I’ve always believed that if you put in the work, the results will come.
It was certainly true for the man who said that — basketball great Michael Jordan — but it also offers a roadmap for doctors navigating the changing landscape of online marketing. While paid search still has its place, good content is increasingly what will set you apart from the competition.
Simply put, advertising is a cost of doing business; content is an investment in it.
And as the ability to measure content marketing’s reach and consumers’ response to it improves, the return on that investment (ROI) does, as well.
Consider a recent report from Eloqua.com that compared the relative costs and revenues between paid search, i.e., pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and content marketing via blogging, podcasting, whitepapers, etc.
Calculating everything from typical pay-per-click rates to content-producer salaries, they found that:
- The cost per lead of content marketing was 31–41% lower than paid search (as calculated over a 24-month campaign)
- In the first five months, the cost per lead of content marketing dropped 80%
- Unlike paid search, the value of content marketing is cumulative: After 36 months, content marketing resulted in more than three times as many leads as paid search
Of course, whether an Internet lead comes from paid search or content marketing, it remains just that: a lead. And, as we’ve discussed before, leads need to be nurtured — not talked at, not sold to — but nurtured to get a sense of what the very real person behind it is looking for.
Ultimately, it’s all about bringing quality traffic to your website. Content marketing, it turns out, is the work you put in — the investment, as it were — that helps those visitors feel they’re getting a good return on their personal investment in aesthetic research.
Or, as search expert and Google Fellow Amit Singhal recently told Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com,
It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content.
Put them together and you’ve got the recipe for a championship campaign.
