1.10 Content to attract existing clients

Alright! You have decided that you want to attract your existing clients to visit your web site regularly,. You, and your staff, are committed to creating regular new content for your site. What kind of content do you need? What will attract your existing clients and keep them coming back?

Unique for your clients
The content you provide has to be specifically targeted at your clients. They need to get something from your web site that they can't get elsewhere. Among the billions of pages on the Internet, why should your site be the one they come back to again and again?

Special
What is special about your clients? What do they have in common that you can use to define unique content? There are two things. They certainly have animals and they most probably live relatively close to your surgery. Local animal owners.

Local content
There is only one class of material that can attract regular repeat visits from your existing clients. The magic word is local. Local content about local animals, their local owners and their local veterinary surgery. It's local content that keeps small newspapers alive up and down the country.

Last Weeks News
..and what happens to last weeks local paper? The cat pees on it. Last weeks news is replaced by this weeks. This weeks news is often much the same as last weeks, only the names change. The same basic articles, rewritten with a changing cast of local characters, have kept local newspapers alive and reasonably profitable for a hundred years or more. The same approach can work for your web site.

Cat litter
A robust policy of removing content would do most web sites a world of good. What good is fireworks advice in February? How can you make the advice fresh come October when it's been on the web site all year? Put it online at the appropriate time, take it down as it goes out of season.

Bought in content
There is no substitute for regularly refreshed local content. You and your staff are the only people in a position to create it. Nothing created in some distant web designers studio, however whizzy or technically advanced, can match a fuzzy snapshot of your head veterinary nurse visiting the gerbils at the local primary school. Once you let them know that their school is going to be on your web site then this kind of article will attract visits from all the children, their parents, their friends, their aunty and granny and the lady who lives next door - the list goes on and on and nearly everyone will live in your surgery catchment area.

Offline
You will still have clients without internet access. You don't want them to feel left out. The content you create for your web site should also be made available for clients visiting your waiting room. Print a newsletter, put copies of articles on your noticeboard, create a paper version of your site in a folder. You might even consider making your web site available in the waiting room – an old computer is inexpensive and your web site can be displayed without requiring an internet connection.

Let's put a couple of long standing myths about content to rest

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