Top Healthcare Content Marketing Strategies for Providers
Healthcare content marketing is an essential part of any great marketing strategy. We have seen the likes of Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic become synonymous with answering medical questions for patients, and as a result, become brand powerhouses in the industry.
Over the last few years, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes have become a major problem in the US. Coupled with the rising costs of healthcare, more and more Americans are starting to think about their health.
In today’s digital age, if someone is beginning to realize the importance of health and wellness, what do you think they do first?
They go online to look for answers. That is why healthcare content marketing is so powerful.
According to research by Pew, approximately 8 out of 10 Americans use search engines as their primary source of health-related information. More often than not, though, they don’t find information that will actually help them.
This is where healthcare content ideas and strategy comes in. By developing superior content marketing strategies, you’ll be able to provide helpful information to your audience and drive traffic to your website—boosting your revenue in the process.
Don’t know where to start? Here are proven healthcare content marketing strategies that will help you get a headstart.
What is Healthcare Content Marketing?
Healthcare content marketing is the strategy of developing various forms of content to help educate and reach new patients. This healthcare content can take many forms such as blog posts, videos, quizzes, infographics, podcasts, and more. Healthcare content marketing has many benefits including brand awareness, thought leadership, patient education, and SEO.
Patients are more hungry than ever to engage and consume content from medical practices in many different forms.
If effectively used, healthcare content marketing can be one of the most effective healthcare marketing strategies you can leverage as a healthcare organization of any size or specialty.
The Best Healthcare Content Marketing Tips
Now that we have set the stage as to why healthcare content strategy are so important let’s dive into some of the actual tips you should be using to get the most out of your content.
1. Invest in Video Content to Connect with Patients
Video is a powerful healthcare content strategy that a provider can leverage to establish thought leadership and connect with existing and new patients.
Youtube is the second largest search engine so not only is it a great tool to educate patients but another opportunity to increase SEO rankings.
Check out these Youtube SEO tips for uploading your first Youtube video…
The big things to keep in mind when creating videos are to keep them short and sweet.
Typically under 5 minutes but generally more in the 2-3 minute range.
Number 2 is to make sure you are answer questions patients care about.
To get started, the easiest thing to do it to write down FAQs that patients ask you through the month.
Do that and I bet you can come up with 6 months worth of video content in a matter of minutes.
2. Write high-quality blog posts
Blogging is the cornerstone of health content marketing. No healthcare content strategy would be complete without a blog, and your facility is no exception. In order to reach your intended audience, you should have a blog page on your website.
However, blogging is more than just posting articles on your website on a regular basis for the sake of publicity.
All healthcare providers do that, so it’s nothing new. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to offer your audience something else.
Instead of generating new content just so you can promote your brand of healthcare, use your blog page as an opportunity to both educate and help your audience.
Here are 7 of the most important on-page SEO optimization strategies to keep in mind when creating blog posts
A healthy, active blog should make up a solid portion of your organic search traffic and should support the conditions and treatments pages that you have on your website.
Just check out this screenshot of a hyperbaric practice. You will notice some of their top organic traffic pages are all blog posts.
Say, for instance, you are marketing for an orthopedic practice and wanting to rank highly for knee replacement searches.
Not only should you have a well constructed “Knee Replacement” treatment page but you should write supportive blog posts on the topic as well and link it back to your treatment page.
For instance, “How long does it take to recover from a knee replacement?”
3. Start a Podcast on Your Specialty
Podcasts are really in right now.
They are not only extremely convenient to listen to but they are an amazing opportunity to turn one type of content into many forms.
We strongly encourage providers and practices looking to cement themselves as an expert in their specialty to start a podcast on that topic.
Before starting a medical podcast, first, decide who your target audience is.
Is it the providers? Patients?
That will determine what topics, guests, mediums of distribution and more.
Also, make sure if you are starting a podcast to commit to at least 10 episodes as a good rule of thumb.
Pro Tip: Leverage a tool like an audiovisual builder such as Wavve to turn clips of your episodes into engaging visuals for social media.
If you want a more in-depth guide to starting a podcast as a provider check out this blog post. We did a blog post and a 1-hour podcast episode with an expert on the topic.
Need some inspiration? Here is a list we made of some of the best medical podcasts around to listen to.
4. Leverage guest blogging to reach new patients
Guest blogging has many benefits.
Not only does it allow you to leverage someone else’s audience for brand exposure and thought leadership, but it gives you major medical SEO benefits via the backlinks gained in the post.
Medical practices may be looking to increase organic traffic to one of their main focus treatment or condition pages, which is where guest blogging can come into play.
As a result of an article on a site with a high volume of traffic, our clients can receive a large amount of exposure to their website as experts in the particular treatment or condition they are writing about.
We know the result of this would be a major boost for the site in organic search and particularly the specific treatment or condition page in organic search.
Here are some great email outreach templates to get you started.
5. Create visual infographics for your healthcare content marketing
Regardless of the quality of your blog posts, your audience will soon get bored of reading plain old text again and again. Change it up once in a while by creating infographics.
In terms of what your infographics are going to be about, you have no shortage of options. You can do an infographic on healthcare marketing trends to watch out for in 2019 or new medical technologies that will benefit patients around the world.
You can even create infographics based on data you already have. To communicate the quality of healthcare that you provide, you can do an infographic that shows data such as the number of patients you’ve treated in a certain period of time, the number of successful operations performed in your facility, or how many doctors or nurses have tenured at your facility.
The possibilities to create infographics that your audience will find helpful and enjoy reading are literally endless. If you need some inspiration, take a look at this infographic.
Creating an infographic takes time and effort.
You’ll have to collect all the necessary data, create meaningful content around that data, and work with your design team (whether in-house or outsourced) in order to produce an informative and well-designed infographic.
Despite the challenge, the time and effort you spend will definitely be worth it. If you did your infographic right, you’ll drive more traffic to your website, increase awareness for your brand, and more easily engage with your audience.
6. Promote your healthcare content strategy via email
Here’s a scenario: you’ve just released a wide array of brand new content. So how do you get people to read them and drive more traffic to your site?
You can maximize the reach of your content by promoting it with email marketing.
Send newsletters to your subscribers and let them know that you’ve just published new content. A good number of your subscribers most likely don’t visit your website and check your blog every single day, so informing them of new content is always a good idea.
You can also segment your lists to determine which of your subscribers will be interested in a specific blog post. Sending relevant content to your subscribers increases the likelihood of them opening the email and consuming your content.
To get rid of the hassle of creating the emails you’ll need to send out, take advantage of email templates.
The great thing about email templates is that they’re not just for creating emails to promote your content. You can use them to create other types of emails such as event announcements or company updates.
Wrap up Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
Revamp your healthcare content strategy by keeping these simple yet effective strategies in mind. You will gain the trust of not just your existing patients, but also other people who might be looking for a new healthcare provider.
When you create meaningful content, you’ll encourage your audience to keep coming back to your website and therefore get more traffic.
