A 2022 Harris Poll on healthcare information found that 80% of those surveyed believed the ability to do their own health and medical research positively impacted their ability to manage their health, up from 76% in 2019. Healthcare content is increasingly vital to the public, but gaining your audience’s trust is imperative to a successful marketing strategy.
When you become the go-to source for your audience, they get the answers they need, and you get new and loyal patients. It’s a win-win. However, you have to put in the effort to reach that audience and answer their biggest healthcare questions and issues.
Healthcare content marketing provides an opportunity to build trust, establish thought leadership, develop relationships with your audience, and increase brand awareness. Roll up your sleeves and let’s dig into the must-know details of content marketing in the healthcare space.
What Exactly Is Healthcare Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing approach that uses various types of content to distribute information to a specific audience. The goal is to consistently create reliable, valuable, and relevant content to attract an audience, move them down the marketing funnel, and drive conversions.
In the healthcare industry, content is an invaluable method for answering consumers’ health and wellness questions, addressing their concerns, and building trust in the institution that provides it. As a healthcare marketer, you also have another layer to incorporate into your content considerations: adherence to unique industry regulations and guidelines.
Regulations
When creating content, your team will always need to assess the impact of compliance on the topics you choose. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is the most significant regulation and requires anyone within the broad healthcare industry to protect patients’ privacy and sensitive medical information.
Healthcare content marketing falls under this umbrella. Your team can craft valuable content without jeopardizing patients’ rights. While videos, photos, and testimonials are great formats, you need written consent before featuring patients in any of that content.
Google Guidelines
In addition to legal guidelines, healthcare marketers need to become very familiar with Google guidelines. You can’t ignore the almighty search engine giant. Sorry.
Google’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) guidelines impact every business. However, the company gives these qualities even more weight for “Your Money or Your Life” industries, and that means you over there, marketing for a healthcare brand.
If you choose to go the route of paid content, you also need to adhere to the company’s ad guidelines for the healthcare industry. These rules cover what is and isn’t allowed, including limitations based on target audience location and Google certification.
Why Is Content Marketing Essential for the Healthcare Industry?
Every day, hundreds of millions of people turn to Google seeking health-related information. Healthcare content marketing helps you meet consumers where they’re at.
Providing consumers with accurate and reliable answers empowers them to take their health into their own hands when appropriate. It also positions you as an industry leader they can turn to when they need more than information.
In a market with almost 3 million health-related businesses in the U.S. alone, rising above the noise of so much competition is a must. The right approach to content marketing helps you stand out from the crowd.
Source: The Harris Poll
What Does Content Marketing for Healthcare Entail?
Healthcare content marketing isn’t something you should approach haphazardly. Doing the legwork ahead of time and establishing a formalized strategy sets you up for success.
Know Your Audience
Understand who is at the receiving end of your content, including their:
- Knowledge base
- Interests
- Issues and pain points
- Demographic characteristics
- Content channel preferences
- Content format preferences
We recommend segmenting your audience and creating audience personas to help you identify and target specific groups. If you use Divvy’s platform, we help you plan and schedule content for each audience using a content calendar with filtering capabilities.
Research Your Competitors
In addition to determining who your audience is and researching their health information needs, you also need to identify and understand your competitors. The content you create should be better and more helpful than theirs.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make is neglecting to create a content marketing strategy. Only 40% of B2B and 37% of B2C marketers have a documented strategy.
A formal content strategy provides a framework for content production, keeps your team on the same page, and makes content planning and measurement easier. It also ensures you craft content that aligns with your brand’s goals.
Your healthcare content marketing strategy should include your brand and content goals as well as editorial guidelines for:
- Your audience
- Brand attributes
- Content channels (blog, social media, podcast, white paper, ebook, etc.)
- Content formats
- SEO and keywords
- Content formatting
A healthcare content marketing strategy should also spell out your publishing cadence for each audience and channel.
Source: Digitalis
Determine and Schedule Topics
With a strategy in place, you’ll have the information you need to determine content topics and put them on your content calendar. Scheduling your topics gives your team a deadline to aim for.
However, it’s easy to overlook those deadlines until it’s too late to construct well-written and meaningful content. Divvy’s platform lets you set up automated workflows to keep your team on track throughout the content production process.
Create and Publish Informative, Valuable Content
Now it’s time to get down to crafting amazing content that will help your audience stay alive and well. Ensure your writers understand your market, are well versed in your healthcare domain, and know how to produce high-quality and engaging content.
Implementing some form of editing and quality control is a good idea for healthcare content. Programs such as Writer and Grammarly provide AI-generated suggestions for writers and editors.
Measure and Adjust
You’ll need to analyze content performance to determine whether it’s hitting the mark. Our analytics tools simplify the process, aggregating data from all your channels and allowing you to create nifty reports to send to your team and the C-suite. These reports also inform your strategy, showing you what you need to tweak to win over your audience.
What’s the Best Platform for Healthcare Content Marketing?
DivvyHQ is the best platform for healthcare content marketing. We provide the tools you need to produce awesome content. We also take security seriously, a must for healthcare professionals. If you’re ready to embark on your content marketing journey, request a demo to see how we can help you start strong right out of the gate.
