10 Ways Your Content Calendar Works For Your Practice

I was doing a live coaching call recently and we covered a few questions on content creation and annual planning, that really got me thinking on how I could best help to answer some of those burning things you all have going on in your practices.

So before I get started, I have a few important questions for you. The answers to these questions will make or break your content marketing success online.

Do you have a plan with goals and metrics for your marketing content?

Do you wake up in the morning and think “Hey, what should I post today?”

Do you focus more on quantity of content or quality?

Do you know what success looks like?

How do you measure results of the content you publish online?

What content does your audience really need and want from you?

Are you confident your content is the highest quality it can be?

Is your content making the impact you want it to make on your ideal patients? On your practice?

How did this list of questions make you feel? Did you read them and think… “Yes, I know the answer to that question! Nailed it!” Or were you thinking… “Hmm not that I think about it, I don't know.”

If you struggle with solid answers to these questions, it's okay. The purpose of this blog post is to help you.

In case you were wondering … The Last Thing Your Audience Wants from You is MORE CONTENT

Here is the thing. When it comes to using content in your practice marketing, less is truly more. Though you may hear some of the loud voices in our space screaming at you to be everywhere ALL THE TIME… trust me… do NOT listen to them.

You need to be where your audience is. You need to be delivering to your audience what they need and want from you. The last thing your audience and ideal patients are thinking when they wake up in the morning is… “Hey, I sure do hope to see MORE content from brands trying to sell to me today.”

In reality, they are looking for human connection. They want to solve the problems that keep them up at night. They want to know that you and your practice actually care about them as humans and as helping them with their oral health or perfecting their smiles. They are wanting to be inspired, empowered and made to feel better than they did before they watched your live FB video, read your post, opened your email, watched your Instagram story or an entire video on Youtube.

The truth is if your content is not delivering value, your audience doesn't care about it. The days of throwing social content spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks are over and done.

It is critical that every status update you post, visual you create, every blog that's posted to your site and video you publish is providing value to your audience. It needs to connect with them in a human way that makes them think… “Hey, I want to know more about that doctor and/or practice!” This will separate you from the status quo of the spam that invades their feeds and searches.

You Need a Content Calendar to Streamline Your Content for Big Results

One of the best ways to start planning your content and escape from throwing "marketing content spaghetti" and hoping something sticks on social or in your marketing, is to develop a content calendar.

A content calendar helps you streamline your efforts and achieve a higher return on investment of every piece of content you create and publish.

And lucky for you…I have a proven 2020 Social and Marketing Content Calendar you can download for a steal here. I have been using this calendar for over 6 years and its lead to the success in my group practice of helping to achieve 20-30 new patients per month from social alone!

Join over 200 of your peers and download it now. It is proven to work for entrepreneurs, startups to Fortune 10 brands. It is the exact same template we use with our clients ranging from small business, franchise, up to enterprise companies.

Still not sold on why you need to use a content calendar for your marketing?

Here are 10 ways a content calendar will help your practice immediately:

1. Focus on the needs of your audience as a top priority. Audience first marketing is what will set you free from random acts of marketing and help you achieve your goals. Be the one who knows and serves your audience better than the competition… you WIN!

2. Prioritize your target patients and audiences. Although your product or service can be sold to possibly many of different types of potential patients, you must prioritize exactly what patients want, if you want to succeed with content marketing today. A good content calendar forces those decisions.

3. Helps you get crystal clear on what your call to actions are. Your audience want to be told what to do. They are overwhelmed with media, pop-up advertisements, video advertisements, and advertising in every stream they consume daily. The better you can guide them toward a relationship with you the happier they will be.

4. Help you get the support you need internally for your content marketing and digital marketing programs. If you are facing challenges getting your budgets approved, a solid content calendar can help you streamline and facilitate the conversation with executives and stakeholders.

5. Helps to "humanize" your brand. When you connect with your audience in a human way they are more likely to remember you. It takes 6-7 brand touches or repetitions before someone will remember a brand. Give them a reason.

6. Help you set goals and define what success looks like, before you start investing in content. Creating content is expensive. It takes time and resources. Too many brands waste valuable resources throwing social spaghetti on the wall. They give up before they get started because they didn't have the right goals to begin with.

7. Help you streamline resources… starting now. Seriously the minute you start to actually use a good content calendar template, you will feel a sense of “ahhh… why didn't I do this 10 years ago!” You will wonder why you caused so much stress for yourself by avoiding something that wasn't really that hard to begin with. If you struggle with knowing when to do what, or what to assign to others on your team, a content calendar will help make sure everyone is working in sync.

8. Force you to think further than today or tomorrow. Creating a content calendar forces you to get out of your “ugh… what am I going to post today?” mindset and instead helps you think strategically yet tactically at the same time. You begin to work smarter, not just harder.

9. Ideas will come easier. When you remove the fire drill mode of posting only for today or tomorrow, the creative ideas will start to flow. Even if you have struggled with coming up with ideas for content, focusing on your audience and your business goals is a serious game changer.

10. You can start leveraging evergreen marketing. This means you create once, use many. Instead of trying to create 120 pieces of content every year as some experts say, you instead create a few really good pieces of content that you can leverage as a baseline. The goal is to build on the solid pieces of content that work really well. This is where the true ROI really gets delivered… 🙂

Your next steps.

Download our marketing and social calendar today. Trust me, you will be happy that you did! More than 200 of your peers have been using this planned for your marketing calendar already!