When you’re trying to stay on top in your market segment, you know that it’s not only a battle against your competitors and a struggle to meet your audience’s expectations but also a struggle to stay fresh and relevant in the context of an ever-changing picture.
It can be a big challenge.
As a physical therapy clinic, you know that your most important assets are quality services and professional staff and specialists, but it is not always enough to keep a constant flow of patients. Good quality of product or service is no longer the only ingredient to guarantee your success, so you have to learn new, contemporary ways to be relevant.
As you know, your patients have different needs, different lifestyles that you need to work with, and their personal choices will reflect on the choices they make in your clinic. That is why it is so important to discuss adaptive content and what it can bring you.
Nowadays, you can no longer sustain yourself with “one size fits all” types of strategies. People engage with businesses on a personal level, highlighting the importance a personalized experience. Adaptive content is one of the newest strategies you can implement to offer your patients a tailored experience from the very first click on your page.
The center of adaptive content is not your service or product, but your patient. Around his or her preferences, you can build a unique approach that will truly appeal to the individual.
In its most basic sense, adaptive content refers to content that can be repurposed and reused over and over again. For example, what started as a tweet can be turned into a blog post, an ebook, a webinar, a YouTube video, an e-course and so on.
Think about it this way. People change. The way a first-time visitor sees your PT clinic’s website differs from what a three-time visitor sees. Their needs are different, and the way they interact with your website is different, as well. And yet, most of them are presented with the same static content.
You need to understand that the needs of each visitor are different, so you should conceive, plan and develop your content around the patient. Tailor your messages based on your visitors’ location, device or referral source. Focus on delivering personalized experience and optimizing your content for the entire journey across all channels.
Surely by now, you are familiar with responsive design. Given that so many people use their mobile devices to communicate, research, and engage in day-to-day activities, your business must be ready to send its message across all channels of communication. Being stuck in a desktop-email kind of communication can mean the death of your brand. Prospects will not even find your message, let alone engage with it properly.
Through responsive design, you can create different versions of your website to match the device used by a patient or prospect. By using browsing information for your website’s visitors, you can switch automatically to mobile, or desktop, or tablet.
Adaptive content works on the same principle, but it takes the experience even deeper by adapting the actual content to each visitor, not only the design. It goes beyond the cosmetic function and adapts the substance of the content to the visitor’s behavior.
First of all, you must understand that adaptive content is all about your patients and how they will benefit from your efforts. By focusing on the user experience, you will be able to see what features would be useful for your potential or existing patients.
When a patient visits your PT clinic’s website for the second or third time, it’s not necessary to present your business as if it was the first time they come across it. Registering the patient’s activity during their online visit will not only help you monitor your traffic but also adapt your message based on previous interactions.
Greet your patients with custom messages that address their specific needs. An excellent idea would be to include polls or surveys and register what each visitor has checked. That way, you can tell if a patient with back problems that visited your site is the end user or the parent of a child in need of physical therapy.
By using adaptive content, you are also making it easier for your prospects to navigate your website. They won’t have to go through the selection process each time they visit your site because now you can use adaptive content to make appropriate suggestions.
Most people nowadays use their mobile devices to get around or research information about different brands or services. By acknowledging their location, you’re doing a major favor to both of you.
Here’s why.
When you’re using your patients’ location information, you can offer relevant information, such directions to your PT clinic or special offers available only in certain local physical therapy clinics.
While it may sound like an effective way to get closer to your patients and deliver personalized experiences, adaptive content does require a certain investment and planning. Even if you are a small PT clinic, don’t think that adaptive content is too fancy for you or an unjustified investment. The benefits it will bring will cover your efforts in implementing it. Not to mention, you can adapt the level of customization to your possibilities.
The best way to begin this process is by understanding the five W's: who, what, when, where and why.
When it comes to adaptive content, building your strategy on these pillars will help you create better-customized experiences for your patients.
Who Are You Addressing?
The first step in developing an adaptive content strategy is to identify your potential audience. Determine who is most likely to read your content and what specific information your prospective patients might be interested in finding.
The best way to answer this question is by creating a buyer persona.
A detailed buyer persona will help you understand your audience, and it can make it easier for you to tailor content to their specific needs.
Once you’ve figured out your buyer persona, you can decide what type of content to create. Always be sure to make your content meaningful. No matter how well-written your content may be, if it doesn’t give your prospects what they need, it will have no value.
Which Type of Content Appeals Most to Your Patients?
You’ve identified your potential audience, and you’ve created your buyer persona. It is now time to find out what type of content works best for your patients.
First and foremost, start by determining how much time, resources, and commitment you are willing to invest in content creation. Do you have the time to publish fresh content on a weekly or even daily basis? Do you have the resources to create different types of content, such as infographics or videos? Remember that, in some cases, consistency is expected and paramount to your success.
Check your analytics to identify your best performing content. Find out if there are any new communication tools you could introduce to the mix. Don’t overdo it, though. You don’t have to create every type of content available out there. Figure out what your audience likes and focus on that.
Even though the actual concept of tailored, personalized content is well understood, applying it to your specific situation might be challenging. How do you know when you need to adapt your content and when not? What should trigger your content to shift for each visitor?
As we showed in a few examples above, there are many ways in which you can apply this strategy, from using the patient’s location to registering how many times they have visited your PT clinic’s website.
Some of the characteristics you can use to trigger adaptive content are:
These rules are essential to adaptive content. Every channel serves as a puzzle, and you need to match the pieces to deliver a complete and personalized experience.
When deciding where the content will be displayed, you need to take into account the challenges of different devices. Remember that what looks good on a desktop computer can cause a frustrating experience on a mobile device.
Imagine that you’ve converted a blog post that uses embed videos into an eBook. Basic digital readers don’t support video, so prospects won’t be able to read the content properly on these devices.
While deciding where to display your content often comes last, you need to consider this aspect early in the strategic process so that your content has defined characteristics based on the intended channel.
We’ve already built a strong case for adaptive content in this article. Numerous studies and surveys point to its importance, and a great number of companies claim adaptive content is the key component of their success.
However, simply stating these facts may not be enough to convince you to invest in adaptive content. After all, what worked for others might not be suited for your physical therapy clinic.
Managers or investors might think that a PT clinic should focus on other strategies to keep and gain patients and it is understandable. But what every physical therapy clinic owner, manager or investor needs to remember is that patients have diverse needs, and these go further than the actual physical therapy.
Choosing a PT clinic also depends on its location, on special pricing offers, personalized treatments, good communication, extra services and commodities, informative content always available, etc. There are a lot of reasons why patients choose one physical therapy clinic over another, and not knowing them or ignoring them can have a negative impact on your success.
It is also a time-sensitive decision to make, as the advantage given by adaptive content is huge at this moment. It is not yet a standard in the marketing world, but more and more companies are using it. Not to mention, customers have begun to notice and request it. Being among the PT clinics that deliver this tailored experience for its patients can set you apart from your competitors.
The world is rapidly changing. Mobile devices are becoming less expensive and more advanced with each passing year. With information available at our fingertips, having static content can hurt your business.
Physical therapy clinics need to review their content constantly and look for new ways to create personalized experiences.
Because we know that the task of creating quality adaptive content can be a challenge, here at PatientSites we can take some of the pressure off your shoulders so that you can focus on what you know best: growing your PT clinic.
Get started with a Free Evergreen Marketing Blueprint to help you create long-term assets that will attract new patients for years to come.