Healthcare content marketing focusses on developing a digital strategy to raise awareness, build trust, offer value, and convert audiences into patients. In the digital world, content is king, and in healthcare, expert content also doubles as a soothing voice, reassuring readers and motivating them to make important, life-changing decisions.
But how do you get started with healthcare content marketing? We asked our marketing experts to discuss the specifics of writing content for healthcare brands. Read on to discover the ins and outs of creating a successful healthcare content marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
What Is Healthcare Content Marketing and Why Do You Need It?
Healthcare marketing covers various tactics and strategies that healthcare organizations — hospitals, clinics, medical equipment-selling brands, and pharmaceutical companies — use to promote their services, attract patients, and build their brands. Content marketing may be an overarching approach in a marketing strategy, covering SEO, email marketing, social media management, and paid advertising efforts.
Through using different media formats, healthcare institutions can maximize the potential of local, regional, and even global web traffic based on their needs.
However, you may wonder whether health-related searches are prevalent. Data from 2022 suggests that 58.5% of US adults use the web for medical or health information, with adults between the 30 and 44-year age gap being the most populous group (47.7%).
This means that more than half of the US adult population seeks health-related content online, representing a splendid opportunity to showcase your knowledge and practice’s medical expertise to them. Some of the business benefits to regularly posting high-quality medical content include:
- Attracting new patients: Regular content distribution can help you reach new patients and inform them about your services and treatment approaches.
- Educate your readers: Strategic content marketing can raise awareness about health concerns, diseases, and preventative care. This way, patients can make educated decisions about available treatments and preventative care (for example, cancer awareness months).
- Enhanced patient engagement: By distributing content on relevant channels, you can engage with your patients and learn more about their concerns and preferences, enabling you to alter your strategies and even services to better suit their needs.
- Improved patient retention: Helpful content marketing that addresses patient concerns and needs can also lead to higher retention rates.
- Trust and credibility: High-quality, expert-reviewed content can help you build a strong reputation and establish yourself as a knowledgeable source, making patients more confident in choosing your services.
- Brand differentiation: Creative content marketing can also help you highlight your practice’s unique values, setting you apart in the saturated healthcare industry.
7 Steps for Creating a Successful Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
Getting the most out of your content marketing strategy requires you to assess and revisit several aspects of your digital presence and alter them to accommodate the new strategy. Read on to find out what we mean.
- Objectives and research
- Explore and define content marketing possibilities
- Invest in SEO
- Experiment with newsletters
- Don’t ignore social media
- Manage reviews
- Monitor and adjust
1. Objectives and Research
It’s imperative to define the objectives of your content marketing strategy. Do you want your content to establish you as a go-to resource for peers, or do you want to provide valuable information to patients? Do you want to raise awareness and drive more site conversions, i.e., appointments with your practice?
Your goals ultimately determine the type of content you will push, its tone, and often, its format. These business objectives will also help you shed more light on the possible digital marketing channels you will use.
For instance, if your main goal is raising awareness, you can leverage social media. If you want to increase your conversion rates, you can turn to SEO and email marketing. If you offer products and want to boost sales, paid advertising can be an excellent way to start. If you seek to educate, invest in video production and start a YouTube channel.
Research is also pivotal for success. Gathering information about the industry’s digital presence, target audience preferences, and content marketing trends on different channels (such as email marketing, SEO, or social media) enables you to target the right people with the right content at the right time, across the most effective channels.
Without research, you can put your content marketing efforts in danger, leaving you with wasted resources and marketing assets that fail to convert, educate, or drive brand recognition.
2. Explore and Define Content Marketing Possibilities
When you have a clear set of goals to achieve and the necessary market knowledge, it becomes easier to look for the most effective content formats that resonate with your target audience on their preferred digital marketing channels.
As discussed earlier, if your goal is patient education, investing your time and energy into creating an SEO-backed content marketing strategy and regular blogging about healthcare topics relevant to your expert field is a fantastic idea.
For instance, if you’re a pediatrician, you can write blog posts reconnected to kids’ health, from infant care through prevalent child injuries to more complex subjects, like teenage depression and dealing with hormonal changes in puberty.
Conversely, you can also educate patients and promote your services through video. YouTube's long-form nature will allow you to explain a disease’s nature and talk about prevention and treatment. Or why not use short-form videos to highlight your services, medical equipment, and practice.
3. Invest in SEO
Fueling your SEO initiatives with a purpose-driven content marketing strategy is an excellent way to climb the rankings and establish yourself as a credible source of knowledge in your industry or region.
Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. A solid SEO strategy will entail performing a thorough content audit on your website and identifying missed opportunities and best practices. SEO can also help your content marketing strategy by focusing on industry-relevant keywords and actively googled topics, ensuring you share trending articles your audience is actively searching for.
We’ve mentioned the potential of YouTube and videos. Producing and sharing high-quality, valuable videos on your website and YouTube channel is an excellent way to boost your page rankings. YouTube SEO can also enhance your visibility within the platform’s rankings and Google’s SERPs.
4. Experiment With Newsletters
Email marketing is another digital marketing avenue where you can achieve success with your content strategy. Data suggests that the average open rate of healthcare-related emails is 41.23%, which is considered mid to high range when compared to other industries. Unsubscribe rates are only 0.5%, indicating possibilities for growing and maintaining a healthy and engaged email list.
Newsletters offer a few additional benefits, including:
- Announcements and updates: Keep your list up-to-date on anything from launching a new service to organizing an upcoming event.
- Credibility and trust: Consistent campaigns with informative and useful content help you build authority.
- Content personalization: Newsletters allow you to segment your list and launch tailored campaigns to address different groups’ specific interests and needs, enhancing the impact and relevance of your emails.
- Cost-effecting marketing: Email marketing is a low-cost strategy, with an average ROI between $36 and $40 on every dollar spent.
- Preventive care promotion and reminders: You can use newsletters to remind your audience of the importance of vaccinations, screenings, and general healthy lifestyle choices.
- Gather feedback: Regular newsletters allow you to build a continuous flow of communication between your brand and your patients if you include feedback forms and react to patient preferences and opinions.
5. Don’t Ignore Social Media
Social media channels represent an excellent digital avenue to distribute content and engage with prospects and patients. 98% of healthcare marketers in the US are active on social media, and 98% of them use boosted Facebook posts to reach their target audience.
Social channels were once often written off as simple brand awareness generators. However, times have changed, and now, companies can leverage them as a fully-fledged marketing ecosystem, built for conversions, awareness, sales, community management, customer care, and everything in between.
For instance, community management can allow you to engage with your followers on a deeper level, enabling you to spark conversations between them and study their preferences, health concerns, and pain points. Running a community can also help you keep them in the loop with promotions and updates and enables you to leverage user-generated content, such as tutorials (if applicable) or reviews.
6. Manage Reviews
Managing your reviews online is another vital part of your success in content marketing. Reviews are powerful tools that can influence prospective decisions. Developing a proactive approach can enhance brand reputation and audience trust.
Monitor your online presence on Yelp, Google, Healthgrades, and other relevant channels for reviews, and respond promptly to every new update. Positive and negative reviews should both be addressed quickly by thanking patients for leaving a positive review and immediately addressing concerns and shortcomings in negative reviews to show empathy and professionalism.
Using feedback to improve patient care, services, and communications is a must. While leveraging positive reviews in your content marketing. This will build additional trust and help your SEO efforts.
Lastly, ensure that all staff members handle reviews with the same approach. This will help you strengthen your brand’s image and consistency on a broader level.
7. Monitor and Adjust
Defining your core objectives and target audience in the previous steps we covered will help identify the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Metrics and KPIs such as site traffic numbers, engagement impressions, and conversion rates can all be used to assess the effectiveness of your current strategy and make the necessary adjustments to better align your approach with your business goals.
Naturally, there are also other ways you can monitor strategy performance. Community management offers an excellent way to actively track how your followers and patients engage with your content. Email surveys can also provide valuable feedback on what might need tweaking.
Dos and Dont’s of Healthcare Content Marketing
Healthcare content marketing requires careful strategizing and market research as well as clear communication with your audience, while respecting ethical and privacy guidelines.
Here are a few best practices for creating healthcare content.
- Avoid using jargon
- Be reassuring
- Aim for expert content
- Use easy-to-digest formats
- Ensure HIPAA compliance
1. Avoid Using Jargon
Patients can come from different walks of life and varying medical knowledge. Convey complex medical processes and conditions in clear but formal language. Use shorter and to-the-point sentences, while avoiding expert terminology if you can.
2. Be Reassuring
Dialing in your tone of voice is also imperative. Diseases and conditions are heavy topics, especially if your readers or their close relatives are dealing with them. Try to write and speak in a reassuring and calming tone. Be subjective about the topic but always offer a glimmer of hope when talking about diagnoses, prevention, and treatment.
3. Aim for Expert Content
Every piece of content that goes live on your channels should be reviewed by a medical expert. Even if you’re working with established content marketers, you should read and review their work to ensure the information is relevant, accurate, and up to date.
If you have any concerns regarding credibility, consider using a few tactics to highlight that your content has been viewed and edited by experts. For example, WebMD always underscores that its informational content has been reviewed and approved by medical experts, listing the medical research sources they’ve used to write the article.
This practice helps you build trust with your audience and also boosts the E-E-A-T signals your site sends to Google, which can potentially help you rank higher in the search results pages.
4. Use Easy-To-Digest Formats
Ensure that written content is structured and broken down into smaller subheadings with paragraphs only a few lines long. Avoid overly complicated sentences, highlight important chunks of text, and provide additional information with the help of internal linking.
If you upload videos to your YouTube channel, use the description area to present the video’s topic and share some information about the points you will cover. Embedding timestamps can also help with video scannability, offering quick answers for viewers who don’t have the time to watch the footage in its entirety.
5. Ensure HIPAA Compliance
Whenever you’re about to disclose sensitive patient data, ensure that your content is HIPAA-compliant. This is especially important when sharing patient testimonial videos, discussing real-life treatment cases and condition specifics, and using patient reviews on your site and email marketing campaigns.
Healthcare Content Marketing Takeaways
Implementing a well-thought-out healthcare content marketing strategy and establishing yourself as an authoritative source on health topics takes time. However, it’s worth the effort as content is still king in the digital landscape, regardless of industry and niche.
Coupled with other digital strategies, the expert content you publish and share can help educate your target audiences and patients and put your practice on the virtual map, solidifying your position as a trusted leader in the realm of healthcare.
On that note, don’t forget that you can always reach out to digital marketing experts who specialize in the healthcare industry, helping you achieve stellar results even faster.
Healthcare Content Marketing FAQs
1. Will healthcare content marketing help with my SEO?
Yes. Especially if you write high-quality content with the right targeted keywords, chances are, search engines will have an easier job indexing and ranking your website. Also, engaging content keeps your visitors occupied on your site for longer, which is another plus for search engines.
2. Should I write the content myself?
You can write medical content yourself, especially if you are a well-versed medical expert in the subject. Your medical teams can also opt for writing articles and blog posts if they wish to. However, to ensure your content is up to the highest SEO standards, the best approach would be hiring a digital agency with dedicated medical content writers who know how to create content that will satisfy your site’s SEO needs and address the concerns of your readers.
3. Are blogs enough for a good content marketing strategy?
In most cases, SEO-friendly blog content can be enough to market your brand through your content effectively. However, if you want to maximize the potential of your brand and truly highlight your expertise, you should also leverage other forms of content, such as videos or podcasts. Incorporate interactive forms, quizzes, and calculators to boost visitor engagement, and cover as many channels with different forms of content as you can.
