Healthcare Content Marketing

Written by Matt Berringer

December 20, 2021

One notable challenge of healthcare content marketing lies in promoting products and services while keeping the campaigns fresh and interactive. The information must grab customers’ attention and engage them throughout. Using keywords and phrases in your content will increase search engine results that highlight your products and services. This guide will review tactics for making your healthcare content marketing strategy more engaging and informative, while boosting your overall click-through rates.

Successful healthcare marketers understand the value of strategic thinking. Here, it’s critical to build awareness of your products and services. You generate leads that turn into sales when using keywords and links to content such as product pages, blog posts and social media profiles. Using these in combination will drive inbound traffic to your content. When running pay-per-click ads, remember that unique content will elevate you higher in search results.

How to Create Engaging Content

Content marketing and healthcare can complement each other in such a complex, highly regulated industry. Healthcare digital marketing is the best way to spread the word about your products and services. Exciting and unique content is crucial to creating successful ad campaigns that people want to share on various platforms. SEO is a vital tactic to propel your campaign above everyone else’s on Google and other search engines. By aligning your content and business goals, you can achieve the success you are looking for.

Engaging content doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a strategic, goal-oriented approach. When creating your marketing strategy, start by mapping out the steps you and your team must take to achieve your goal. It will help you plan all the details of your content design and delivery. It will also let you visualize the path to converting viewers into customers, which is your ultimate objective.

Breaking your content marketing into sub-sections lets you focus on the details of each portion of your content marketing strategy. Determine what metrics you’ll use to measure your results, so you’ll understand what elements of your campaign you need to adjust as time goes on. Defining specific goals at the beginning of your marketing strategy roadmap will help you make wiser decisions as you continue.

The Value of Knowing Your Audience

Once you have defined your campaign’s purpose and goals, you need to understand your target audience. In doing so, you’ll avoid blindly setting up an unsuccessful content marketing campaign. Data is a vital component of any content marketing strategy. For example, you can survey current customers to get a picture of their demographic makeup, and fine-tune your ads from there.

Next, you must create your audience personas, or detailed descriptions of your ideal customer. Envision each persona as if it was your neighbor, friend or family member. You might even want to write their biographies and add photos. For example, one campaign might target married, college-educated moms with children ages 6 to 10 and a median household income of $100,000 or more per year. Remember, when getting to know your audience, there’s no such thing as having too much data. The more granular you can make your campaign, the more it will speak to your audience’s needs and concerns.

With your data collected and your audience personas defined, you can start connecting with prospective buyers in an engaging way that increases views and signups and effectively turns them into new customers. Rely on the audience personas you’ve created to test various content strategies in your campaign.

Ensuring People Can Find Your Campaign

In addition to healthcare content writing to fit your target audience’s demographics, you’ll also want to make sure people see your ads. With social media being such an indispensable tool for most people, it’s crucial to find out where your audience spends the most time. Use that information to decide what engaging content you will post on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. To steer viewers to your campaign, use lead-generating keywords that appear in search engine results. Link your ads to informative landing pages that reinforce your messaging and include an unmistakable call to action.

Using blogs and other forms of landing pages that provide information about your products or services is a crucial step in creating a revolving door of content and information for your viewers. Consider adding mid-roll ads to your audience’s streaming videos on platforms YouTube and Facebook. These provide the viewer with quick, engaging information about your product or service and steer them toward your landing page.

Your content marketing campaign can also use pre-roll ads and other forms of native display ads, depending on what resonates most with your target audience. Make sure to keep all your information, links and goals updated as things progress and change within your business. Keep an eye on your campaign analytics —‌ if they show one aspect of your content marketing is more successful than others, consider investing more in those ads. Meanwhile, if part of your campaign isn’t getting the expected results, work on fine-tuning it until it starts converting customers.

How to Create Engaging Healthcare Content

Any content marketing strategy must be primarily goal-driven. Since for-profit companies exist to achieve a healthy return on investment, having the data to drive your content is crucial, especially in markets like healthcare. Many inexperienced healthcare content marketers make the mistake of focusing their campaigns on their brand, instead of the people who will use their product.

You want your content to be the first thing people see when they’re searching for health-related information online. That’s why SEO strategies should be a crucial focus of your marketing strategy. Optimizing your content for search engines will drive traffic to your landing pages, resulting in more views and click-throughs to your website. Don’t forget to add engaging calls to action that tell people where to go next as they navigate your website.

SEO strategies revolve around adding relevant keywords and links to your site that provide users with a clear-cut direction to answers, information or signup pages. Easy-to-navigate content will keep viewers connected longer and offer more opportunities for them to convert into customers. When websites or blogs are vague or confusing, readers will bounce away and may up finding your competitors.

More Advice for Healthcare Content Creation That Drives Conversions

Providing content that puts users first, instead of your brand, will make them feel welcome and help convert them from aimless browsing to thinking specifically of you next time they need a healthcare provider. Ensure your content is authoritative and well-researched. When your audience knows they are getting information from a trustworthy source, they will start to trust your brand. With such a broad range of specializations and services in the healthcare industry, focusing on your unique value proposition is vital to your marketing’s success.

A successful content marketing strategy also involves researching what SEO keywords will drive search results to your landing pages. For instance, you may want to write a series of blog posts about highly searched topics or insert specific keywords in your health-related content. Your goal is to provide informative content that encourages people to explore your site and even recommend it to others as a resource.

Below are a few of the most commonly searched medical subjects:

• Diet
• Symptoms
• Stress
• Stroke
• Tips
• Recipes
• Pain

Examples of Creative Healthcare Content

With the ever-shifting landscape of technology and healthcare, implementing fresh ideas in your content marketing will help you stand out from the pack. Knowing the trends and thinking above and beyond other companies will increase your chances of creating engaging content for your audience. Doing a medical SEO audit will help you find out out-of-date or inaccurate information, so you can always keep your content the most engaging and findable on the internet.

Building backlinks, or external sites that link back to your content, are an essential factor for credibility in search engines’ eyes. It’s a best practice to keep a list of other websites that link to your site, so you can ensure those links don’t break or result in 404 errors over time. Maintaining your site and backlinks will ensure quality content and build trust. You can find many free tools to help you track your SEO results and see how your pages rank in the search results.

There are also abundant ways to provide valuable content to your viewers. Some platforms allow you to customize online brochures and pages to help enhance your content quality and keep track of essential aspects of your content marketing. Tools like Google Search Console are free and let you keep track of page rank, impressions, click-through rates and other critical data to help you improve your content’s quality.

Use Social Media to Complement Your Content Creation

Social media platforms such as Instagram are invaluable to digital marketers. Instagram’s visual nature lets you show off your business to viewers without them having to leave the comfort of their homes. They can browse your posts and learn who you are before deciding to entrust you with their health and well-being. Having quality content on your Instagram feed and in Instagram Stories will connect you to viewers and convert them to customers.

Before-and-after photos of services you provide, customer testimonials, guided office tours or previews of events you host are all ideal for social media content marketing. Use hashtags strategically to help your content reach more people than usual and create word of mouth about your brand.

If you take the time to set up social media profiles on various platforms, be sure to monitor any interactions with your followers and respond to comments, as appropriate. Social media posts are also an excellent opportunity to introduce various calls of action that encourage visitors to click through to your landing pages.

Remember to Follow Healthcare Marketing Guidelines

While finding and creating content for your marketing campaign can be tricky at times, you will want to follow all HIPAA laws to protect your patients’ privacy. Before posting before-and-after content or telling a story of how a specific treatment helped a patient find pain relief, you must first get written permission.

If you intend to craft a content marketing campaign to share patient success stories and compel more people to explore your healthcare practice, HIPAA can complicate this somewhat. However, some exceptions to this rule may let you publish content without direct permission from the patient.

• Describing a health-related product or service included in your benefits plan: For example, an email or social media post can explain a new offering that you cover, such as a diagnostic screening or a facility that has recently opened to the public.
• Patient-specific communications: For instance, a health provider doesn’t need permission to send patients reminders of upcoming appointments or prescription refills.
• Communication that occurs as part of a patient’s case management: For example, suggesting a recommendation for an alternate provider or treatment is not marketing, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Have the Right Content Strategy for Healthcare

As you now understand, defining the “why” behind your content strategy is an integral part of any marketing campaign. Having a defined goal in mind from the beginning enhances your strategy details and plans as you build on top of the information you gather. Vital components of any content strategy solution are collecting user data, creating audience personas to test content and applying trends and specific platforms to your marketing campaign.

Need Help Creating Engaging Content?

Nxtbook Media can help with all your healthcare content strategy needs. Start by booking a demo with us today and find out how our healthcare content marketing services fit your needs! Our partnership development team is here to help you create the best possible content for your healthcare digital marketing campaign and make informed decisions. Whether you need brochures, reports, magazines or other content-related services, we are the solution for you.