How To Start an Effective Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re starting a new content marketing campaign or you’re new to creating content for your clinic or practice’s website, healthcare content marketing can help. Its goal is to engage your audience with good quality, accurate content – and promote your services.

Here are the seven steps to effective content marketing for healthcare sites:

1. Understand your site performance
2. Define your goals
3. Document your patients’ journey
4. Look up patients’ questions
5. Use content management tools
6. Write your content
7. Promote your content

This article details each step to help you create better and more engaging content.

Let’s go!

How Healthcare Content Marketing Promotes Your Business?

Content marketing means creating online content such as web site copy, blogs, and videos to promote businesses, organizations, and practices. It is one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing in disseminating accurate information in the healthcare industry.

But there’s more to content marketing than just blog posts and videos. It's about helping people, patients, or clients access your content online and become informed. Even if you have the most exciting content, you need marketing strategies to help people find it. Content marketing is crucial to providing updated health information through the strategies below.

     1. Create Brand Awareness Through Websites and Social Media

More experts are relying on this strategy to create brand awareness. A survey of content marketing experts revealed that 88% of businesses use content to create brand awareness. The second most frequent purpose of content was to educate the audience.

For a hospital or medical service provider, marketing promotes your unique brand. Your website highlights healthcare services, specialty departments, staff, and facilities, promoting excellence in healthcare and wellness, and with those come greater brand awareness through the hospital’s social media content.

     2. Show Your Expertise in the Healthcare Industry

The internet has made it easy for people to search for answers to their health concerns and questions using search engines. Healthcare providers, meanwhile, leverage effective content marketing strategies to convey accurate information about the healthcare industry.

Content marketing helps engage your target market with meaningful content such as research papers, statistics, news updates, and case studies. These types of content help show your expertise in your field and thus promote your authority and knowledge of your industry.

     3. Educate Patients Using Informative Content

Creating informative content is one way to promote your healthcare business or practice. Impress your target audience with high-quality and well-written content in your field of specialization. They are more likely to share your posts, videos, and other forms of content and return for more.

However, be mindful of Google's E-E-A-T content guidelines. Google places high regard on content that shows your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. That means such content also has better chances of ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs).

7 Steps To Designing a Winning Content Marketing Strategy

A successful content marketing strategy starts with carefully evaluating your content's current state. Once you clearly understand your content marketing needs, you may begin creating your strategy. Here are seven critical steps to consider.

     1. Understand Your Website's Performance

How far is your content engaging your audience? Are your videos getting more views? Are your posts from your social media pages acquiring any shares?

Whether your marketing goal is to generate more leads or to increase sales, a careful understanding of various site metrics can help you gauge your content's performance. Monitor these metrics to assess accurately your content's overall performance:

• Site traffic
• On-site time or time spent on your content
• Brand awareness or reputation
• Number of returning visitors
• Shares of social media content
• Percentage of sales or conversions

Aside from improving your content, you may need to adjust technical aspects of your site, such as site loading speeds and content formatting, to enhance indexing. Use Google Search Console to review your site's technical and on-page metrics.

     2. Define Your Goals

Start defining your goals after checking and understanding your site's performance. Ask yourself, who do I want to reach or engage? What do I want my patients or customers to do when they visit my site?

Building your marketing campaign goals around your patients or clients is essential, because they will be the ones consuming your content. Set up SMART marketing goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

• Specific – focus your goals on one content metric at a time.
• Measurable – you must be able to measure metrics for this content.
• Attainable – your goal must be achievable given the timeframe and available resources.
• Relevant – your marketing goal must coincide with your company's wants and needs.
• Timely – have a deadline by which you’ll achieve that content metric.

     3. Document Your Patients’ Journeys

Understand and document your patients’ health journeys. Your patients pass through different stages of their journeys to health and wellness. The journey starts when they search for your business or your service and ends when they book a consultation or purchase your products.

Consider creating patient personas to guide your patients properly. Gather the data you need to understand your patients and use it to create an accurate picture of your patient's needs, health, and buying behaviors.

     4. Look Up Patients’ Questions

You'll likely come up with questions from your clients as you begin to understand them. Assess these questions using the Google Search Console or other keyword research tools. Use these tools and check if these questions generate good traffic from Google.

Gather as many relevant, high-traffic questions asked by your patients as possible. These questions will help you better understand their needs and what type of content you need to write.

     5. Write Your Content

Now that you have a list of relevant questions, it's time to create your content. You aim to answer these questions accurately and expertly. Your content must inspire and engage your patients. Here are a few healthcare content writing tips:

• Consider your audience’s point of view
• Create content that matches your audience’s reading and comprehension levels
• Add relevant keywords
• Create concise and straightforward content
• Don’t forget to proofread your content
• Go for original content
• Explore different types of content, such as infographics, videos, podcasts, etc.

     6. Use Content Management Tools

Content management systems (CMS) software or tools help content creators publish engaging and creative content. These tools can also help publish, edit, and store digital content, which makes collaboration easy on content creation projects.

There are many content management tools available. But make sure that you’re using a CMS with:

• A content editor with visual and code-based editing functions
• Complete functionality, such as adding, formatting, and publishing content
• Easy access to third-party plugins, themes, etc.
• Additional marketing features such as social media marketing and email marketing
• Flexibility to work with your specific desktop and mobile site design

     7. Promote Your Content

Your content is now live. You may now post it on your social media platforms. Promoting your content on social media can also bring brand recognition, engagement, leads, and thought leadership. These tips can improve content promotion through social media:

• Encourage audience participation
• Consider live video events to discuss your content
• Use question and answer content promotion to enhance engagement
• Share relevant content and make sure to credit the original owners
• Include your contact details like phone number, email address, and website info

Summing Up

Content marketing for healthcare can help businesses, healthcare providers, and medical practitioners boost their authority, increase traffic, and promote their expertise. Well-developed content creates brand awareness and educates patients to help them make better decisions regarding their health.

Follow our steps to create an effective content marketing strategy. You can guarantee success in your healthcare marketing campaigns with these techniques.

Do you want to find out how the best content can help you get more out of your marketing strategies? Contact Digital Authority Partners and let's get started.