Businesses that use content marketing see six times more conversions than those that don’t. So, it’s not surprising that 95% of healthcare organizations use or plan to use content marketing to reach their target consumers.
To make your healthcare brand stand out from the competition, you should find ways to connect with your patients, peers, consumers, and other healthcare organizations. Effective healthcare content marketers leverage valuable and relevant multimedia content and share them easily across online platforms.
This article explains how to approach your target audience with tips for a comprehensive healthcare content marketing strategy. Get ready to boost recognition and increase inbound leads, patient flow, and consumer numbers for your healthcare brand!
Types of Audiences in Healthcare Content Marketing
You must first understand your target audience to create a successful marketing strategy. The more you know about them, the more effective your campaigns will be.
In healthcare, you must consider the differences between “Business to Consumer (B2C)” and “Business to Business (B2B)” audiences and tailor content to suit their needs.
| Business to Consumers (B2C) | Business to Business (B2B) | |
|---|---|---|
| Targets | Patients, clients, or healthcare consumers. | Healthcare companies, providers, and organizations. |
| Tone | Simple, relaxed language, conversational tone. | Complex language, formal tone. |
| Depth | Simple concepts, and detailed explanations. | May include medical jargon for experts. |
| Format | Short blogs, bite-sized chunks that are easy to consume. | Long-form content, case studies, blogs, research-driven how-to guides, and webinars. |
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5 Tips for a Comprehensive Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
Now we know the different audiences we can target with healthcare content marketing. Let’s look for ways to implement key strategies for stellar results!
1. Focus on Subject Matter Expertise
There is a large amount of medical information available online, and it can be difficult for patients and consumers to distinguish between fact and fiction! People go online for all their health questions – from diseases and treatments to the best doctors or clinics in their area. It’s no wonder that Google has 70,000 health-related searches every minute!
Medical content is unique from other types of content online because any misinformation can greatly impact the consumer’s health and income. It’s often known as YMYL content – Your Money or Your Life.
Unfortunately, 1 in 10 news and information websites publish healthcare misinformation or hoaxes, according to an analysis of over 4,000 websites published by STAT News.
To protect consumer health, Google released an update in 2018, aptly called the MEDIC Update, which ensured that high-quality, verified information ranked well in their search results. This means that content released from creators who demonstrated the EAT factors: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, was featured by the algorithm, ensuring that searchers could rely on the information provided.
For example, large medical platforms like Healthline, WebMD, or the blogs run by the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are well known for featuring healthcare experts as writers and reviewers for their content.
Subject matter experts dominate healthcare. There are several ways for them to share their experiences and opinions through online mediums. From making YouTube videos and TikToks, being interviewed in a webinar or podcast to writing blogs and social media posts, content delivered by doctors or nurses makes a huge impact on healthcare consumers.
The content you create with subject matter experts has to showcase their knowledge and vast expertise. Patients are looking for answers. If you draw them in with the right information, you will be able to see leads converting into paying patients and customers.
Bonus point:
Doctors and healthcare providers love jargon! When using them as key opinion leaders and subject matter experts in your content, ensure that you alter your writing style and tone to match your target audience. For example, creating information-heavy, data-rich content may position you as an expert in B2B audiences, while light, simple infographics are easily digestible for B2C consumers.
2. Connect with Your Audience Using Stories
Healthcare content can be filled with complicated jargon, and while it may be informative, it can also intimidate your readers. If overwhelmed, your readers are more likely to search for another website with the answers they are looking for.
Using patient stories and experiences is a great way to capture consumer attention. Studies show that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts or figures. Our brain activity increases five times when we listen to a story. Consumer research reveals that 92% of consumers prefer when ads are presented like stories.
For example, if you are writing a post on botox injections for your medspa blog, consider approaching it from a patient’s point of view by using these simple steps for effective storytelling:
- Discuss their struggles and emphasize how those problems affect their lifestyle. Maybe they are self-conscious about their wrinkles and need to spend hours covering up their age spots.
- Introduce your product or service as a solution and showcase its value proposition and advantages over the competition. Do you have trained professionals at your medspa who can deliver the service with expert care? Is your process so fast that they can finish it during their lunch break?
- Conclude your story with a successful patient testimonial highlighting how your offer helped them resolve their pain points. There’s nothing like a strong before-and-after visual to demonstrate the efficacy of your service!
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Would you rather read a dry, text-book-like account of botox injections or an engaging story where you can identify with the struggles and solutions described?
The storytelling approach works well for B2B marketing as well. Instead of patient stories, you can give a sneak peek into the company’s culture to attract future employees with posts about team events or training sessions. For example, a health tech company providing hospital information software can create case studies to demonstrate how their solution improved operations for their clients.
When it’s time to pay for a service, patients and providers want to choose a healthcare company that understands their point of view.
Bonus point:
Ensure that you have the patient’s consent when you share their stories, as you may violate HIPAA laws that protect patient privacy and confidentiality if you don’t.
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3. Communicate with Your Audience, Not at Them!
Social media channels make it easy to interact with your followers while targeting your B2C audience. It’s not surprising that 26% of US hospitals are active on social media. Data shows that 41% of consumers decide which doctors or hospitals to choose based on the information they get from social media.
Think about creative ways to use your content to engage with your audience. With the engagement stickers on Instagram stories, you can easily set up opinion polls, quizzes, and ask-me-anything sessions with your audience. This is a great way to collect consumer-specific data that can give you meaningful insight into their pain points. Plus, you get tons of inspiration about the topics you can write about in your content strategy.
For B2B marketing initiatives that target industry experts, email campaigns are also an effective way to deliver content. You can add surveys, polls, or quizzes to your content strategy to maintain two-way communication with your audience. This method establishes trust between the company and your consumers so that when they need your product or service, they think of your brand as the perfect solution!
Bonus point:
Ensure that you moderate the responses you get through comments or direct messaging on social media. Patients might approach you directly for medical advice, so a moderator should ensure that they tell your audience to call 911 in emergencies or visit their healthcare provider for more help. Add a disclaimer to clarify that the information you provide is strictly for education. It is not meant to substitute professional medical advice or doctor consultations.
4. Show the Human Side of Medicine
The events of the last few years have completely changed how doctors and patients communicate. With the rise of telemedicine and digital health, patient interactions are not just limited to a 15-minute consultation at the doctor’s office.
Healthcare organizations realized that a great way to connect with customers and patients is through human interactions online. People are twice as likely to remain loyal to a particular hospital when they feel connected to the doctors and nurses. To retain their patients, healthcare providers would have to meet them where they are most often found – on social media!
We are now seeing physicians transition from traditional, formal, and often inaccessible personas to a more relaxed and informal image. They are ready to show their human side by revealing sneak peeks into their personal lives and showing up authentically online.
Instagram and Tik Tok catapulted many physicians into instant internet fame, with their videos or social media posts going viral, giving birth to the med influencer!
Bonus point:
You can work with med influencers to create visual or written content on their channels, showcasing products or services provided by your healthcare organization. Data shows that 61% of people are likely to trust the information provided by a doctor online. You can leverage this by featuring prominent experts in your healthcare content marketing strategy for great results!
5. Reuse, ReFresh, And Repurpose Your Content
Content recycling is an often under-utilized marketing strategy. But it is an effective way to ensure that you make the most of the content you create.
Every business needs a blog, and healthcare businesses are no exception. Companies with blogs are 13 times more likely to see a positive return on investment (ROI).
Writing high-quality blogs, case studies, and how-to guides, or producing videos can be both time and labor-intensive.
To ensure that you always have an endless supply of content ideas, train yourself to look for creative ways to repurpose and reuse your existing content over multiple channels.
For example: If you have a YouTube interview with a subject matter expert on the latest advances in the treatment of Type 2 Diabetes, you can:
- Condense the interview into a blog covering the same topic.
- Create a podcast episode from the interview.
- Use bullet points from the blogs to create carousel posts on social media.
- Create a simplified infographic that’s easy to share.
- Draft and send an email newsletter, sharing the key takeaways from the interview with your subscribers.
- Take snippets from the video interview and convert them into short-form video formats like Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts.
- Extract quotes from the interview to use as thought leadership content.
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Conclusion
Healthcare content marketing is growing more popular recently, as industry leaders realize its potential to reach their target audiences on a large scale. A deep understanding of patient and consumer pain points is essential to curating topics that resonate well with your audience.
Getting creative with different content formats is a great way to show the human side of medicine. Consumers resonate well with real-life patient stories and testimonials, making your brand more approachable. To ensure that you always have ideas for content, don’t hesitate to recycle older content pieces with a fresh perspective. With these tips on healthcare content marketing, you are poised for success!
