When you’re creating content in the healthcare industry, there are unique challenges. You have to be factually and scientifically correct, but you have to explain concepts in a way that non-medical professionals are going to understand. There are also complex topics that can be challenging to break down for a non-professional environment, plus you have to deal with compliance and legality issues that aren’t an issue in other industries.
Healthcare is competitive in terms of content marketing, too, so you have to do it extremely well to set yourself apart in a crowded area.
The following are six tips to create effective healthcare content marketing.
1. Don’t Confine Yourself
When we talk about healthcare content marketing, we might think it’s all about doctors or a hospital. In reality, there are a lot of health-related topics you can create content about that are going to attract a broader audience.
You’re going to be able to generate more traffic if you think outside the box.
For example, nutrition, holistic health, supplements, and exercise are all things you can broadly write about that are also in line with the healthcare industry.
2. Get the Right Tone and Voice
The voice you use in your content is important. You need to know when the be professional and when to be more friendly. You’re going to base this on the audience you’re speaking to and the content you’re creating.
You want to make sure you’re keeping an upbeat tone, even if it’s also professional.
You don’t want people to feel negative emotions when connecting with your content. You might share some facts or statistics that are eye-opening, but to frame this in a positive way, center your content around what people can do to empower themselves and take control of their health.
3. Be Careful with Keywords
SEO in the past decade has changed a lot. It’s not about packing content with a lot of keywords and hoping to rank. Google’s algorithms have become especially sophisticated at understanding context and intent. Google has said over and over again that its primary goal as a search engine is to provide the best possible experience for people searching.
Keyword stuffing and content are written only for an algorithm that isn’t going to deliver the experience that Google is looking for.
You can use keywords and keyword research to broadly guide your content creation, but you also want to make sure that you’re writing for real people first and foremost.
Don’t think much about keywords—think about providing value for each person who engages with your content.
4. Use Video Content
Healthcare is an industry that is specially positioned for video marketing. Content marketing is about blogs, articles, and other forms of written materials, but video is also content marketing.
Healthcare works well for video content because you can add a human face to an otherwise science-driven or technical conversation.
When you use video marketing content, you have the opportunity to talk about in-depth concepts in a language your audience understands, and you’re also evoking a sense of trust with your audience and authority, both of which are key in healthcare.
Your audience can start to emotionally invest in your brand and put faces with names.
Video content can take a lot of energy to create, and it can be more expensive than producing a written piece of content, but having decent or good video content, even if it’s not perfect, is better than having none at all.
5. Understand Pain Points
No matter what particular type of content you’re creating or who it’s for, you want to understand the pain points of your audience.
Pain points and understanding those are what’s going to drive your healthcare content marketing strategy.
When you understand pain points, you can offer the information that’s going to help solve those for your audience, and that’s what’s going to give them value.
6. Measure
Finally, any content marketing strategy needs to be one that you can show your ROI for. You have to set metrics that you’re going to constantly assess, showing you where you can stay the course and where you need to make changes.
Don’t focus too much on vanity metrics like page views or click rates. Instead, you want to find ways to measure engagement because that’s a lot more relevant to measuring the value of your content. It’s harder too, but worth it.
Your healthcare content marketing strategy is constantly going to be evolving and improving, so it’s not like you have to get everything exactly perfect right now, and then you can set it and forget it.
