A while back, I talked about what it takes to start up a blog for your dental practice, and while setting up a blog is easy enough to do, having good content to publish on a regular basis becomes the challenge.
How often you publish is dependent upon what your staff’s bandwidth is to actually write the posts, as well as how often your audience wants to see posts from you. To keep things simple, let’s pretend that your goal is to write one blog post each week – seems pretty reasonable, right? Maybe you have some ideas for blog posts for the first few months, but what do you do when you hit a wall and no one seems to have anything worth posting about? Here are some ideas to get you over some of those hurdles.
Employee Bios
Whether you have a new employee starting or have a staff full of people who have been around for years, profile each of them on your blog. You can get into all kinds of details: where they grew up or went to school, favorite sports teams, hobbies – the possibilities are endless.
Similarly, you could choose themes. For instance, around the Fourth of July, you ask each employee to talk about their favorite tradition or activity associated with the holiday. You only need a sentence or two from each, so the workload is minimal.
This gives your patients a chance to “meet” the team before they head into the office. Especially for new patients, this can be a useful resource.
Oral Health Care
You spend all day reminding patients to floss and brush every day, but there’s so much more to oral hygiene and health than just brushing and flossing. You could write about or give your professional opinion on:
- Hygiene trends (oil pulling, anyone?)
- Healthy food options
- Procedures – break it down for patients so they understand what’s being done
- New research or studies
- Common dental ailments – bruxism, sleep apnea, chipped teeth, etc.
Community Activities
If your practice participates in any community activities or does any charitable work, talk about it on your blog. Tell the story behind why you decided to get involved and explain why it’s important to your practice. Ask your staff if they volunteer in the community and consider featuring their experiences in the community.
Don’t forget to take pictures or videos and embed those into your posts!
Feature a Happy Patient
If you have a patient who just completed a really successful treatment plan and they’re enthusiastic about your practice, consider asking them if you can feature them on your blog. Of course you’ll want to get written authorization from the patient in order to remain in HIPAA compliance first! Using patient testimonials or features on your blog is a great way to demonstrate what your practice does and why patients should choose you over another dentist or specialist.
Let Your Inner Technology Geek Shine
A lot of practices invest a lot of time and money into the equipment and technologies they implement. So why not highlight that on your blog?
Patients don’t always know what a CEREC Omnicam is, or how a CEREC milling unit works, but what they will understand is that having technology like this means that they can benefit from single-visit treatments. Ask everyone in the practice what their favorite piece of equipment or technology is, why they love it, and how the patient benefits from it.
Skip It
If you’re really struggling to come up with something to write about, no worries – it’s completely okay to skip a week every now and then. To get the most out of your practice’s blog, and make sure you’re making the most of your time, remember: Quality over quantity.
I’d love to see your blogs, so feel free to share them in the comments! Happy blogging!
I just recently started a blog on our website. Is it okay to write them once a month vs per week? As mentioned, I am afraid to run out of content hence writing once a month.
Hi Claire, monthly posts are perfectly fine. You don’t want to jeopardize the quality of your posts by trying to rush, just so you can get one in every week. And you can always do one-off posts as they come up! What’s the link to your new blog? I’d love to check it out!
Thanks, Tara. We just set up our blog as a subdirectory of our website and are beginning to blog again after moving the blog from a separate website. Here is our first post: http://cranforddental.com/cosmetic-dentistry/dr-bill-cranford-sedation-patient/
It was great to get positive comments from patients and also 45 Facebook likes when we shared the post there: https://www.facebook.com/CranfordDental?ref=aymt_homepage_panel
Thanks for your advice on social marketing for dentists.
Thanks for sharing your blog, Martha! I really enjoyed that post about sedation dentistry – a little funny and had some good info. Keep up the good work!
Great ideas Tara!
Great post! Thanks!
Well Whattadya know, yet another great site to add to my reader!
How flattering – thank you!
Interesting read. I really liked the idea about sharing employee details or even opinions as a way for letting patients get to know about the team. In fact, it humanizes the dental clinic. Most patients are a little scared of dental procedures and all they see are huge gadgets hanging over their heads and instruments inserted into their mouths. So, this is a great chance to let patients connect with the team on a personal level. The same goes for technology. Writing to explain the gadgets and how they can make the procedure faster and more effective can go a long way in making patience feel more comfortable.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thorough thoughts, Ashley! Agreed with your point about explaining technology. When patients understand the “why” behind treatment, they’re also more likely to accept it!