What Is Content Marketing for Healthcare Companies
Healthcare content marketing means using pieces of content, like social media posts, eBooks, videos, blog articles, patient reviews and other enjoyable or informative media, to spread the word about your company. This strategy could be applied toward any number of goals: you could launch content marketing for medical devices you’re trying to sell, or to persuade B2B healthcare partners to check out your medical records software. You could also use content marketing to target healthcare consumers in order to promote the hospital or clinic you work at. Healthcare content marketing has as many uses as you can think of, and it’s an important component of a balanced marketing strategy for your healthcare business.
Why Healthcare Companies Need Content Marketing
Content marketing and healthcare go together well because people often turn to the internet with medical questions. When someone is having certain symptoms or has questions about a medical procedure or product, Google is usually their first stop. They want clear, authoritative answers to their queries, and because the queries have to do with important matters of health, they’re willing to do some digging to get them. That means there is an abundance of organic search traffic that you can harness to improve your website’s SEO performance, your authority in the field, and ultimately, the amount of business you do. Also, even though medicine is a huge branch of knowledge, there is so much specialization involved that, with your content, you can likely compete for keyword ranking in your specialty much easier than if you were in a line of work like real estate or financial services, where there is less compartmentalization.
Moreover, marketers these days are leery of any strategy that doesn’t include some content marketing, simply because it leaves you more exposed to failure. Relying on paid media campaigns or PR alone means there’s no backup plan if the ads or media pitches don’t go well, and it could also result in your business being outcompeted by others that have a robust array of content to catch online searches by patients, vendors and healthcare professionals. In short, you’ll want to put some energy toward healthcare content marketing.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for Healthcare
Creating a healthcare content marketing strategy will involve a few straightforward steps. They are:
- State Your Goals and Identify Your Target Audience
- Identify Key Metrics
- Develop Content
- Measure Results
Let’s go over these more thoroughly.
State Your Goals and Identify Your Target Audience
What goal are you trying to accomplish with your healthcare content marketing? Be specific. Are you trying to reach a certain number of leads or conversions per month? Raise your website’s SEO standing? Establish your thought leadership on a certain medical development or problem? Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve going in will sharpen your thinking when it’s time to devise content and put it out.
Next, identify the people you’re speaking to. A good healthcare content strategy will keep the audience front and center, and to do that you need to understand their needs and motivations. What searches does your audience tend to make? What obstacles do they run into in their journey through the healthcare space? Get clear about how things look from their perspective before moving forward with healthcare content marketing.
Identify Key Metrics
Then, decide which metrics to keep track of as your marketing campaign progresses. These will be tied to the objectives you’ve identified. If your goals have to do with your website performance, for example, you can choose to track things like your page views, time on page, scroll depth and keyword ranking. If your goals are more sales-oriented, you could keep an eye on leads, conversions and other metrics related to that side of the equation. There are tons of metrics to choose from, but finding a few that correspond to your business goals is a good place to start. For more tips on finding the right metrics to work with, read this article.
Develop Content
The next part of your healthcare content strategy is the fun one: developing the content! But don’t just publish pieces at random — you want to build on the parts of your strategy you’ve already put in place. Find the intersection between your goals and target audience, and then create the content you think would be most compelling in that context. A few pointers: as we’ve said before, video is big, and getting bigger. Videos tend to have higher engagement than other content, so it’s worth your while to say something with a video if you can. Also, in healthcare content marketing, it’s especially important to watch for accuracy, reputable cross-sourcing and HIPAA compliance. Your content may guide people’s health decisions and will attract scrutiny by regulatory bodies, so you want to make sure everything you put out is well-researched and supported, and stays within the law.
Measure Results
Finally, using the metrics you’ve chosen, keep track of how your healthcare content marketing campaign is doing and make adjustments as needed. Content marketing and healthcare are a good match, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get everything right on the first try. You want to strike a balance here between being too reactive, i.e., making changes in response to every little metrics change without waiting for things to unfold fully, and being too stubborn in your approach, i.e., not making changes even when it’s clear you should.
Develop Your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy With Us
Want to take the guesswork out of your healthcare content strategy, by partnering with people who have the experience and insight to take your business where you want it to go? We’re always ready to chat: wearecsg.com/contact.
