7 Pitfalls and Advantages To Good Dentist Content Marketing

The world has no shortage of dental problems, but it takes more than a problem to bring new clients to your clinic in particular. Content marketing is a powerful tool for dentists to reach their target markets online and steadily grow their practices. However, it comes with a wide variety of pros and cons.

This article covers the following:

• Three benefits of dentist content marketing
• Three pitfalls of dentist content marketing
• Compliance with HIPAA rules

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

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Though good content marketing is often the means to multiple end goals for marketers, it is not without its issues. For instance, success can easily become complacency, a massive hurdle for dentists wanting to grow their practice. Good SEO strategies should adapt to evolving situations.

Moreover, good dentist content marketing is not everlasting, and clinging to that misconception leads to disastrous results. Below, we show seven benefits and pitfalls to watch out for in good dentist content marketing strategies and how to best utilize or avoid them for even better results.

Benefit #1: Reach a Broader Target Market

The goal of content marketing is threefold: to raise awareness, show expertise, and attract clients, which it does through various mediums. Blogs are the most notable type, but rich media, such as photos and videos, are also effective. The best media type depends on your goals.

A dentist might deliver content through various digital channels, including their website, social media, or webinars. That taps the core benefit of reaching a wider audience and new market segments on the platform a strategy uses.

Family or pediatric dentists might use plenty of simple drawings in any of their content to emphasize that they are child-friendly. Here, content acts as a means to display the clinic’s branding and reach its intended target market: parents with young children.

However, a well-rounded dentist content marketing strategy does not stop at employing only one form of content or utilizing a single platform. Each segment of a target market exists within its own separate online space. In other words, every marketing channel serves a core demographic.

Uploading blogs and images to multiple channels (e.g., your website, Instagram, and X) to maximize exposure is fairly easy. You can even use them as-is in paid ads on Google, YouTube, or TikTok for more precise targeting. These highlight content marketing’s flexible utility.

Pitfall #1: Overlooking Niche Content Ideas

Given content marketing’s simple and effective nature, it is all too easy to lock your strategy into overplayed ideas or jumping on trends. The result is a complete (but unforeseen) oversight of niche topics that are just as valuable in attracting new clients. Research is vital for good content, and entertaining research sells.

Most dentist websites likely have articles on food suitable for sensitive teeth issues, but very few would think to upload recipes that readers can make at home. Seeing this type of content would be a welcome surprise for online users who are not keen on eating the same food for the week.

Other niche content ideas dentists could have are not limited to dental health. Many good niche ideas overlap with subjects like mental health and food. For instance, though teeth grinding affects the teeth, it is rooted in factors such as stress and anxiety. Another example is exploring habits that stain teeth and how people can work around them. 

Coffee and tea are staples for people in the workforce because the caffeine they contain is vital to staying awake and active, but they are harsh on tooth enamel. A niche content series could explore tooth-friendly options for keeping up daily energy levels. Investigating which caffeinated drinks harm teeth and how to slow their effects might also be good. 

Benefit #2: Readily Scalable Content Plans

Another major benefit of a well-built dentist content marketing strategy, particularly an expert agency strategy, is that it can readily adjust to customer demands. Changes in how your target market searches for or consumes content online are accounted for.

For instance, marketing emails are a natural next step for blog content. Proactively delivering content to your audience creates a seamless customer experience (UX) that can generate more leads or nurture existing ones. More importantly, it keeps you visible online.

An expertly made content marketing strategy can readily scale your content creation to keep up with a growing target market. A style guide, for example, is a must in any good content marketing plan because it creates a familiar brand, which is important for growing any business.

The style guide includes a set tone and format that any writer can easily apply when writing content and a workflow that moves smoothly in one direction. All good dentist content marketing acts like a well-oiled machine, with each part contributing to its efficiency and productivity.

Speed and consistency are some of the biggest hurdles in scaling because breaks in production flow can throw a strategy off balance. That is why effective content marketing prepares to integrate new systems and tools, such as generative AI, to scale content up or down as needed.

Pitfall #2: Aligning Quality and Quantity

As hinted above, balance is central to excellent content marketing because it affects whether a strategy can meet its goal of reaching more people. Consistent uploads are critical in marketing because they show that your business is active, which keeps it relevant in searches.

However, content quality is just as critical because users and search engines care about value, and content that fails to deliver is quickly forgotten. Imagine how patients would feel if they came across your website and every post was written to sell products.

Cutting corners on research topics affecting people’s health is not ethical or desirable. It hurts SEO to do this because Google reviews health content with more scrutiny to ensure users avoid harm. Quality is an objective and not a subjective metric within SEO.

In crafting a good dentist content marketing strategy, plans inevitably move closer to one than the other, depending on how you define ‘good’ in the first place. The result is either high-volume content with low quality, low-volume content with high quality, or, in the worst cases, neither.

Even with AI tools, balancing quality and quantity is far from simple. Experts can help devise a plan that fits both your marketing goals and your capacity. A top SEO agency can even take over content creation and management duties.

Benefit #3: Adapting Content for Best SEO

Content must be dynamic and interesting to catch people’s attention. Video is one of the best formats to use, no matter the platform or channel. Using only one content format is not required or even advised, as it can hurt your SEO potential. 

Top-notch content marketing operates on the notion that change is constant, making flexibility vital. It does not mean only making content if it works across multiple formats (e.g., webinars, blogs, podcasts, etc.). Instead, it means adapting your content for better SEO.

Writing in general terms and focusing on timeless topics is another tactic that can make adapting content to new marketing strategies easier. Evergreen content stays relevant indefinitely, so it adapts well to other formats. It is also a pillar page or focal point for new content ideas.

An example is dental care tips everyone should know, which readily adapts to long-form articles, charts, short-form videos, and even quizzes. Each format has a unique optimal function, platform, and audience, giving you the best options to reach various markets.

Diverse content gives people more chances and reasons to engage with a business in whatever format works best for them. That allows you to benefit from optimal SEO at every turn and flows into a strong omnichannel marketing approach.

Pitfall #3: Content Creation is a Full-Time Job

However you look at it, content creation (and, by extension, content marketing) is a full-time job. It does not matter how well you plan ahead or how airtight a strategy is because, at the end of the day, you still need people to do the work. Human writers create better for a human audience.

As powerful and useful as generative AI can be, it should only function as a support tool in any serious content creation process. Each process step must center on how the audience’s needs align with business goals. In short, good dentist content marketing results from focused efforts.

Dentists are in the best position to create dental health content between patient care and other tasks around the clinic. However, dentists are often too busy caring for patients to write content, saying nothing of content quality or the associated marketing tasks to turn it from content into a campaign.

Hiring content writers is ideal for a dental clinic with marketing needs it must also fulfill, though this is often beyond the reach of a small clinic. Outsourcing content marketing (and digital marketing in general) to an SEO agency is often more practical because it covers more strategies with a sharper focus.

SEO agencies have teams of experts ready to work on projects immediately and trained to handle the intricacies of healthcare content. That said, working closely with the agency is best to ensure that whatever they produce serves your customers and business well.

Bonus Tip: Be Compliant with HIPAA Rules

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a marketing concern unique to healthcare companies. Its goal is to protect personal health information (PHI) by omitting any and all clues that lead to personal identification, for instance, a patient’s name or health issues.

Though you are unlikely to turn your clients into case studies for content, even using names in subject lines for marketing emails (a common personalization tactic) is against HIPAA rules. Including user-generated content (UGC) is yet another complex issue for HIPAA compliance.

Obtaining express permission is one way to resolve any HIPAA-compliance issues, in addition to reviewing how you safeguard, process, and distribute content with PHI in the first place. The software you use to store patient and marketing data is part of this because it affects security.

HIPAA compliance is beneficial because it ensures that your content stays up and continues to reach more people. It also shows them that you take the right to privacy seriously, which is a major step in gaining trust as a business. 

However, this trust can be easily broken if you do not keep up with the law. Any changes in HIPAA warrant changes in content marketing strategies to ensure compliance. In short, additional checks must be in place to avoid costly mistakes that can harm PHI security. Staff training (including content writers) on how to comply with HIPAA rules is a must.

Summing Up

Healthcare businesses have additional scrutiny on content quality and accuracy and industry-specific rules (HIPAA) that make their campaigns tricky and connecting with target markets more difficult. General oversights in content creation also apply to dental health content, which includes overlooking niche content or content gaps in favor of trendy topics. Balancing quality and high-volume production is another challenge that all content marketers struggle with daily.

However, by successfully navigating these roadblocks, dentists can reach more people and improve their online presence. Effective strategies also translate to readily scalable plans that easily adapt to shifting market demands and maximize online visibility. 

Need help unlocking the true potential of dentist content marketing? Contact Digital Authority Partners to learn how we can help.