5 Guidelines and 5 Ideas for Excellent Healthcare Content Marketing

Healthcare has evolved dramatically in our information age, when anything and everything is accessible via smartphone. Competition for healthcare content is fierce, and good marketing makes a world of difference.

In this guide, we’ll go over some useful tips for your healthcare content marketing:

• Identify your niche.
• Understand your audience’s needs.
• Emphasize the human side of medicine.
• Make your content user-friendly.
• Create an effective social media strategy.

At the end of this guide, we give you some ideas for effective healthcare content marketing. How many of these have you tried?

Let's begin!

5 Guidelines for Excellent Healthcare Content Marketing

The internet is full of dubious websites that may have questionable information. The demand for medical and healthcare articles is huge, but good quality resources are few. Healthcare content marketing helps doctors and organizations carve out their niches and build their reputations.

In a 2022 poll of US healthcare workers, content development and marketing ranked third in the priorities for their companies' marketing budgets. Content marketing provides a great opportunity to thrive in the healthcare industry.

Below are some guidelines to help you leverage healthcare content marketing effectively.

     1. Identify Your Niche

Similar to how doctors specialize in different diseases, you need a well-defined specialization when developing and promoting content. Being a jack-of-all-trades may sound desirable, but balancing too many activities at once is difficult. Creating a specialization allows you to locate and work with specialists to deliver high-quality content.

A niche helps you narrow down content keywords. If your niche is cancer treatment, include it in your list of target keyphrases.

Here are other ways finding your niche can help you.

• Decrease the number of things you have to write about and direct your work;
• Become a trusted source by consistently providing niche-related material;
• Knowing what to expect from you and your content helps readers and clients trust you.

Identifying your brand's niche helps whether you handle marketing yourself or work with a healthcare SEO agency.

     2. Understand Your Audience’s Needs

Knowing your target audience is not enough. You must understand their behavior. Here are some questions you ought to ask yourself.

• Who is my target audience?
• What are their pain points?
• What online pages do they often visit?
• How can I make my content accessible to them?

The answers to these questions help you align your content with the types your target audience consumes.

Here are ways you can answer these questions.

• Conduct market research. Gather data through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and other online research methods.
• Review existing data. Gather statistics or research created by other firms.
• Create personas. Understand your target audience based on their profiles, which include details like age, gender, occupation, and more. Observe how these details affect their decision-making.

Knowing your audience's wants helps you narrow your healthcare content marketing ideas for your focus medical practice.

Take, for example, healthcare companies that leverage telehealth. They provide a solution to many healthcare barriers and meet critical day-to-day needs even remotely. Patients can arrange and consult with doctors by video call with just a smartphone and an internet connection. This method reduces patient expenditures and hazards while maintaining care quality.

     3. Emphasize the Human Side of Medicine

Your audience comprises people who need reassurance and human relationships. In the healthcare industry, it's extremely important to locate professionals to work with.

Here are ways you can emphasize the human side of medicine on your pages.

• Use images. Adding photographs of people, especially doctors and medical personnel at work, makes information more inviting.
• Add videos. One fun and fast way to share information is through videos. This media content is easy to consume.
• Create profiles. Emphasize doctors' and specialists' knowledge in their profiles. Use video introductions so potential patients can see them before making an appointment.
• Highlight client feedback and testimonials. Feedback tools allow clients to voice problems or appreciate exceptional service. At the same time, they assist new visitors in choosing doctors or services.

Using human elements is only one of the many healthcare content marketing strategies for doctors.

     4. Make Your Content User-Friendly

It's natural to imagine that a medical website should be textbook-heavy. However, medical jargon would be daunting and uninviting to website visitors. To support your essential material, use user-friendly elements.

Keep the following in mind when creating your healthcare content:

• Easy-to-find content lowers readers’ efforts and annoyance. The more searching people have to do, the more they tend to switch sources. You could lose customers if your material is hard to find or comprehend.
• User-friendly content makes something boring easier to consume. Make text-heavy pages livelier and more readable. Add visuals like charts, tables, or infographics to make your content interesting.

     5. Create an Effective Social Media Strategy

Next, increase your audience via social media.

The social media marketing usage rate in the US alone is already nearly 100%. It makes sense to leverage it, but that doesn’t mean it is simple to do so.

Social media isn't as straightforward as posting on your timeline or using hashtags. A well-planned social media strategy is like any other form of marketing. It involves many elements.

Each social media platform has a core audience and functions that make it better for some content types than others. Instagram, for instance, is a millennial-friendly photo-sharing app. It’s not great for text-heavy posts.

Each platform has strengths and drawbacks, and there are numerous points to consider if you want to increase your social media rating. If doing social media strategies would take your time away from your patients, consider getting help from a medical SEO agency.

5 Ideas for Healthcare Content Marketing

Finding marketing ideas that work for you takes a lot of trial and error. Here are some tried-and-tested ideas to improve your healthcare content marketing strategy.

1. Publish reviews and testimonials. Finding the right doctor takes time. It's not enough to direct or inform readers about doctors and their specializations. Reviews and testimonials are valuable marketing tools for doctors and hospitals. More importantly, these tools help patients choose a doctor or hospital.
2. Advocacy and awareness Such initiatives convey facts and battle myths in healthcare. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, for instance, raised awareness about ALS. Developing a niche-based advocacy or awareness campaign helps you promote content and practice while fighting medical misconceptions.
3. Start a social media campaign. If you've used Twitter, you probably understand hashtag-powered social movements. Launching a social media campaign is difficult. A good hashtag isn't enough. Like real-world phrases, people need to see a distinctive image or gimmick for you to make a lasting impression. Consider easy recall when you do this.
4. Offer promotions and discounts. Offer deals and discounts to boost traffic. People may require medical care they can't afford, and you can use promos and discounts to  incentivize treatment. Your client gets a valuable service while you connect with them.
5. Create fun games. Leverage interactive content like quizzes and puzzles to engage readers. These quizzes and puzzles help patients test their knowledge or learn about certain topics.

Summing Up

Building a successful healthcare website may seem impossible at first, but with the right tools and support, your website will be up and drawing traffic in no time. Contact us today and work with our SEO experts!