Generating Value
With respect to content development, there are two important things you can generate value from:
1. Your Brand. This is your ability to deliver a genuine message and typically comes by doing content on your own.
2. Improving your search engine rankings. This happens by creating a lot of activity around content development, then leveraging that content to boost rankings based solely on pure activity. This is something that can be easily supported by a third-party agency.
Driving Your Message
At the end of the day, content is your best method to drive a genuine message to your client base or potential client base. It is imperative to make sure the message stays authentic and valuable. Once your message starts moving away from authenticity, you’ll start to lose opportunities from a branding perspective and just get lumped in with everything else that’s going on throughout the internet. Make sure the content you create stands out with these three ideas:
Video and Photos – Some of the best ways to genuinely and authentically deliver your message and value proposition is through the videos and photos you create. You don’t necessarily need to use high-end images or hire a professional videographer to accomplish this.
Blogs – Blogs are a great way to create maximum activity with minimum effort, which will help your search engine marketing. You won’t necessarily get a lot of reviews and exposure from a blog post to consumers, but the activity will drive up the search engine rankings associated with the pages and the blog content you’re writing about. This is a great thing to outsource to an agency to create pure activity.
Professional Imagery – This starts to veer away from natural and authentic content and begins to look like a lot of other categories online. It can cause your content to get lumped into everything else and lose the genuine value proposition you’re trying to deliver.
Ultimately, it comes down to the blend you want for your practice and what your goals are. If it’s true branding and improving search rankings as much as possible, do both. If you’re just trying to accomplish one or the other, decide which is most important for your practice and give it your best effort.
