3 Rules for Creating Interactive Content


By: Aiman Ghori
Marketing on social media is not like marketing on legacy mediums like television or newspapers. Websites like Facebook and Twitter allow for heightened immediacy in interaction between buyers and sellers that the previously mentioned mediums do not allow. This has led to the development of a whole new set of rules when creating content for prospective clients.
Customer engagement, service visualization, and content customization are some of the few elements that can and should be refined as much as possible to incite customers to interact with your office.
Below we outline 3 rules to keep in mind when creating content for your practice.

Customization

By trying to cast a wide net and appealing to a large audience, chances are you won't appeal to many. Audiences are usually able to easily differentiate between meaningful content and content that is generic. Content that is personalized and contextualized for a specific audience is more likely to attract user engagement. Content, whether it's a social media post or a blog post, can be as broad as users who live in a specific country, or as narrow as targeting neighbourhood blocks. There is a heavy saturation of content online and users are constantly receiving an influx of information as well as ads telling them to buy their product or service. However personalization allows your practice to gain the attention of prospective customers.

There is plethora of variables you can use to identify the kind of audience you want to attract and ultimately engage with, but that is only the beginning of customizing your content. From there you have to decide what the best way is to use the information you have on prospective clients and how to make the content interactive to keep them engaged with your practice.

Read More: 9 Benefits of Having a Newsletter for Your Healthcare Practice

Interactivity

Now that you have an idea of who you want to customize your online content for, it's important to figure out how to implement it. After attracting consumers to your service, you want to keep them engaged and turn them into customers. This is where interactivity comes in. If your audience comes to your social media page or opens your e-newsletter and finds there is no meaningful content they value, they will leave pretty quickly and most likely will not come again. So, it's crucial to create a unique interactive experience that will keep them coming back every time you post or send an e-newsletter.

Some ideas to throw around are: online polls, infographics, and possibly the simplest, genuinely engaging with users through comments or emails.

Online polls allow you to ask your audience directly what is it they want from you or the industry in general. Polls are a great way to find out how you can customize your content further. Using the results from those polls you can create engaging infographics that can be displayed back to the contributing audience. In this way they will be connecting with you as well as others in our audience. Try mixing and matching different ways to interact with prospective clients to find the one that works best for your practice.

Read More: Are You Using Social Media to its Full Potential?

Value

In the midst of all this content creation and interactivity it's easy to see your audience as a target rather than what they are, individuals. Individuals appreciate being valued and feeling that the service provider genuinely cares about their needs so the newsletter article you are sending them or Facebook post you're showing them should reflect that. Consumers in this time lean towards practices that put in extra time and effort to reach out to them and acknowledge their loyalty if they are a long time customer. This doesn't have to stop at a generic thank you, although that is very important as well, but goes beyond that. Personalization and interactivity should be interwoven in the way you appreciate customers/patients as well as in the content you create to attract prospective clients.

Read More: How to Capitalize on User-Generated Content

Making regular content for your online pages and newsletters is already a step in the right direction to gaining interest in your practice and the rules outlined above will only boost your image. Personalizing your messages to cater to your specific audience and keep them engaged with interactive content will build brand loyalty. Patients will appreciate the effort put in to give them meaningful information that is relevant to their needs.

To learn more about how to customize your online content and how it can benefit your practice, contact an UpOnline representative today.