As years go by, the healthcare sector continues to experience more growth. As the population grows larger and needs keep evolving and changing, it’s crucial that healthcare companies like yours proactively address patient pain points, answer consumer needs using innovative products, and remain ahead of the increase in competition by building a company image that’s thoughtful and trustworthy.
The key to achieving all these and more is creating a strong content strategy. This post talks about content marketing in the healthcare industry.
What’s the State of Content Marketing in Healthcare?
Before we get into the good stuff, it’s helpful to know what’s happening inside. The State of Healthcare 2020 Content Marketing report gives some important information.
The research surveyed executives at hospitals and content leaders around the country. 89% of healthcare companies are actively engaged in content marketing, a 13% increase from 2019.
There is a possibility the pandemic provided the time and increase for greater adoption. The research also revealed that content marketers use various platforms and techniques to attract, engage, and convert their audiences.
The top techniques were blogs, newsletters, social media content, videos, infographics, and illustrations. Indeed, healthcare content marketers did adjust their content strategy in response to COVID-19.
Several companies revealed they started focusing on creating educative content around COVID-19 prevention and care.
Most of these healthcare companies claim their content marketing is effective, with 92% saying it was kind of or very. And this is a 7% decrease from the year before.
Only 28% of these healthcare companies have a documented content strategy causing a big gap for the industry and impacting how effective content marketing would be.
Healthcare industries also struggle with content marketing ROI, with 23% claiming they aren’t successful and 9% not even tracking it at all.
Why Healthcare Companies Need Content Marketing
Healthcare and content marketing are aligned because people turn to the internet with their medical questions.
Google is usually people’s first stop when they have certain symptoms or have questions about a medical product or procedure.
They want understandable, authoritative answers to their problems, and since the queries are related to important health matters, they’re willing to do some research to get them.
This means there is an increase in organic search traffic that you can utilize to boost your website’s SEO performance, your authority in the industry, and, more importantly, the amount of revenue you make.
Also, even though medicine is broad, there are many niches involved that, with your content, you can compete for keyword ranking in your niche much easier than if you were in an industry like financial services or real estate, where there is less specialization.
These days, marketers are careful of any strategy that doesn’t involve some content marketing just because it exposes you to failure.
Relying solely on PR or paid media campaigns means you do not have a backup plan if the ads or media pitches don’t work as expected.
This could result in your business being overshadowed by competitors with a robust array of content to attract online searches by potential patients, healthcare professionals, and vendors.
In summary, you will want to devote some energy and budget towards your healthcare content marketing, and Talent Prospect can help you with this. They have a team of professional healthcare writers to help you execute your content strategy and achieve your goals.
Benefits of Content Marketing for Your Healthcare Company
Above 7 to 10 companies revealed content marketing to drive more leads effectively.
In the healthcare sector, these leads can come in several forms – they can be new patient applications, consumers searching for products and services, or client consultations.
Nonetheless, of the specialization your brand fills in the healthcare industry, content marketing can offer amazing benefits.
- Build authority for your business:
In the realm of healthcare, trust is fundamental to a business’s success, and if there’s one thing content marketing can do for your healthcare business, it’s to help foster trust and loyalty amongst consumers.
Content marketing not only plays a role in allowing you to acquire new clients, but it is also crucial to building loyalty and getting the word-of-mouth marketing and referrals you need.
In any way, keeping the content digestible, factual, and empathetic is the ingredient to resonate with consumers in the sector.
- Showcase your brand’s values:
Since nurturing trust is essential to growing a healthcare company, another strong advantage of content marketing is providing different content that touches an array of various topics.
The best healthcare companies have recognized this, and they’re leveraging content marketing as a tool not just to explain products and services but also to exhibit their company values and how they’re working on them regularly.
- Grow your online presence:
Content marketing is the pillar of the digital marketing strategy for many brands, and that’s awesome.
Content marketing can play a vital role in building your healthcare brand’s online presence – even do it single-handedly.
A content marketing strategy done right will be created around a long list of search keywords, enabling your content to boost organic traffic to your website.
In addition, your content strategy will focus on the topics and channels your consumer personas care about the most, enabling you to maintain your efforts to get the most results for your money, whether it is followers, website visitors, or shares.
- Funnel prospects into clients:
Growing your online presence is excellent; however, that doesn’t mean much unless you’re using that online presence to increase your company reach and convert more leads.
When you include end-of-funnel content into your strategy – meaning content that engages prospects to the point where they take action and become your client – you can also convert your online presence into a revenue stream.
Tips for Developing a Winning Healthcare Content Strategy
Drawing inspiration from big brands is a great start, so also is monitoring your direct competitors and learning their content marketing strategy.
But to make content work for your company, you have to create a goal-based, realistic, and executable strategy. Here’s how to create one in just a few steps.
- Get the Foundations Right:
The first step to developing an effective content strategy is to build a solid foundation for your future research.
This requires you to answer these three things:
- What your brand is.
- Who your audiences are.
- What your brand seeks to provide its audience.
Your schedule should include:
- Brainstorming what your company is and laying out a brand book.
- Researching your audiences and knowing at least one customer persona
- Detailing what your brand offers and how it solves your audience’s problems.
Only after you’ve gotten these fundamental things done right should you proceed to the next step. What you get from these foundational items will help fuel and inform your content strategy moving forward.
Ensure you devote time to researching them to be confident about the details you’re working on.
- Identify Your Goals:
Now that you’ve laid down the foundational elements, it’s time to build on them. The most reliable way to build a content strategy that will get you to where you want to be is reverse engineering things.
In lieu of this, you need to know where you want your content strategy to take your company. You should lay out both short-term and long-term goals.
You can begin by setting your long-term goals and dividing them into smaller milestones.
For example, suppose your long-term goal is to acquire a 20% increase in consultation requests through your company’s website. In that case, your short-term goals will be:
- Increasing your social media followers
- Reaching a 50% engagement rate on Facebook or Instagram
- Getting a 30% boost in organic traffic to your site
When identifying your goals, run them through the SMART framework to ensure they are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound.
SMART goals help you achieve your goals by enabling you to define all the metrics essential to track your progress towards them.
- Plan Your Content Types:
After defining what you want to achieve with your content strategy, the next action is to revert to your consumer personas and identify which platforms your audience is more likely to engage with your brand.
Such as Facebook, Youtube, or several other social media channels. You should also identify the type of content your audience prefers to consume if it is long-form written content (such as white papers and eBooks), long videos (online courses), short videos, or any other thing.
This will help you base your efforts on the types of content your audience is more likely to consume and share.
- Schedule Your Content:
This step requires you to create a content calendar that will allow a layout of when and where you want to publish for a whole calendar year.
If this sounds overwhelming, you can take it one month at a time or outsource it to a reliable digital marketing agency.
The amazing thing about creating an entire year’s worth of content upfront is that it motivates you to plan for seasonal content, such as end-of-year reminders to get a checkup or informational pieces on summer allergies.
Don’t bother about adding topics or ideas to your calendar. Begin by laying out the template – basically scheduling your content.
With that, you’ll clearly understand the amount of content you will post and how to align them. This will also help you move forward with creating your content in the most effective way possible.
- Start Your Keyword Research:
Now you have your content calendar before you, and it can be overwhelming. You’ve got a year’s worth of content waiting to be filled.
Luckily, a little extra research is all it will take to bring your content plan to reality and launch your content strategy.
While the thought of generating content ideas daunts some people, analytics tools would have already done much of the work for you.
Since a content strategy aims to address your audiences’ pain points, you can begin filling your content calendar by conducting keyword research.
Select the keywords your audience is searching for to discover their questions and concerns and help proffer solutions.
For instance, a healthcare brand with a niche in home wound care would likely target keywords like:
- How to clean cuts
- How to treat a burn
- Best wound cleanser
Focus your keywords entirely around your audience and the products or services you wish to offer them.
- Build Out Your Content Strategy:
As you generate topics, ensure you also add some unique ideas. Your content marketing shouldn’t target keywords only; it should also explain your offerings, brand’s history, and company culture.
You can also decide to make complementary content, which is best if you’re creating videos and articles. Remember how your audience prefers to consume content when deciding how to execute your content marketing.
Ensure your company’s values and, above all, your brand’s unique identity reflects through your content.
Great Examples of Healthcare Brands and How They Did It
Drawing out inspiration from leading healthcare brands is always a smart move. Here’s a view of some of the most successful healthcare companies and a summary of how they are making content marketing work for their brand.
- Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials:
The Senior Director of Content at Cleveland’s Clinic, Amanda Todorovich, is among the pioneers in the content marketing field, and she’s doing it in the healthcare sector.
Her team released what was initially an internal video; it went viral and is among the story behind the kickoff of the award-winning healthcare content marketing example: Health Essentials.
The website competes and wins against major publications such as WebMD with valuable and helpful content and fun explanations of vital healthcare questions.
- Mayo Clinic:
The Mayo Clinic owns a blog called Sharing that shares stories from family, staff, patients, and friends. The content is empathetic and also has great narrative properties.
It would be tough to read some of them without having a connection. These stories aren’t centered around the Mayo Clinic, they are focused on the people, and those are the stories that mean so much.
Most times, a company can attract more attention without saying what it does.
Build Your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy With Us
Are you ready to remove the guesswork out of your healthcare content marketing by working with people who have the professional experience and insight to take your brand where you want it to go? Reach out to us at Talent Prospects.
