Healthcare content marketing has some catching up to do as we step into 2021. With more people working from home and using search engines to answer queries about everything from trivia to aches and pains, healthcare sites are in high demand.
To earn patients’ trust, practitioners need to create accessible and credible content for their blogs. But how does one go about creating a content strategy?
We share seven ways to make the process more effective for healthcare professionals making their first foray into the world of content marketing.
1. Plan and Track Your Healthcare Content Marketing
Planning is essential for any project, particularly one as impactful as healthcare content marketing that can drive registrations and patient acquisition.
Create a project plan for your content strategy, like the below example, that outlines the direction the organization is headed with its marketing.
Source: Venngage
Note how the plan includes the marketing strategy’s primary goals, as well as ideal audience personas. Competitor research helps organizations define how their marketing can rise above already existing content.
Healthcare marketing teams can also design a preliminary content marketing calendar in their 2021 plan that defines the number of blog posts, expert interviews, videos, and social media posts are created for each month or quarter.
However, a content plan doesn’t need to be set in stone—allow room for flexibility as events may occur that require less or more of a specific type of content to be produced.
One of the benefits of creating a plan is that it becomes easier to track SEO performance, brand impressions, social media views, website traffic, and conversion rates.
2. Focus on Your Specialties for Healthcare Content Marketing
To make healthcare content marketing more effective, organizations need to focus on areas that they are already familiar with. Healthcare coaching, however, is growing with the popularity of a health coach contract template, and training your team for unfamiliar topics would be helpful.
This is particularly important because of the amount of content available online—potential patients will be wary of getting advice from the wrong sources.
There is room to spread one’s wings by enlisting experts in a variety of medical fields; it is best to highlight your organization’s in-house thought leadership.
All content—text, video, imagery, and social posts—should share advice based on the organization’s specializations in healthcare.
Additionally, all information should be up-to-date and accurate at the time of writing or posting—if the data you have included is subject to change, add a note in your post.
3. Target Healthcare Content Marketing Towards Patients
Only 24% of consumers believe organizations are protecting their health over their business interests—this holds for healthcare organizations.
While some of your content will be geared towards fellow experts, the majority of your target audience will be potential patients.
You need to simplify your content accordingly so that it is more accessible to clients. For example, symptoms of a disease and how to recognize them can be confusing to the layperson.
Make your content as easy to comprehend as possible—break up your text with headings, use bullet points, make a video for a complex subject, or try creating a flow chart, like the one below, to show patients what to do when experiencing symptoms.
Source: Venngage
Healthcare content marketing needs to be geared towards its audience—and for the most part, they are patients looking for quick solutions to their health-related problems.
4. Highlight Heroes in Healthcare Content Marketing Materials
2020 has shown the world just how heroic healthcare practitioners have to be—which is why they should be highlighted in healthcare content materials.
Organizations have long appeared like impenetrable monoliths—and that creates a barrier between the company and the patients it is reaching out to.
Circumvent this by showcasing the people behind the business in your content strategy—the doctors, nurses, and administrators. In other words, the people patients are most likely to meet.
Look at this Mayo Clinic tweet about handwashing—it features a doctor, thus creating a human connection between the brand and the consumer.
https://twitter.com/MayoClinic/status/1336024029346533379?s=20
5. Create Gated Healthcare Content
Gated content is a mainstay of online marketing strategies—and it’s something healthcare content marketing can adopt.
eBooks, whitepapers, like the one below, and exclusive content all fall into the gated content category and help to generate more leads.
Source: Venngage
Healthcare organizations can create and promote an eBook or lead generation papers to earn contact details from their consumers.
When you create gated content, add links to it throughout your website and promote it across your channels.
6. Ditch Lingo in Healthcare Content Marketing
We’ve mentioned that patients won’t always know or understand complex medical jargon—if this is your target audience for your healthcare content marketing, ditch the lingo.
If you must include medical terms, explain what they mean. As we said earlier, make it easy to read by using more headings and bullet points.
Create original graphics to explain difficult terms and procedures—create YouTube videos to take consumers through a procedure and demystify the medical processes.
Consider creating patient testimonials or experience videos—these create personal connections between your existing patients and new ones. But it also puts people at ease.
7. Repurpose Healthcare Content
Creating new content is extremely hard—envisioning stories and graphics every week, and new ways of using platforms can become exhausting.
But healthcare content marketing doesn’t need to be this much of a challenge—because marketers have the option to repurpose existing content.
There are numerous ways to use one type of content in multiple ways:
- Create infographics out of blog posts
- Divide one infographic into multiple social media posts
- Use infographics as newsletters
- Make videos from blog content
- Divide longer videos into short video snippets for social media
- Combine multiple blog posts into a whitepaper or eBook
- Combine multiple videos into a webinar
When it comes to repurposing content, the possibilities are endless—they may require a bit of work at first, but once the marketing team gets used to doing it, the process will become easier.
By repurposing content, healthcare practitioners can reach diverse audiences who may be using a variety of platforms to get medical information, so it’s worth the effort.
Key Takeaways: Keep Healthcare Content Marketing Simple and Accessible
Patients are the primary audience for your marketing materials, so they should be easy to understand by someone without extensive knowledge of the field.
To make healthcare content marketing effective in 2021, follow these steps:
- Plan and Track Your Strategy
- Focus on Your Specialties
- Target Marketing Towards Patients
- Highlight Heroes
- Create Gated Content
- Ditch the Lingo
- Repurpose Content
Use the above methods to create a strategy that will attract more consumers to your business and retain them through the years.
