In today’s digital age, how will you benefit from featuring long-form content on your practice’s website? A study probed on the relevance of this phenomenon.
What surprised the authors was that the market for long-form content (like everything else) has grown with the emergence of mobile and portable devices like tablets.
In the past, the laptop limited the interest of the readers to short forms where they could get in and get out of a page quickly.
But this can be counterproductive for your practice’s purpose. Why?
Three Reasons to Use Long-form Content on Your Practice’s Website
1. You want to grow your practice
Short term engagements won’t establish the kind of relationship that builds loyalty. Long-form content will enable you to share your expertise through in-depth discussion and quality engagement.
The article cited that:
- 73% of people who read using their tablets read long-form content. And 20% of these do so daily.
- 70% of people who use their smartphones read long-form contents. And 11% do so daily.
These are numbers you can’t ignore.
To capture this market, you should consider long-form content. Readers will stay for more than 30 seconds on your site, and therefore will enable Google to track this more prolonged engagement in your site and rank you among the reader-worthy places.
2. You want to attract the right prospects
Patients who are committed to taking care of their health do a lot of research. They want to have the best health care provider. They want the expert in the field. They want to read stories of success.
Hence long-form content (like blogs) will provide them with the kind of information they need to decide on whether they’d pick up that phone and schedule or not.
When prospective patients read testimonies coupled with evidence-based practice, they feel more comfortable about the kind of care they will be getting. They will know what to expect and will likely want to become new patients for your practice.
3. You want to meet the needs of your patients
It’s not just the quantity of words that you want, but quality. Long-form content demands well-written useful information that meets patient’s needs in a format they could easily store and share.
Some examples of websites, according to the article, that are popular for their long-form content are:
- Newspaper sites such as The New York Times and The Guardian that feature long-form articles with multimedia reports
- Digital native sites like Buzz Feed and The Huffington Post
- Long-form aggregator sites like org and Longreads.com with the advantage of saving for later reading and sharing not just in Kindle but in other apps like Pocket and Instapaper.
- Crowdfunding projects like Matter and The Medium
- Websites aimed at writers and long-form narrative publishing market, such as Vooks and Readymag with useful tools for your creation
- Paid long-form content sites such as The Atavist
The long-form format will enable you to add multimedia products like:
- Slideshows
- Multimedia specials like videos
- Online infographics
In addition to long form content, your web design should be responsive and easily adapt to the type of device (desktop or mobile) your patient is using. It would be a shame to have an immersive story displayed in unreadable fonts with minuscule images.
If you don’t have the time to come up with a solid digital marketing strategy, but would want to offer this added-value on your website, we can help. Schedule a FREE practice review today!