9-Step Guide for a Great Healthcare Content Marketing Campaign

The best content engages your audience and promotes trust and your expertise. It also guides your patients to make sound decisions about their health. But it takes an efficient healthcare content marketing campaign to do this.

This guide will talk about:

1. The importance of content marketing
2. The vital steps to a great healthcare content marketing campaign

Are you ready to follow these steps and overhaul your content marketing strategy?

Let’s go!!

Why Is Content Marketing Important to Healthcare?

Content marketing is important in building brand awareness, industry authority, and high rankings for your healthcare business. The pandemic has changed how people search for health information online. Thus, providers and practitioners must invest in content marketing to provide patients with the most useful, updated, and quality content.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, causing stress, anxiety, and panic. The internet became one of our sources of information about COVID-19, from symptoms to vaccines, from tests to possible treatments.

With the best content, practitioners connected with their patients and provided information and remote care. Even after the pandemic, it’s clear that content is crucial to healthcare providers and practitioners. Below are some of its benefits.

• Get engagement on various platforms. Content marketing involves developing materials that work for different channels. In healthcare, it's about creating informative content to reach your target clients on different platforms. Leverage press releases, influencers, podcasts, etc., to engage your audience better.
• Rank your website higher on SERPs. Healthcare marketing promotes your current search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Creating updated, high-quality, helpful, and engaging healthcare content helps Google understand your site and rank it higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Build industry authority. Establishing your healthcare practice or organization as an industry leader is possible through professional content. This quality content further promotes customer trust and loyalty to your brand.
• Supports brand awareness. The right content marketing campaign will promote your brand so your audience can identify with your services and products. People will correlate your brand with good qualities: safety, fast and friendly service, effectiveness, etc., all of which contribute to better engagement and brand trust.

9 Steps To Creating the Best Healthcare Content Marketing Campaign

A 2021 survey showed that, of businesses surveyed, 97% used content marketing in their campaigns. Most marketers know that content marketing is indispensable in your campaign strategies. Use your content for marketing your healthcare services with the nine steps below.

     1. Develop Your Campaign Goal

Every content marketing campaign starts by identifying your goal. Creating SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — goals will help you connect with your audience better.

A healthcare group dedicated to promoting smoking cessation needs more traffic to its website. The goal of increasing site traffic is too general. A better and more specific goal is "to increase site traffic by 50% within the final quarter of the year."

Do you have the resources and capabilities to achieve your goal? The SMART strategy sets your business for success, lets you push your efforts further, and guides you to achieve your goals.

     2. Describe Your Customers

Define your patients, clients, or customers and how you will differentiate them. Using buyer personas is the best way to create well-targeted content marketing campaigns. A buyer persona examines the uniqueness of each customer.

For example, cosmetic dentists segment their audience according to interests, services needed, pain points, etc. Through segmentation, they can create specific content for every customer segment, increasing the chances of conversion.

     3. Develop Your Content Messaging

Considering the right content messaging according to your client's journey further improves engagement. This is about identifying the message you must convey for every sales funnel stage. It’s the content your audience will prefer to see. Assessing your current messaging will help identify gaps affecting engagement or conversion.

     4. Use Content Channels That Your Audience Prefers

Where does your audience typically go to consume your content? The most popular channels for healthcare include online sites, social media, publications, billboards, and in-person. Understand which channel works best to efficiently use your efforts and budget.

     5. Set the Pace of Your Campaigns

You can look at your campaign's pace by breaking down your objectives, channels, and audience. Take note of milestones and the type of content to support these events. For instance, web content for a product launch such as a new anti-smoking effort differs from that of a more seasonal event such as the flu vaccine being available.

     6. Develop a Content Process

With your goals set, the audience defined and segmented, and the content channel identified, it's time to develop a content creation process. Help your content creation team get to know their roles and take ownership of the project. Creating a content brief aligns all the deliverables and makes the approval process more accessible.

     7. Create a Content Calendar

An editorial calendar helps you maintain the pace of your content marketing campaigns. A well-organized calendar will keep you on budget and within your deadlines. Update your calendar quarterly or according to your content process. Have enough time to meet with your team to brainstorm new content topics.

There are many formats to use. A spreadsheet may not be enough, so explore using a project management tool for easy visualization and collaboration with your team.

     8. Publish Your Content

When creating healthcare content, quality should be your primary concern. High-quality healthcare content is consistent and may be repurposed to fit different platforms. You can repurpose it as a blog post or an infographic. Don’t just focus on webpage content. Publish quality content on the social media platform your audience uses.

     9. Manage and Monitor Your Content

Once your content is live, you must manage and monitor its effectiveness. Take note of the cost, content utilization, and overall performance.

Take inventory of the content that you have published over time. Highlight the cost of producing each piece of content and use this as a benchmark. Focus more on useful metrics like engagement than vanity metrics like page views, click rates, and social shares.

Summing Up

Follow our step-by-step guide to create excellent healthcare content marketing campaigns and ensure success for every strategy. With a good campaign strategy, you can reach and educate more patients and help them make better, more practical health choices for themselves and their families.

Contact Digital Authority Partners today, and let us help you create a better marketing campaign.