Chapter 3: Content Strategy

Before you start creating, repare a roadmap that defines where the collateral, or the material you are creating for your marketing campaigns, is heading so that every step of the process follows that direction. Strategy is where professional content teams spend a large portion of their time. Why? It protects the investment, ensuring that the final product meets goals and expectations, serves as a compass for whoever contributes to the material, and allows you to be proactive about making sure you get the most mileage from these efforts. 

3.1 Developing Content Goals 

Content Purpose

Understanding the purpose of your content is the most mission-critical step because it informs every part of the strategy and creation process. Ask yourself this simple question: what are you hoping to get out of this content? The purpose likely falls into one of seven categories. Identifying the category should shape how you create your content. 

1. Increasing your audience
2. Building practice loyalty
3. Converting patients
4. Monetization (making direct revenue from the content)
5. Educating your patients and potential patients
6. Building your authority in the medical aesthetic industry
7. Building your brand identity

There are many ways to illustrate these goals, but here are some real-world examples of content with a clear purpose:

• I want to increase the number of followers on my Instagram account.
• I want to increase the amount of traffic our website receives for Mommy Makeovers.
• I want to build brand awareness throughout a demographic interested in injectables.
• I want to sell more of our beauty products directly from our website.
• I want to build better relationships with patients who are already considering my services.
• I want to become more of an authority in the medical aesthetics industry. 
• I want to educate people who are considering breast augmentation.
• I want to tell a story that will resonate and make people feel comfortable at my office.
• I want to grow my presence on TikTok and YouTube Shorts to attract new customers.
• I want to promote a new medical device on all my social media platforms.

Choosing Your Platforms

Once you have a purpose as clear as these examples, creating content to fit your goals is much easier. The paths are plentiful. For example, let’s look at option number two: I want to increase the amount of traffic our website receives for Mommy Makeovers. Since this goal is straightforward and easy to understand, you can now think about what approaches would work best to achieve it. Here are five possible content solutions aimed at increasing website traffic for Mommy Makeovers:

1. Increase the word count of your procedure page on Mommy Makeovers with helpful information based on long-tail keywords and frequently asked questions
2. Develop infographics or other graphic art to answer questions about Mommy Makeovers, and publish them on social media and on your Mommy Makeover webpage
3. Create a Patient Journey narrative, which details the experience of an actual Mommy Makeover patient and tells their story, and promote it on social media
4. Produce a blog series covering Mommy Makeover surgery from a variety of angles, such as “5 Treatments You Don’t Want to Skip During Your Mommy Makeover” 
5. Create a Mommy Makeover email marketing campaign linking directly to the Mommy Makeover page or a Patient Journey narrative

Patient Personas

As your content marketing program takes shape, you should develop patient personas for your practice. These are quick and easily digestible profiles that illustrate who you are looking to target with your content. They serve as tone and voice guides for anyone you have working on collateral for your practice, and they are usually accompanied by a visual representation. Here are two example personas created for a fictional medspa: 

Figure 1

Patient Persona #1

Patient Persona #2

STOCK IMAGE

STOCK IMAGE

Who: Stephanie Sanders

Who: Elizabeth Nelson

Age: 25

Age: 50

Location: Beverly Hills

Location: Beverly Hills

Motivation: Active and healthy lifestyle, wants to remain proactive about offsetting early signs of aging with noninvasive and injectable cosmetic procedures. Will be starting medical aesthetics for the first time after finally having disposable income. Wants to begin spending slowly. 

Motivation: Looking to build self-confidence after noticing more advanced signs of aging throughout their body. They are able and willing to invest financially in their appearance and happiness and are not afraid to splurge on self-care services that will help them feel happy and healthy.

The tone and content that resonate with each of these personas are very different. If you are targeting Patient Persona #1, then you need to be conscious about the cost of your services and use your content to clearly present the value of those services. On the other hand, if your goal is to target Patient Persona #2, then the content should focus on the improvement and experience that treatment can provide, regardless of cost. 

Setting Content Goals

We covered that there are many different goals content can achieve, but how do you actually figure out what your marketing goals should be? There is a direct relationship between your marketing goals and your practice goals. Typically, practice goals are the first consideration. They tend to look like this:

1. We want to increase our number of patients.
2. We want to increase the average spend per patient. 
3. We want to improve our brand equity. 

Brand Equity: the value that a patient or potential patient places on you or your practice based on the perception they have developed rather than the quality of your services itself. 

Marketing goals support your office in hitting its practice goals. As an example, let’s assume your practice goal is to increase the average spend per patient. With that target in mind, the marketing goal for your content should be clear: create content that cross-sells existing patients. Here are some examples of what that content could look like:

Figure 2

1. Social media posts showing off popular combination procedures with before and after results

2. Improving internal links throughout your website with possible combination procedures

3. A blog, email, and social media campaign offering incentives for combination procedures

Acquiring Benchmarks

Now that you know how to set goals for content, you need to figure out how to benchmark it. Each category of content has its own set of metrics to consider, although they are often similar to one another. Following the examples from Figure 1, let’s list some of the relevant metrics that could be used in each case.

Figure 3

Example Content Solution

Relevant Metrics

1. Social media posts showing off popular combination procedures with before and after results

Reach, Engagement, Link Clicks

2. Improving internal links throughout your website with possible combination procedures

Bounce Rate, Conversions

3. A blog, email, and social media campaign offering incentives for combination procedures

Click-Through Rate, Conversions, Engagement

In later chapters, we explain how to measure and analyze each type of content. For now, it is only important that you understand two points: content needs time to settle in, and metrics don’t always give you the full story. 

Market Research

Market research is the process of systematically collecting, analyzing, and interpreting information about your patients and the potential patients you would like to convert. It is typically performed early in the content planning process, and often as early as the initial business planning phase. Market research is an important tool for understanding the best demographics for you to target as well as the best ways to compel them to action.
During this process, the type of data you collect for analysis can be broad. It can include primary research, like focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and surveys. This method of gathering information can be highly beneficial when executed well since it provides a clear picture of general attitudes and sentiments toward your practice and industry. If you select the subjects properly, you can use this research as a guide for much of your future marketing operations.
You can also conduct secondary research, commonly referred to as desk research since it can be performed without getting out into the “field.” It can include government statistics, published studies, research journals, or commercial data. Anything that has been properly sourced and gathered previously is considered secondary research.
Qualitative research is the collection of data that cannot be quantified or put into a numerical value. This could include doing in-depth interviews or questionnaires as a follow-up to a survey or focus group. It tells the story behind the data, providing a human element and understanding. Quantitative research is the opposite. This is data that can be put into a numerical value and analyzed mathematically. Surveys, polls, and even focus groups are great examples of quantitative research. Both qualitative and quantitative research can be considered either primary or secondary research.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding your own demographics and audience is important, but having a grasp on your competition is equally paramount. Doing an assessment on your top competitors — including what content they are producing, the response it receives, and what their content teams are doing well or poorly — can give you an early advantage. Your audiences are similar, so there is no shame in using the information you gather from competitive analysis to jumpstart your content strategy.
Just make sure that you do not plagiarize or duplicate a competitor’s content along the way. You want to take the things they are doing well and adjust them for your own practice. Improve on the details you think could be stronger so your content is measurably better when comparing side by side. Provide deeper information, more interesting creative, better branding, more engaging personality—anything you can think of to set you apart.

Keyword Research

When it comes to creating content, you should be spending a significant amount of time studying keyword trends in your industry. The content that performs best answers questions that people type into search engines. These are called queries. Google and other search engines prioritize content that provides valuable and authoritative information about these queries. A mistake many people make when starting their content program is to discuss topics that have very little SEO value. They might be impactful for other reasons, but if your goal is to improve your digital marketing program, you should create based almost exclusively on popular long-tail keywords and questions.
Here are a few tricks you can use to implement keywords and keyword research into your content: 

1. Use them in titles or headings. You don’t need to worry about trying to get as many keywords as possible into your content. Google is primarily looking for quality answers that are useful to users. If you write an in-depth blog about “A Guide to the Tummy Tuck Recovery Timeline” with only a few dedicated keywords or phrases, it will likely perform better than content that is shallow and trying to stuff in as many keywords as possible. Thorough content is better content.   
2. Natural language is always better. With the current emphasis placed on voice search and Google prioritizing content written for people and not the algorithm, you should never let the flow of your content or language suffer for the sake of a keyword. The system is intelligent enough to understand your content is answering a query whether or not the keyword phrase is an exact match. Write for people, not for Google.
3. Use several keyphrases to create an FAQ section. Procedures and treatments often have two or three very popular questions surrounding them. Typically, they revolve around cost, recovery, and results. Creating an FAQ section answering those questions in a straightforward way can be a great SEO strategy. Don’t be afraid to get creative when applying keyphrases.

Conducting Content Audits

After you have set goals and benchmarks, conducted market research and competitive analysis, and completed your keyword research, the next step is to conduct a content audit on all of your digital marketing platforms. This process has four steps: taking inventory, analyzing data, creating an action plan, and adjusting your content strategy.

Taking Inventory. It might be a time-consuming process, but you must have a detailed list of all the pieces of content you have created for all of your platforms. This affords you a top-level view of gaps in your content or areas that you may have covered thoroughly already. The time you spend doing this well will pay back dividends.

Analyzing Data. Knowing what content you have provides little value unless you also know what that content brings to your digital marketing program. As you revamp your marketing efforts and take a more strategic approach, knowing what your high-value content is versus what tends to be low-performing is critical.

Creating an Action Plan. After diving into the analytics, the next step is to create an action plan for your existing content. This is when you decide if you want to remove low-performing content in favor of new content covering the same topics, or if you want to continue building on high-performing content for even better results. This step is essential as you move into the final phase.

Adjusting Your Content Strategy. Stay flexible and adapt your approach as you go. If, during your initial research phase, you figured out that your highest value keywords or phrases revolve around liposuction, then you probably made preliminary decisions to build out that area of your content. But that could change during the content audit process, where you might discover that you are already getting value from well-crafted liposuction content that doesn’t need updating. You can now rework your initial strategy to either build on the foundation or focus on something else.

3.2 Generating Effective Content Ideas

Your content plan is only as good as the ideas you create. Coming up with compelling ideas for your content program over and over again can be taxing, but there are practices you can implement to help alleviate some of the pressure. As you move through the ideation process, you always want to keep in mind that these ideas must feed into your goals.
Sourcing examples of content that you appreciate and that perform well helps jumpstart the creative process. Don’t be afraid to take inspiration from angles, approaches, or structures that you find elsewhere. Very few things on the web are original, so it is likely that the person inspiring your content was inspired by someone else. (Of course, you don’t want to plagiarize—put your own spin on the approach and improve on their iteration.)
Ideation sessions are common practice among content creators. Creativity thrives when you have other people to bounce ideas with, so spend some time with your staff or content team developing new and interesting ideas, titles, or topics. You have more ideas and more success when you form a content think tank.
Remember that your topics often need to be platform-specific. At the very least, you need to consider how to implement a topic or idea throughout all of your digital marketing avenues. A blog structure won’t perform well on social media, but a video covering the same content will. Come up with large, sweeping topics and then fine-tune them for each platform as you go. 

Creating Content for the Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is an indispensable tool for understanding how specific pieces of collateral serve your larger marketing efforts. In the context of medical aesthetics, it follows people on their journey from becoming aware of your practice to becoming loyal patients. Let’s examine Figure 4 to get a better understanding of what that marketing funnel looks like. 

Figure 4

Marketing Funnel

Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, Loyalty

You must understand which stage you are targeting when producing your marketing material. The language, tone, and approach you take should shift based on where your target audience is in the funnel. People in the loyalty stage don’t need convincing; they need more opportunities to buy into your practice. Someone aware of your practice might not be ready to take action, but spiking their interest with compelling content might move them down the funnel.
This funnel is split into three primary sections: Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, and Bottom of Funnel, also referred to as TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, respectively. TOFU includes the awareness and interest stages of the funnel; MOFU includes the desire stage; and BOFU includes both the action and loyalty stages.
It’s easiest to understand the process of creating content for these sections with a concrete example, so let’s use this as the marketing goal we are hoping to achieve: I want to increase the number of Botox injections I perform per month. Figure 5 below illustrates examples of content you can create for each stage of funnel for patients considering Botox injections. 

Figure 5

Top of Funnel

Awareness, Interest

1. Webpage about the details of Botox injections
2. In-depth blogs about specific aspects of Botox, like recovery or results
3. Explainer videos presenting easy to understand information about Botox procedures
4. Social media posts or infographics breaking down the benefits of Botox
5. Advertisements about Botox injections at your practice

Middle of Funnel

Desire

1. Testimonial advertisements about the efficacy of the results you provide
2. White papers and case studies about how Botox can improve your appearance long-term 
3. Drip email campaign highlighting before and after photos of real patients
4. Social media posts showing the Botox process and how quick and easy the procedure is

Bottom of Funnel

Action, Loyalty

1. Advertisements offering coupons or discounts for Botox at your practice
2. Email campaign dedicated to a loyalty program for injectables and other treatments
3. Social media posts or advertisements with CTAs that are easy to follow and set up
4. Social media stories featuring before and after photos with easy-to-follow CTAs 

Remember, too, that it is possible for patients to be in different stages of a marketing funnel and patient funnel. This funnel specifically is unique to where they are in the buying cycle of this specific product or treatment. 

3.3 Understanding Content Symbiosis

Maximizing Your Content’s Mileage

When you spend time planning and creating high-quality content, you want to promote it on multiple platforms. Websites, social media, and even video hosting sites are all valuable places to invest your bandwidth. There are optimal ways to use the same content across platforms, so you should understand the difference between these five approaches: plagiarized, duplicated, cross-posted, repurposed, and pre-planned.
Plagiarized content is never beneficial to your digital marketing program. You may think you will save time by using material someone else created, but the time saved is hollow and of little value. Even if you took content from a reputable site that performs amazingly on search engines, Google and other engines will punish your site for using plagiarized content. This includes content that has been pulled from a different source, rehashed, and then put up as unique content. Switching around some verbiage is still technically plagiarism. You could even end up in some legal trouble if the platform you stole from becomes aware of the situation.
Duplicated content is often confused with cross-posting. But the difference lies in the amount of effort made when pushing to multiple pages. Some platforms punish you for copying and pasting your own content from one place to another, while others care less about it. This could lead to negative SEO impacts, but the trade-off is the amount of time you save in the short-term developing unique assets. Whether this exchange is worth it for you or your practice is dependent on your situation.
Cross-posted content is one step removed from duplicated content since it goes through the effort to change the details of the collateral for the specific platform it appears on. This could mean changing the text, hashtags, image, transitions, or video depending on the distribution location. Cross-posting isn’t necessarily a bad approach to reusing content, but its efficacy depends on how much effort you put into tailoring it for that platform.
Repurposed content is the best way to turn content that is already produced into a new product for a different platform. In these cases, the assets of the original content are broken down and rebuilt specifically for wherever they will be posted. An example of repurposing content is to take an in-depth blog about breast augmentation options, breaking it down to the core ideas, and creating new video assets explaining the same information in a new way. Repurposing avoids any of the issues that duplicated or cross-posted content presents.
Pre-planned content is the best way to go about maximizing the reach of the collateral you develop. This is particularly true if you couple planning with good communication. If the team creating videos, audio, and graphics plans to use written content as a resource, then the writer of that content can keep reusability in mind as they go and identify sections that could translate well into other formats. Knowing the scope of what is being created and when keeps the creators on track and opens easier lines of creative dialogue.

Planning for Reusability

Planning for reusable content can be approached in several ways. It can be as simple as finding a common element to build around or handing off a finished blog to video producers and graphic artists to adapt. But it can also be complex, such as creating templates for the content well in advance to ensure it meets specific goals. Whatever approach you  choose, consider the following concepts as you move into the planning process.

Identifying Commonalities. By virtue of sharing a common message and subject matter, there are many instances in which content has snippets or large sections of shared requirements. Consider Figure 6 below.

Figure 6

Email Blast

Blog Post

YouTube Short

TikTok 

Subject Line

Title

Title

Title

New Treatment Description

New Treatment Description

New Treatment Description

New Treatment Description

Customized Body Content

Customized Body Content

Script

Script

CTA

CTA

Outro Graphic

Outro Graphic

In this example alone, we have identified five areas of content that can be reused across platforms. Even if they need a little tweaking to fit those specific places, utilizing as much similar material as possible improves your ability to create multi-use content. 

Unifying Motivations. Understanding the goals behind your content programs makes it easier to communicate with team members and keep them aligned, as well as to keep yourself focused as you create your assets. Who is this information for, and why are we making it? These two questions give you 99% of what you need to know to get the ball rolling on your content program. Finding opportunities to maximize the breadth of your creative assets is a great way to scale your content program with little additional investment. 

Creating a Content Calendar

Once you have developed your content goals and identified how your content assets can work together, the next step is to create a release schedule for your content. Commonly known as a content calendar, this critical tool helps you keep your efforts organized and your goals top of mind. It also helps you figure out where holes might be in your content program and how you could fill those gaps.