Located in Carlsbad and San Diego (Rancho Bernardo) and led by Dr. Jeff Birchall and his team of 20 employees, Dermacare Laser and Skin Care Clinics specializes in cosmetic rejuvenation and restoration of the face and body.
A savvy marketer himself, Dr. Birchall asked us to help him develop a content marketing program that would embody his years of experience as a family practitioner building long-term relationships with patients.
So we put together a strategy that would help Dermacare discover new patients from search, promote new content to new audiences on social, and build long-term loyalty by satisfying patients’ informational and emotional needs with content.
Before launching our content marketing program, our first objective was to define Dermacare’s business goals and target patient.
Since Dermacare wanted to increase consultations for a full suite of non-invasive face and body rejuvenation treatments, we made the decision to take a needs-based approach to our positioning. In other words, we would meet the broad needs of a narrowly defined audience – in this case, women over 40 years old. Not only did this demographic have more disposable income, but they also showed a higher interest in aesthetic treatments than their younger counterparts.
Knowing that 97% of patients aren’t ready to purchase on their first visit, the next step was to transform Dermacare’s outdated website into a marketing hub – a place where we could reliably funnel the new search and social traffic we were about to acquire and expect visitors to convert to patients over time.
After establishing our website infrastructure, we created a weekly blog series to function as the anchor of our editorial strategy, driving traffic from search and promoting Dermacare’s thoughts and expertise on social. Then we supported our blog with a monthly email newsletter to build a list of subscribers that would receive our marketing message every month by choice.
We had myriad goals for Dermacare’s new website, all that were paramount to our content marketing success:
First, since 75% of people judge the credibility of a business based on their website appearance alone, we needed a more contemporary design that better reflected Dermacare’s contemporary business model.
Second, the website would serve as the foundation of our SEO, so we needed to establish DermacareSanDiego.com as a reputable authority on all things skin care if we expected to rank first in Carlsbad and Rancho Bernardo. Not to mention it needed to pass Google’s mobile friendly test.
In just over a year, we were able to corner the market in Carlsbad and Rancho Bernardo and rank #1 for Dermacare’s target procedures like Coolsculpting, Botox, and tattoo removal.
Last, because the website would be the destination for every prospective patient at some point in their journey, not only did it need to work for Google, but it also needed to nurture prospects along their journey from visitor to patient.
To build trust with our target patients and earn their attention, we used weekly educational blog posts that sold Dermacare’s thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and expertise. More importantly, our blog posts would help deepen Dermacare’s topical expertise and authority on skin rejuvenation, resulting in an increase in search rankings and organic traffic.
Blog posts also served as the foundation of our monthly newsletters. With our newsletters, we could align blog post topics with relevant specials and offers and give target patients a valuable resource to subscribe to in exchange for their attention.
Since we started blogging for Dermacare in 2015, we’ve accrued 10,635+ pageviews to blog posts alone and over 1,000 new subscribers to our newsletter.
Because we were targeting the 40+ demographic, we chose Facebook as our primary distribution model for publicising our content, building a following, and driving traffic back to the website.
By taking advantage of Facebook’s custom tabs, we transformed Dermacare’s business page into a micro-site, complete with before and after photos, team page, consultation form, and newsletter opt-in. This allowed patients to get the full experience of Dermacare’s message and offerings without ever having to leave Facebook.
And with social posts comprised of blog articles, live streaming, educational post, curated news from around the industry, and personal posts from Dr. Birchall and his staff, we were able to triple traffic to dermacaresandiego.com in one year.
Total two year traffic growth from our content marketing efforts, including referral, social, direct, and organic, rose to above 52,000 visitors in 2016 alone – a 24% increase from when we started. Today, between calls and website form submissions, Dermacare fields roughly 600 new patient inquiries a month. With a unified content marketing strategy that incorporates social media, SEO, blogging, reputation management, email marketing, and website development, and that provides Dermacare with multiple sources for finding new patients, they’ve successfully resurrected walls against the competition in their market.