Healthcare marketing is one of our favorite niches at Webtage. We get to tell beautiful stories of miracles and the resilience of the human spirit. But this is the easy part of our jobs.  

What we find challenging, and thus, more exciting, is building a solid foundation for our client’s content marketing. It begins with laying out a well-thought-out content strategy.

Good healthcare content can help:

1. Generate trust in your expertise as a trusted healthcare provider, thereby helping with your reputation management
2. Drive search traffic by helping your quality content rank higher on search engines
3. Help your patients answer questions regarding health conditions.

Why would any healthcare practice not want to include content in its marketing toolkit? Even though quality content should be a part of any healthcare practice, a recent survey by SEMRush on State of Content Marketing 2022, found that only 26% of healthcare organizations use content marketing very successfully.

 We’ll be exploring healthcare content marketing in this article, the challenges, opportunities, and some actionable tips you can implement for your healthcare practice. 

Where Are Healthcare Marketers Going Wrong And What Can They Do About It?  

What truly matters is delivering value for your customers through your content. Unfortunately, that’s missing from healthcare marketing. Most of the focus is inward, and content marketing is merely another tool to hard sell their practice and its offerings. We also commonly see click-bait, low-quality SEO articles with keyword stuffing to drive search traffic. 

Another challenge is that healthcare marketing is a different beast from the other kinds of marketing because of HIPAA laws and high (read life-and-death) stakes. 

At Webtage, we believe that challenges are hidden gems of opportunity. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, present fresh ideas, and carve new pathways that are unique for healthcare marketing. 

7 Tips For Your Healthcare Practice To Ace at High-Quality Content Marketing 

Here’s how you can use high-quality content marketing to partake in your patients’ conversations and make a difference in their lives. 

1. Step Into Your Customers’ Shoes 

 The internet is a gold mine for healthcare marketers. Your patients are looking at it as a reliable source for answers on their health and solutions. It’s their first go-to source which can lead them to stumble upon your website. 

Relevant and high-quality content is what will pull them to your website, browse for answers to their challenges, and reach out to you for solutions. 

 Your content must be empathetic, and that can happen if you think and feel like your patients. What your patient is looking for is a trusted partner that can solve their ailing issues. 

Your message should have your target audience and their needs at the heart of all conversations. 

 You must know your audience before creating material for them. Ask yourself: 

What is your patient experience like when they come to your website and when they visit your competitors’ sites? 

A strong content marketing program identifies and defines its target audience. Some tools that can help you are focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and qualitative and quantitative research. You should now have a strategic foundation to construct your content marketing program thanks to that analysis. 

 A firm grasp of your patient’s needs and experiences is key to building a winning content marketing plan and relevant engagement material.  

2. Plan Well And In Advance

Content marketing must be strategic, like any other marketing element. 

A documented content strategy, in our opinion, is essential to any healthcare marketing strategy. Not more content, exactly. Intelligent content is the key. It’s a tedious procedure, but essential to your success. A strategy is now essential, not just nice to have. 

We engage your consumers and drive business growth with our differentiated content marketing approach which requires us to plan, create, distribute, measure, and optimize all content around the target audience.

At Webtage, we employ a Google Sheets content calendar that enables us to collaborate with our healthcare clients to manage their monthly content editorial plan. In order to make writing content less stressful and more focused, our editorial calendar concentrates on specific key areas and goals. Our top content marketing goals are: 

• Consumer engagement 
• Brand building
• Lead generation and conversion 
• Patient loyalty
• Physician engagement 

Our editorial calendar is set up in two-month intervals. This enables us to prepare ahead of time and delegate tasks to our content creators.

3. Content Creation 

Once you have the content strategy and editorial calendar ready, decide how you will ensure quality content that meets professional compliance requirements and is medically vetted, so readers get valuable, up-to-date information. 

Quality, up-to-date and accurate healthcare content is also important for search engine visibility. In 2018 Google unveiled its “medic update” which had strong implications for businesses in the YMYL (short for ‘Your Money or Your Life’) or in other words websites that provide any information that affects people’s health, wellness, or money. Put simply, it means that Google does not want to recommend “uneducated advice, opinions, or potentially fraudulent websites.” Google wants to be certain that the sites that they recommend display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. algorithms place. 

That’s the reason that we follow the E.A.T. principle when creating and marketing content for our healthcare clients.

At Webtage, our content team comprises medical writers with experience in creating content that meets professional healthcare writing standards. This means some of the  specialized skills they bring to the table include:

1. Ability to present information that is scientifically accurate
2. Deep understanding of medical terms & conditions
3. Ability to provide a logical structure, including logical presentation of ideas
4. Ability to simplify complex medical information into simple, easily digestible pieces, without losing factual accuracy
5. Ability to search reliable references from non-reliable sources
6. Be able to combine factual information with compelling writing to appeal to readers and search engines.
7. A clear understanding of statistical research, data presentation, as well as ethical and legal issues

4. Content Delivery & Mobile Searches

It’s crucial that we present the content in an engaging way. Those who optimize for mobile platforms and present snackable content in text and video formats will reap the benefits of content marketing. Therefore, your content marketing must not only show relevance to the end user but also deliver it in easily digestible chunks while on the go.

• Content formats – Consider altering your company’s messaging delivery. By alternating written stories, videos, infographics, memes, blog posts, and podcasts, you can reach people with varied information consumption habits. Make the communication personal and relatable to engage people.
• Responsive content – More than 2.25 billion people access the Internet through their mobile devices, and 1 billion of those admit they only use their phones to access the Web. Make sure your content is designed to be easily accessible on smart or mobile devices.

5. Pay Attention To Online Reputation Management 

Healthcare marketers must convince prospective patients that they are reliable considering the abundance of options for customers to get health information, both reliable and dubious.

Reputation management means more than generating and managing reviews (although that’s an important part of the puzzle). 

So how should you go about building a transparent & authentic brand while driving action & advocacy that goes beyond managing your reviews on Yelp and other public review sites? Remember, the approach is to push up positive content higher and higher in search engine results and bury the negative content. We offer several services to build a solid reputation for you.

Creating original content, such as thought articles, white papers, videos, Q&A, and other long-form content pieces and publishing them on your website and high-quality third-party sites helps to display your thought leadership high on search engines, thus boosting your reputation. Similarly, social media marketing, when done well, can not only increase your brand reach, but it also allows you to build your reputation through local community marketing.

6. Collaborate With Influencers 

Even if a doctor may be the one writing prescriptions and advising treatments, if a patient is well-informed, she is more likely to follow the doctor’s advice or even inquire about it in the first place.

Online influencers are now a part of these doctor-patient discussions because of the expansion of digital healthcare research, and they have a significant impact on the possibilities that patients inquire about.

Think of the quality above number when choosing your influencers to work with in order to maximize your impact. Instead of only looking for influencers with the greatest following, when conducting audience research, look for specialty publications and websites that cater to your core audience and consider methods to collaborate with them.

Your own work will benefit from paying greater attention to these trends and how they change over time. 

7. Content Analytics and Measurement

In order to maximize the efficacy of the program, you need to examine your content marketing endeavor to determine what is effective and what is not. You’ll discover the tactical move that most appeals to your target market through trial and error. 

Key performance metrics we use to understand content marketing success include:

1. Acceptance of content pieces on high-quality and relevant third-party sites.
2. Ability to produce medically compliant content pieces that attract traffic consistently.
3. Reader engagement with the content. This could include social shares, likes, and comments on owned social channels.
4. Website traffic to your content pieces, whether we publish them on your website or third-party sites.
5. Reach of your content, calculated as impression share

 It should be clear that developing a successful content marketing strategy takes time. It needs nurturing and requires patience. But in the end, your firm might benefit from all of your efforts, strategic focus, tracking data, and meticulousness. 

Final Thoughts 

The key to enhancing your reputation as an expert in your field and drawing new patients to your health system’s website and online channels is timely, pertinent, and consistent quality information.

Marketers in any industry may position themselves for success by creating great content for audiences that are becoming more knowledgeable, prioritizing mobile, and spending money on influencer marketing. This is even more important for healthcare organizations as the content you create can have serious implications on lives if not created and vetted extremely carefully

Google has clearly stated that “medical advice needs to be written by people with high medical E-A-T to be considered high quality.”

Creating regular, excellent healthcare material is not easy—but it doesn’t have to be an insurmountable endeavor. We hope you find our advice on developing a master editorial content calendar and skills to create high-quality, up-to-date, and medically sourced content helpful. 

Finally, you might want to consider asking for support from a professional healthcare digital marketing agency in Chicago to help handle this challenging task with ease and comfort.