Healthcare Content Marketing: All You Need to Know

A content marketing strategy is used to attract an audience, engage with it, and encourage it to keep coming back for more. This kind of content marketing is commonplace for businesses in the healthcare industry today. With a content marketing plan, your business will focus on creating blogs, articles, videos, infographics, and other kinds of content that serve your audience. With the right content, your audience can be entertained, get more information about your products, and see why they want to work with you.

Content marketing is about more than creating awareness of your healthcare brand. It can also go deeper, educating them on your services and why it’s so important they work with, buy from, or otherwise interact with you as healthcare providers.

To get the most out of healthcare marketing, healthcare marketers need to have a strong content strategy. Here are some of the healthcare marketing tips that can help.

Understanding Your Key Audience Segments

To get started in content marketing in the healthcare industry, you need to understand your audience. Identifying your target audience gives you a better idea of the kind of content they want to see, making it easier to tailor your content appropriately.

Identifying Target Demographics

With your audience, it’s important to identify the target demographics for your business. Your office’s marketers might target an older audience, such as retirees, or you might be open to reaching patients of all ages. Whoever it is you want to reach, you will want to narrow down your audience with:

Patient Personas

Patient personas define your target patients. For example, a patient persona could be:

• Jill, 47. Jill has a newly diagnosed illness and needs a rheumatology appointment. She is proactive and wants to be involved in her care. She needs more healthcare information.
• Jack, 25. Jack has been living with Type 1 diabetes for several years and is interested in new technology and open clinical trials. However, he wants to know more about HIPAA and his privacy rights.

Age, Gender, Health Concerns

Along with patient personas, you should consider the age, gender, and health concerns of your target audience. For instance, a brand that sells oxygen might want to focus on those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), while a brand that sells weight-loss products may aim its marketing at patients who are overweight.

Age and gender matter, too, particularly with conditions that affect one gender more often than another. As an example, a brand that sells hormone replacement therapy treatments may more heavily market to women around the age of menopause (45 to 55).

Patient Needs and Preferences

Another consideration in your content marketing strategy should be looking into what patients need and prefer from the healthcare information they receive. Content marketers can make a greater impact by focusing on the content people really want (or need) to see.

Common Health Issues and Information Needs

Think about the services the office provides to patients and the health issues patients deal with on a regular basis. For example, if your brand offers cosmetic services, you might provide content about wrinkles, the discoloration of skin over time, or details about the techniques or treatments used.

Preferred Content Formats (Blogs, Videos, Infographics)

Finally, you must think about the way patients want to receive content. Content marketing isn’t simply creating a few blog posts and calling it a day. Patients may learn best through infographics, videos, blogs, or other types of content, and your brand can make a better impression by providing content across a variety of mediums.

Developing a Content Strategy for Healthcare

You can see why identifying your target audience is vital. Now, here are some ways to make a content marketing strategy that works.

Setting Specific Goals

To get started with your content strategy, you must set clear goals. Decide if you want to raise awareness about your brand, generate leads, educate patients, or do something else entirely. Then, use SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound), which are designed to help you get the most out of data to help your business thrive.

Patient Education, Brand Awareness, Lead Generation

Your brand may have one or more goals you want to reach with your content. Within the healthcare industry, one of the best things you can do is to build brand awareness through patient education. Talk to your audience about diseases, how you treat them, and the strategies you can use to prevent them from developing, for example. By providing this service, you’ll improve brand awareness and encourage lead generation.

Content Planning and Calendar

Keeping up with your content is easier with content planning and a content calendar. As a part of your content strategy, you should develop the following:

An Editorial Calendar for Consistent Posting

Posting regularly makes it more likely that audience members will continue to return to your blog, social media, or other resource. On your editorial calendar, decide how often you’ll post content and stick to it. If you decide to post a video and blog once a week, schedule them in advance to stay ahead as you build out your content.

Seasonal and Health Awareness Events

Don’t forget to develop content around seasonal or health awareness events. Whether it’s a national month for mental health or autism awareness, you’ll want to create content to bring attention to it if it applies to your audience.

Content Types and Formats

Content doesn’t come in only a single form. You should vary your content to ensure your audience members get the answers they’re looking for and understand what your brand has to offer. Healthcare providers may want to consider creating:

Blog Posts, Videos, Podcasts, Infographics

Blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics can all be excellent tools for marketing. Blog posts, short- or long-form content, can be read at any time and even help with on-page SEO on a website. Adding infographics to them can help audience members visualize the content, too.

On the other hand, podcasts and videos are sometimes better if you want to explain or talk through content verbally. And, with video, you can use visual aids to show audience members what you want them to see.

Case Studies, Patient Testimonials, FAQs

Case studies are ideal for brands that want to provide more in-depth explanations of how others have benefited from their treatments or services. Patient testimonials give first-hand feedback about working with healthcare providers, and FAQs answer frequently asked questions to give audience members quick answers to common questions.

Creating Valuable and Relevant Content for Healthcare Customers

Once you’re ready to create content, remember that the content has to be of good quality. Good quality content will impress your audience, encouraging each person to continue investing their time into reading and interacting with your healthcare marketing content.

What is good quality content?

Quality content is reliable, useful, relevant, and accurate. Any content you create should be researched and verified. Focus on providing content of value to your target audience.

What is the importance of quality content?

Especially in the case of healthcare organizations, quality content is important because it has the potential to help or hurt people. Good quality content helps build your brand up as one that can be trusted, whereas content that isn’t accurate could lead to confusion and hurt the audience’s opinion of your brand.

Quality content is also important because it can improve your SEO rankings, generate leads, and even increase conversion rates, all so you can continue to improve brand awareness and grow your business.

Address Your Customers’ Needs

When you create content, focus on your customers’ needs. As healthcare providers, you provide necessary services. Tell patients how your services help them solve a problem or take care of a need in their lives.

Understanding Search Intent

The reason for a query is called search intent. Search intent can be roughly divided into four reasons for searching: for information (informational), to find a particular brand or business (navigational), to make a purchase (transactional), or to research in order to make a purchase (commercial). Your brand’s focus is to satisfy search intent by understanding what your audience wants.

Perform Audience Research

To gain a better understanding of your audience, you can research it. Collect information about your audience from your own company data as well as external resources. For example, you could send out surveys to ask past customers about the quality of the service they received.

Focus on ‘Information Gain’

When you create content, focus on how much additional information you can provide to the user. If they already know the basics about a disease, for example, what more can you tell them to give them an even better understanding? Provide that extra information to boost their knowledge and build brand authority.

Be an Expert on the Subject You’re Tackling

Finally, be an expert. Use subject matter experts (SMEs) to add value to your content. Low-quality content types won’t have SMEs on board, meaning the health information likely isn’t verified. By using an SME, you deepen the quality of your content, build trust with new patients, and better align with patients’ goals for gaining new information.

5 Content Marketing Ideas For Healthcare

To get started in content marketing, it can help to see some content marketing examples and how to use them in the medical field. As you plan your content, remember to use plain language when discussing medical information if your audience isn’t other healthcare professionals.

Write Helpful Blog Posts

One easy and straightforward content type is a blog post. A blog post can provide medical information. You can also use blog posts to inform website visitors about your services or to take a deeper look into conditions they may be dealing with where you can offer help.

Patient Stories and Reviews

Patient stories offer another content option. If your patients are willing to share their experiences, writing a blog post about them or creating content to discuss their situation could help generate interest.

Newsletters With Infographics

Sending out newsletters is a great way to stay connected with your email subscribers. Newsletters with infographics give them insight and education in their inbox. Consider using a subject matter expert as a part of a monthly interview, for example, to create interesting content for your audience.

Podcast and Webinars With Experts

As a part of your content creation process, consider creating podcasts and webinars with subject matter experts. You can use your blogs and other long-form content as a basis for scripts, making it simpler to distill the information in new formats.

Videos

Finally, consider using video to build credibility. You can put subject matter experts or medical providers in videos to talk about who they are or explore topics with new patients in your target audience.

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