The goal of healthcare content marketing is to offer your customers the most accurate and helpful responses to their medical inquiries. Effectively promoting healthcare products or services involves striking a balance between presenting well-researched information and avoiding the use of overly technical language, which can make your content feel like a textbook.
What do you need to get started with content marketing strategy?
As a healthcare office, you have an advantage of being able to give patients special information regarding the specific medical matters that your office deals with. If someone has an issue with their heart, they are likely to go to a heart surgeon rather than their general practitioner; similarly, if your content is targeted towards certain needs, people will choose to read it over other available websites. To make your content more valuable for the target audience you can:
- consider mentioning your location to reach out to those in your locality
- provide exclusive information based on your field of specialization, if any
- offer valuable insights from doctors and medical experts at your office
Content marketing is easy to get into and requires minimal effort to set up. You should already possess a website with blogging capabilities or a page in one of social media services, a deep understanding of your industry and good writing abilities. If you lack the skill to write your blog content yourself, you can always hire someone for that task. With these three core elements, you’re ready to start your content marketing journey.
After you have your content ready, the next step is to upload it to your website. Thinking of ideas for captivating content can be done in several ways. The best content is the material that your patients will giva a “like”, comment on, or share with their family and friends. Some sources of inspiration could include:
- inquiries that patients usually ask regarding treatment or operations at your facility
- wrong information that they often bring to the office
- points that you would like patients to be aware of or understand before visiting your office
Once you have your initial blog posts established, you can create more content by looking at what articles are receiving lots of viewership. High traffic indicates that there is an interest in that topic and you can take a look at what your competitors are discussing on their websites to see if you can come up with something novel or interesting that can make your article on the same subject stand out and give your patients better information.
Tips for promoting your content
Though content marketing can be effective for gaining organic website traffic, promoting your content can give it the initial launch it needs. Search engines appreciate when a website has external backlinks and will rank it higher on the results page. To promote your content, leverage social media and email marketing, as well as talking to patients at your office and directing them to your blog posts. Additionally, pay special attention to the photos you include in your content, ensuring that they are succinct, relevant, and up-to-date.
Your long-form marketing message(s) can be communicated via (partial list):
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Case study/trend analysis
- Data-driven content
- Discussion Forums
- Ebooks
- Educational game/quiz
- eNewsletters
- Instructional articles/guides
- Technical report interpretation
- Podcasts
- Print newsletters
- Research reports
- Video content
- Virtual conferences
- Webinar/webcast
- Website
- White papers
So, you can focus on some points from this list and combine when it’s necessary. Also you can inclide additional methods of communication while choosing the best options. Content marketing is a great way for hospitals and healthcare providers to communicate with their patients and offer them helpful and intriguing content. It’s a powerful marketing tool for patient engagement, building loyalty, identity, and professional reputation. It can be defined as a form of marketing that entails the production and dissemination of educational and relevant materials that are intended to influence consumers’ purchase decisions and interests. It is an effective method for delivering timely and interesting materials to current and potential customers.
5 basic rules of content marketing
To create high-quality pieces of content you should follow 5 basic rules:
1. When writing content, always keep your target audience in mind. Ensure that any material you create is suitable, relevant and intriguing to the specific group you are looking to reach and engage. Make sure your content is tailored to their interests rather than your own.
2. The tone of you articles should depend on types of content you’re creating. Content marketing materials should be composed in a comprehensible tone. Story-telling and conversational tones can be used to make dry data and technical details more relatable. Physicians should prioritize their ability to interact with people over healthcare sector.
Content marketing, as opposed to direct response advertising, creates a connection that goes beyond immediate action. By offering in-depth and unbiased material, the readers (and your potential patients) can have more confidence and trust in what they are reading. A neutral and enlightening voice is very persuasive and reliable. Self-promotion, on the other hand, is counterproductive.
3. Content marketing takes time and energy to produce results. Its advantages build up over a period of time, as the audience grows in size and receptiveness. This approach can be complementary to traditional advertising techniques which provide a more immediate impact when it comes to meeting certain marketing objectives.
4. Start with something you can maintain. Content marketing can be a valuable asset if it is reliable, timely, and consistent with regular updates of new content. Put your focus on what you can accomplish with your current resources, starting small and expanding as your resources grow. For example, running a blog can gain credibility, but if you do not post regularly, you will no longer appear trustworthy. Content marketing provides the public with something of value in a way that can build trust in the practitioner, spark discussion and engagement, and increase visibility to potential patients through various search engine avenues.
How to write differently for B2B and B2C markets
When it comes to healthcare content marketing, there are two main targets: Business to consumer (B2C) and Business to business (B2B).
The factors to consider when creating such content vary depending on the audience.
1. For B2C content, the language and tone should be clear and unambiguous, so that it is accessible to people of all ages and levels of experience.
2. For B2B content, the language should be more complex and pitched to the expertise of the target audience.
3. In terms of distribution channels, B2C content might be more suitable for short blogs and social media, whereas B2B content might include whitepapers, long-form blogs, research-driven guides, newsletters, and webinars.
Ultimately, the most important thing is that the right audience can consume the content in the most effective way.
Five steps to make your content successful:
1. Reach out to your community and patients to gain insights for your content marketing strategy. Make sure it is clear that these conversations are not meant to share personal health information. Building a platform dedicated to engaging with customers can be a great way to source ideas. Additionally, collaborate with customer-facing teams and clinical teams to understand the requests and questions made by patients. Traditional audience research must also be conducted to ensure success in content marketing. To truly capture the needs of your audience, engaging with customers through interviews and learning their language is important. This will provide you with deeper insight into the problems they have and help you better communicate with them. When conversing with your customers and prospects, it is important to get an understanding of their goals and challenges. This will help you create content that truly resonates with them. However, you must abide by HIPAA compliance protocols when creating content for healthcare companies. Also, learn about their communication preferences, channels, and content formats, as well as the language they use when talking to other brands. This understanding of their communication style will help you decide which tone of voice to take when addressing them.
2. Gaining an in-depth knowledge of your audience and the related community is important before you plan out the topics to be included in your content. Establishing topically-focused authority can help you deepen your expertise in a certain niche and increase the trust of your audience. Additionally, it will boost your presence in search engine rankings. To achieve this, create great content with much quantity that is focused on a single topic. If you need to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and their needs, it is essential to explore other available platforms. To do this, you can read forums, check various social media platforms to see if content is being created and shared around relevant health topics. It can be beneficial to attend industry events to stay up-to-date with recent news and trends, as well as “newsjacking” to create authoritative content. You should also set up a list of industry resources, publications and journals, and follow relevant topics and hashtags to find out what questions and conversations are taking place. Finally, you can always go back to the Topic Research tool to find the latest trending topics and popular headlines and questions related to your subtopic.
3. Completing a content ideas search in the healthcare space is not finished without looking into competitive research. To optimise your content research strategising, there are several steps that need to be taken:
- Generating a list of direct and indirect competitors
- Evaluating their overall content strategy – what content are they creating, what categories does it fall into and what mediums are they using to share it? It might be worthwhile having a look at their websites and social media accounts.
- Examining their SEO strategies – what informational and transactional keywords are they ranking for? Which are their top-performing pages? Utilising the Organic Research tool can assist with this.
- Doing a keyword gap analysis to discover the differences between their current rankings and yours. The Keyword Gap tool can come in handy here. Afterwards, make use of the insights found in the research to improve your content plan depending on what is successful in your sector.
In order to capture new audiences and stand out from the competition, healthcare brands should explore diversifying their content by introducing new formats. While academic-style articles are often used in the healthcare industry, other content types such as short-form video, interactive tools, data-driven guides, and checklists can be beneficial. Furthermore, creating content across the different stages of the buying cycle is a great way to nurture leads. According to the survey, blog posts, video, and success stories were the most successful types of healthcare content. Additionally, try utilizing less common formats such as podcasts, data visualizations, ebooks, and quizzes to differentiate yourself from others.
4. Once you have chosen and researched your topics, you must utilize medical knowledge to generate your health-related material. There are two possibilities for this: work with specialists from the start to compose/produce the content, or use authors with medical experience to create initial drafts and have them examined and validated by knowledgeable experts. The latter is generally the simplest option as it requires less time from your specialists. No matter the approach you take, a great deal of care has to be taken to create precise, accurate, and verifiable content. If you possess some form of platform, you should be providing clinically-vetted and precise info to your readers, or else risk misguiding them and undermining your objectives. This is particularly important when it comes to “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) content, meaning information that affects personal finances or health. As such, Google takes special care to ensure that the healthcare info it displays in search results is up-to-date, reliable, and accurate. For those without clinical resources, it is advised to obtain answers from credible sources and healthcare professionals. After all, when it comes to healthcare content, people’s wellbeing is at stake. You may also get in touch with department heads at universities or medical schools who can direct you to the right people if they are unable to answer your queries.
5. To make sure your content is effective and user-friendly, we suggest the following:
- Organize your content into well-defined categories and hubs. Make sure the information you provide is related to your audience’s questions, challenges, and needs.
- Ensure that your content is easily discoverable on your website. Consider user experience when arranging your content – strive to make it easily navigable as well as searchable by keywords. This will help not only your readers but also search engines better understand the site’s structure, which may result in higher rankings.
- Structure your articles using advance headings (H2 + H3 + H4) and ensure readability with plain language. Some researches show that 47% of articles with advanced headings are among the top performing organic content, while one list per 500 words is optimal.
- Including images, infographics, and videos can give your content a more human touch, making it easier to understand.
