Content marketing is the best way for wellness businesses to demonstrate their expertise, integrity and sincere interest in helping potential clients. And your website is the perfect place to do it.
What’s content marketing?
It’s the process of providing the right information at the right time in the buying process.
That means providing information before the sale, after the sale, and in ways that encourage online and offline word-of-mouth. For example:
- Pre-sale, potential clients thinking about corporate wellness programs might find a self-assessment checklist useful in setting priorities
- Post-sale, a “how-to” guide that helps cyclists in winter climates train for a century using your high-end bicycle trainer helps keep customers using your product
- And meaningful tips in your newsletter from current weight loss clients demonstrate to potential clients that people succeed in your program.
How do we choose our keywords?
Your goal: to identify the short phrases that potential customers actually use when searching online for the kinds of problems your wellness business solves
You can take a crack at it yourself for free by looking at your website analytics, using Google Insights and Adwords Keyword tools, looking at Related Searches (in Google, click “More search tools” on the left), activating Google Instant to see what folks are searching for – and listening closely to your customers.
When choosing keywords and key phrases, pay close attention to how customers actually talk.
Let’s say you have a weight loss program that helps women lose pregnancy weight after they have the baby:
- Many will search for the common term “how to lose baby weight”
- Fewer will search for the clinical term “how to lose post-partum weight”
- And almost no one will search for a fluffy marketing term like “life-changing weight loss program”
How does content marketing work with SEO?
Say your fitness business offers three different programs – sports conditioning for kids, weight loss for moms and golf conditioning. You’ll identify a set of keywords for each program. Then you’ll give each program its own webpage which includes the keywords you identified for that program. Then, on sub-pages, you’ll create a set of content marketing tools for each program, again using the relevant keywords for each program.
For local businesses, it’s also important to include your full address on every page. If you’re in Dallas, you only want Dallas residents looking for golf conditioning to find you.
What types of content marketing work best?
The right information – and the best way to present it – varies depending on your target customer.
For example, infographics work especially well for employee wellness prospects. For consumers, they usually miss the boat. Case studies work well for both audiences. A First Visit FAQ usually applies only to consumers.
That said, these content marketing tools usually work extremely well:
- Factoids and infographics (especially for corporate wellness)
- Case studies
- White papers (especially for corporate wellness)
- Comparisons of different solutions (surgery vs medication vs lifestyle change)
- Self-assessment tools, questionnaires and checklists
- Competitor comparisons
- Q&A with key staff or clients
- What to expect on your first visit
- Frequently-asked questions (not self-serving questions, but the real questions that potential clients have)
You can also use a variety of media – articles, slideshows, video, audio, etc.
What about social media?
It’s generally best to create the content on your website – so you have total control and ownership.
Then, it’s a great idea to post links to your content marketing tools on your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Facebook pages. Use your keywords when you create your posts.
And of course, always include “Like” and other share buttons to help people share content they find valuable with others.
