FOB – fear of blogging, and dental practices do not need to blog
I am coming into contact with a huge number of managers and owners who have FOB.
Yesterday was day 6 of our management course. The final day that is spent with me learning about marketing.
Blogs are of course covered. Everyone in the group yesterday felt the same about blogging. The most common concerns are:
- Time
- Ideas
Time is one of the biggest problems in dental practice for managers and owners and with the limited time that you have, you have to ensure you use it effectively.
Blogging is great for two reasons –
- Long tail searches
- Building credibility
Long tail searches are pretty much a thing of the past, we are all lazy with the internet now. Go back in time 10 years and a prospective patient may of typed ‘can you find me the best dentist in Norwich’ now people write ‘dentist’ and that is about it, Google will perhaps suggest ‘near me’ as an add on.
So if 10 years ago you had a blog titled ‘why our patients’ consider us to the best dentist in Norwich’ The blog would most likely of shown up in a search.
For a short tail search – dentist, the blog will not show.
If you want to write blogs that may appear in searches you need to think of titles that match long tail searches and then of course create the content in the blog. This is a huge negative for a manager / owner.
Credibility is extremely important but instead of writing about treatments and Dentistry (that many patients will not want to read anyway) build your credibility through a combination of patient testimonials, case studies and video.
I know how busy practice life is, being a practice manager is really tough and a simple ‘quick’ task usually takes far too long to complete due to distractions and the reality of the working practice.
Just the other day a manager told me that she went to pay the window cleaner. This should take 90 seconds, but the window cleaner was chatting to her (and she can’t be rude and cut him off) he is also a patient, but it ended up taking 5-8 minutes. This is the real life of a PM.
So with time against you I would advise instead blogging you:
- Put time into understanding your website and work alongside a fabulous company that helps you to generate leads, or if that is already in place understand how social media marketing really works and can work for you.
- Focus on creating case studies, and gaining testimonials for patients to see how great the dentists really are. A patient will choose a case study / testimonial over a blog any day.
Laura
