If you are like most professional service practitioners, your primary concerns are providing your existing clients with the service they need while continuing to grow your practice. Although we all know that online marketing has become a major component of any successful practice marketing campaign, most of us feel more than a little overwhelmed when it comes to getting our sites to rank well with the major search engines. From link building and keyword research to structuring internal links and code enhancement, traditional search engine optimization (SEO) is an bottomless rabbit hole that can quickly turn into a full time job.
Thankfully, there’s one SEO element that remains more important than any other and requires zero technical training: content. By making education-based marketing the center of your online practice marketing campaign, you can position yourself as an industry thought leader and attract new potential clients while watching your site rise up the search engine results pages.
In a nutshell, education-based marketing is based on the concept of sharing your specific industry knowledge and experience freely with your target market in order to attract potential clients to your practice. For example, a dental practice that specializes in cosmetic dentistry might offer a significant amount of educational content in the form of articles, photos and videos that document the methods and benefits of their top procedures. Combined with a little local search marketing, our fictional dental practice would attract considerably more business than their competitors based simply on the educational content they provide potential clients.
Education-based marketing works well in today’s practice marketing environment because it establishes your practice as being experienced and knowledgeable with a sincere interest in the best interests of your clients. Heavy handed marketing strategies like snappy advertisements or sales driven web content simply don’t work when your addressing a market that is over-saturated in marketing gimmicks. Providing your target market with the answers they need does.
In many professional service industries, there has been a tradition of holding one’s cards close to one’s chest in terms of the knowledge and training that puts a practice ahead of its competitors. Today, that trend has completely reversed, and the most successful businesses in many niches are those that generously share their industry knowledge as freely as possible. By educating potential clients and providing them with answers to their questions ahead of time, you will position your practice to be as the first name that comes to mind when they are ready to invest in your services.