doing guest posts, linking to influencers and promoting your content on podcasts and videos.

2. Know Your Audience

Who will be engaging with your content?

“Who you create your content for is equally important as what you create.”

What is it that your audience is talking about?  What do they want to know? A lot of this information can be gleaned by either forums and chatrooms or in your office directly.  Providing solutions to problems that they are struggling with or giving answers to the most commonly asked questions is a sure-fire way of getting loyal readers.

Creating Your Avitar

Create a fictional person that represents your ideal patients so that you can talk directly to this person.  It helps you understand how to relate to your patients and clients when you can visualize who this person is.

Download a picture of your Avitar which you can find on Pixabay or Pexels so that when you are talking to that person, you have a better connection.

How does your Avitar access your content?  Is it through Facebook, Twitter, or Google searches? Knowing this will enable you to have content where your ideal patient or client is likely to be.

3. Set Up Your Blog 

If you haven’t set up a blog or found a place to host the content you’re going to create, now is the time.

The site that I like is WordPress because the support is great, it is easy to use and you can link WordPress to your current website.  Then, any time that you publish a blog, it registers as fresh content on your website directly, thus keeping your website from looking stale and unused as far as analytics are concerned.

TheWordPress-powered blog.com version is free with fully customizable templates, but the .org version allows you to customize the blog site and has more versatility.

Other options include hosting content on an external domain like Medium (writing), YouTube (video), or Apple (Podcasts) or through a content management system like Squarespace.

Building your blog site gives you the freedom to customize but using a pre-existing platform like Medium, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts gives you instant access to an audience that already exists and is looking for the type of content that you are publishing.

Helpful Sources

There are loads of great tutorials on Skillshare including: