A Good Healthcare Content Marketing strategy can completely bring astonishing results in the way we perceive the information around us. All of us would have experienced certain health issues at some stage of our lives, be it cough, cold or pain in your tooth that may have made it difficult for you to eat.
Most of us these days look into Google or other search engines first, for answers.
Two major challenges in today’s healthcare industry includes:
- Locating and retaining new patients.
- Making sure that the current patients have the up-to-date information easily accessible.
Now, there is a way to solve these issues at the same time. Healthcare Industry, using Content Marketing can,
- Allow new patients walking in and seeking the advice of your medical professionals.
- Create a resource where your current patients can turn to when they have any healthcare related questions.
Doing this will help you maintain your standards as an expert. It also creates a bond of trust between you and your patients before they actually enter your premises.
Healthcare Content Marketing
Content marketing is a planned way of marketing that focuses on creating and distributing valuable and significant content to attract the targeted audience, generate leads, boost sales and improve the brand awareness.
The base of Healthcare Content Marketing is to provide your customers the answers to their queries or questions.
It should not sound like you are referring to a medical textbook which is hard to understand. Since you are into healthcare industry, your patients will give more weightage to your content over the content provided by other websites just like a person would prefer to go to a dentist over a general practitioner if they have issues in their tooth.
You will be preferred more if your content is based out of the needs of your patients. To target your Healthcare Content:
- Offer insights directly from the doctors and other medical practitioners in your office.
- If you have some specialization, provide unique information based on that.
- Mention your location to target patients in your area.
For Example, if a person wants to search: What kind of food should nursing mother’s eat?, there are people answering to their queries and you knowing the front and back of Healthcare industry can stand out.
Generate ideas for creating engaging content
All you need, to start with Content Marketing is:
- A website with Blogging capabilities.
- Strong copywriting skills
To provide fresh content it is important to know how you can generate new ideas for your blog.
Whether you write your own content or hire a freelancer to do the job, strong copywriting skills are important for a good start with content marketing .
To get started, you can consider:
- Things you wanted your patients to know or understand before they enter your premises.
- Queries your patients often have when they come to the office
- Misconceptions that your patients usually have.
The best content is the one which your patients would want to engage with by liking, commenting or sharing it with their own family and friends.
You can generate further content by considering the articles that generate traffic because high traffic on an article indicates that your patients are looking for information on that topic.
You can also consider the ideas your competitors are talking about on their website, if you have something more interesting to share with on the same topic and give better information to your patients.
6 Effective Healthcare Content Marketing Strategies
1. Set up your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy & Document it.
The very first thing you need to put your efforts in the right Direction is a strong Content Marketing Plan. Do it, even before you share your content on social media or publish it on your website.
Establishing your goals and objectives along with the rest of the Marketing plan will certainly pay off your time and efforts in the long run.
The annual State of Healthcare Content Marketing study states that since 97% Healthcare Marketers using or planning to leverage content to drive growth and engage customers, it is more critical than ever to differentiate your approach to stand out in the market.
It is very important to design each aspect of content strategy from planning and content creation, to distribution, measurement and optimization.
In the light of COVID-19, patients expect immediate & accurate answers to their healthcare questions. With earlier engagement with your patients, you can achieve preference and long term affinity for your brands.
Nearly 83% of the organization have Consumer engagement as their main marketing goals.
2. Get acquainted with your customers.
Building trust with your customers is very important when it comes to Healthcare Content Marketing in the Industry. Understanding your customers in a better way will help you build trust with them .
Understanding your buyer persona’s will help you to have a better understanding of who your ideal customers are and what their demands are along with what type of messages they are going to respond the most.
Outlining the buyer’s journey for each of your buyer personas is very very important step in the Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy.
One common mistake that many healthcare companies make is that most of their content focusses on brand itself. Some content related to your brand can be beneficial.
However if all your content is around your brand it is not offering more to their needs. Its is important to understand that these days customers are looking into search engines for answers related to their health.
Providing content that answers these questions will provide the value to your audience without putting too much focus on your brand. This putting user-first strategy can convert your readers from” I m just browsing your blog” to “I need a healthcare provider – & I know where I need to go”.
3. Work Simple and Use your Specialization to your advantage.
Whenever you write an article, keep in mind that whoever is reading does not have basic knowledge of this particular topic. When your readers could not understand what you are talking about, they’ll go to another source that will provide better information.
Make sure that you keep your customers in mind while delivering the content. You can write so many things on how your company is best, however the customer is not interested in your self-branding content.
Keep your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy focused on the needs of your customers and give them the information they are looking for. It is always a great idea to get an interview with the experts.
The readers who are interested in the technical side of a topic will look for the expert’s advice and can prove to be an important component of your content marketing strategy.
We all know that healthcare industry is vast and have various specializations & services. Starting from physicians with their own specialties to the different healthcare companies focused on various aspects of wellness.
These specializations can be a vital aspect of your content marketing strategy. Creating a content on your niche is a low-hanging fruit on which you and your marketing team can engage in.
After all, one would always prefer to go to a physician or a healthcare specialist on a particular subject matter for their healthcare related queries over someone writing a blog in general.
Even if your on staff experts do not have time to write the entire blog, they can probably take out few minutes for an interview to inform one. These experts will also help you in building the reputation of your company.
4. Get your Readers to take action
To understand, if your readers if your readers are understanding what they are reading, you can include quiz activities in your marketing plan to test their understanding.
Make sure that your content is sharable so as to give your customers the chance to help you in spreading the message. Ask your readers to comment, however make sure that they will need a discussion based, pointed questions to start commenting.
Make notes on which questions your customers are having difficulty with. Use this insight to tailor your content appropriately. People are looking for answers to their questions related to healthcare. Make sure they are able to find their answers.
5. Don’t forget human touch
Statistics shows that the persons remember 85% of what they see, 125 of the content they hear & 26% of what they browse. Means it is very important to give human touch to whatever content you use.
If you want your content to be liked and shared, visual content is very important. Even though informational content can bring beneficial result to your content marketing strategy, it is very important not to forget the human side of the content.
Content like, Video marketing, High quality images can help you add a human touch in your online reputation. Apart from an eye catching attractive headline, nothing can see a blog post more than an impressive image.
6. Track your progress & Success
After putting some good pieces of content, develop a tracking system to measure how your audience are responding to the content.
This step will help you to ensure that are you actually aligning to the goals and objectives along with the ROI you initially created as a part of your content marketing strategy.
Although it is hard to copy the success of the past content if you have no clue about what’s working for you and what’s not. Still it is seen that many healthcare companies are skipping this step or even abandoning it.
According to Healthcare Content Marketing Report by Jordan Teicher Timely COVID stories works best if done correctly:
This global pandemic impacted everyone and everything. In Healthcare industry it was vital to cover the topic of COVID, Audience was looking for the information on how to deal effectively with this issue.
This rush of COVID-19 content proved to be an interesting case study for the Healthcare Marketers.