Know your ROI: The Practice Blog

If you understand the benefits of your practice having a blog, you know that it can be a highly valuable marketing tool. When your practice has a consistent blog, it can help keep you in contact with your patients, build trust and loyalty, and it can bring in new potential patients to your website. But it’s only going to be a success if you know whether or not the posts you are publishing are effective.

Many doctors and health care professionals have a blog, having someone in their office writing the posts. At the outset, you may think this is saving you money and keeping things simple. It might if the posts are engaging and are being delivered consistently.  If not, the truth of the matter is that it’s likely costing you are more than you realize. A blog populated with effective posts is going to provide you with a great return on investment. It’s going to bring in more patients and strengthen the relationship you have with the ones you already have. But if your posts are not effective or only happen every so often, your blog will fall flat and will not give you the edge you are looking for.  The blog will have the exact opposite effect that was intended. You know. We go to websites and see a post from six months ago—credibility goes way down. We have to commit to quantity and quality for a time to be able to evaluate the analytics data.

When you don’t know how effective your blog posts are you are essentially leaving money on the table. Publishing posts that are not crafted to be effective is a waste of your employees’ valuable time. It’s imperative that your practice know whether or not your posts are working, and that’s something that your staff may or may not how to do.

When evaluating whether or not your blog posts are helping your practice, you have to ask such questions as:

·             What was the conversion rate through your social media channels?  Are we linking effectively through our social media?

·             Is your blog attracting new visitors to your website? Are those visitors your target market, your ideal patients?

·             What is the most effective day to publish on, and how do most people find your blog post?

·             Is the blog converting visitors to your blog into being patients at your practice?

·             Is what you are getting from your blog more valuable than the response you would get from online paid ads?

There is more to simply writing and publishing a post on your blog. You want your practice’s blog to boost your online presence, and when it is you will have a great ROI, and you will see the difference it makes. Using Google Analytics and other tools in order to gauge whether or not your blog is effective is something that blogging experts do, but most other people are not familiar with. Analytic tools are crucial to ensuring that your blogging efforts are not wasted.  If you don’t have the know in-house, you can easily acquire this knowledge watching YouTube videos, going on Amazon to find hundreds of books on the subject, or find an expert to help you to develop a content strategy and build out your editorial calendar.

Every blog post your practice publishes is either going to fall flat and do absolutely nothing for your office, or it’s going to be a highly effective marketing tool. Having a practice blog that is highly effective doesn’t happen by accident, it’s something that is done strategically. Half of having an effective blog goes into the writing, but the other half goes into the analytics to see what works, what doesn’t, and what can be done to improve the response rate.