10 Secrets of Healthcare Content Marketing that Will Help You in the LONG Run!
Every other day, a new innovation or trend enters the healthcare world—making headlines in newspapers, and on the ‘Gram! Would an average social-media bee understand every bit of that (think of those dry facts and health jargons before answering)?
It’s hard to answer, isn’t it?
The healthcare industry is brimming with stories of human resilience, symptoms of X, causes of Y, and so on. To top it, there is a huge crowd looking to understand them all, to gain knowledge—and help themselves today or in the future. With healthcare content marketing, you can help such individuals read into the health concerns and concepts with breeze.
Healthcare content marketing can be your pass to delivering health-related information—from latest news to guidance on different concerns—in a seamless, digestible way to readers. Keep reading to know how.
Practices to Adopt for Effective Healthcare Content Marketing
Whether you are a health-tech startup, wellness brand, or a hospital—read below the basic yet most important ways to make your healthcare content marketing work:
Know Your Audience Well
When planning healthcare content strategy, always imagine your target audience as humans who are waiting to bring their unique concerns, needs, and—above all—huge expectations.
Who are you addressing? Doctors? Patients? Caregivers?
You need to define the group(s) of people you are speaking to through your healthcare content. Each cluster will require you to adopt a unique approach. While patients expect medical and emotional support, doctors might want you to share in-depth health insights with them.
Here’s how to approach this practice:
- Create audience personas: Elaborate on what are the pain points of your target group, various queries they have, and content preferences.
- Define their language: It isn’t wise to speak to a patient in medical lingo! There’s a strong likelihood they won’t understand a bit of that. Thus, use simple, relatable words.
- Address problems: No one—no one—reads healthcare content for fun. Come up with a list of concerns/topics that your audience wants to know about. You can conduct surveys, poll or analyse feedback to dig into this.
Tailoring healthcare content marketing strategies as per target groups ensures it resonates; it helps make sure your efforts don’t go into vain. After all, a patient who is simply looking for recovery methods for a recent surgery won’t find any use of white papers discussing surgical techniques. Right?
Prioritise Stories Over Statistics
Numbers are crucial for boosting credibility in content marketing. But guess what? Most people forget statistics faster than what they had for dinner at last week’s party!
It’s actually the stories that can stick. Humans are wired for this approach, depending upon how you narrate it. A well-told health story of a patient or behind-the-scenes snippets at a medical achievement can help the audience resonate more than any digitised photo ever could.
Here are some tips for you to go about this tactic:
- Show up behind-the-scenes: Introduce your team working behind the scenes. From doctors to lab technicians to nurses—everyone has got a word to share.
- Put in testimonials: Nothing beats an honest positive feedback by a patient; you can let satisfied patients share their experience in their own words.
Remember, healthcare is one of those niches in marketing where emotional connections drive engagement. Stories give the brand a humanised flavour, and makes complex medical topics understandable and relatable.
Keep It Bite-Sized
Has your audience got time—or patience—for a 5,000-word thesis on arthritis? Let us answer, NO.
A layman wants quick, digestible answers to their queries; something that doesn’t feel like a task. Focusing on that, you should keep healthcare content crisp and to-the-point.
Grab these tips:
- Create macro content: Plan and create healthcare content for social media posts, short videos, and more.
- Let visuals talk, too: Incorporate infographics, videos, and charts to convey complex information quickly.
- Break it down: Use bullet points, heads, and subheads, plus short paragraphs to make content readable.
Content marketing strategies mean nothing unless users engage with them—and to ensure they do, you must first make the content feel like a quick snack. Long-winded explanations are not only overwhelming, they can lead to high bounce rates too.
Build Trust
Trust isn’t just ‘sugar and spice, and everything nice’ in healthcare—it is everything. It is the lifeblood of your brand. Imagine a large number of people putting their trust and well-being in your hands. This makes your credibility non-negotiable. Therefore, your content should be so on-dot with the information, that your user not only engages but finds value that helps them with their well-being in the long run.
Here’s what you can do:
- Be transparent: Address common concerns openly.
- Showcase experience and expertise: Feature different sorts of content from doctors, specialists, and certified experts.
- Cite reliable sources: Link to peer-reviewed studies and authoritative sites.
Trust is critical in healthcare content marketing as it builds customer loyalty. If patients trust your brand with healthcare content, they’ll trust your services.
Worship SEO
We are talking about healthcare content marketing, of course search engine optimization (SEO) would be here. The deal is pretty much clear: when someone feels a weird twinge in the body or notices a rash surfacing, the first thing they are going to do is GOOGLE UP. Nearly 7% of Google searches are health-related. Where does that bring you? To make sure your content shows up in their searches.
Here’s how you can nail healthcare SEO practices:
- Answer common questions: Patients ask for symptoms and remedies; you can address these topics directly.
- Do keyword research: You can use a range of best SEO tools to find the best performing keywords as per target demographics.
- Optimise all your content: Use keywords naturally in blogs, website pages, etc.
SEO is the holy word for content marketers in the digital world. It’s the way of getting your content the attention of your target audience. Ranking high on search engines boosts credibility and helps drive organic traffic to your website.
Make It Visually Attractive
The long, long paragraphs of texts can be intimidating to many, especially when it comes to topics like healthcare. But, you can flip the cards simply by making the content visually appealing. A visual content isn’t only pretty, it is also the powerhouse for creating an understanding among customers while keeping them engaged. According to marketing statistics, visuals content drives 94% more views than text-only content. Visual content can help you simplify complex information, making it more accessible to laymen. Besides, it is more shareable.
Here’s how to shake up your content with visuals, for good:
- Indulge in infographics: You can switch from dense data to easy-to-digest graphics. A flowchart, for instance, with the steps of a surgical procedure can simplify the process for patients.
- Create explainer videos: Using short videos can lead to more understanding about different conditions, and treatments among readers in an engaging way.
- Say ‘Hi’ to user-generated content: You can encourage your patients to share their own visual stories, including ones with photos or videos of recovery.
Bring On Interactive Elements
People want to read content that keeps them hooked to some action. Interactive content will not only help you engage your audience but will also give you a hand in sharing valuable data.
How? Think of those quiz-led pieces of content, for instance.
Interactivity in content keeps users engaged for longer durations. Whether you are implementing a symptom checker or a health quiz, interactive content can pull more people towards your brand, encouraging them to explore your site.
Want to make the most of this? Try the elements below:
- Quiz: Come up with informative yet happening quizzes like “Which Wellness Plan is Right for You?” or “What’s Your Health Age?.”
- Interactive infographics: Allow users to click through the content flow so they can discover steps or facts related to a health issue.
- Surveys: Gather feedback from your audience on their healthcare needs and preferences. It will help build engagement, and will give you actionable insights for future content.
EDUCATE
In healthcare, the right approach for content marketing is: educate first, sell second. Patients aren’t looking to buy anything—they want the answer to their questions, guidance, and support. Here’s how you can emphasise educating customers through healthcare content marketing:
- Provide value: Focus on the solution; avoid pushing products/services.
- Offer free resources: Provide free ebooks, guides, and materials that answer common customer health concerns.
- Be supportive: Encourage users to move onto the next step without pressure.
Educational content can help you build more trust among customers, while hard-selling practices can make them feel like they have entered a transactional dynamic. Keep your first goal to be supportive.
Show Off Socials
People trust word-of-mouth more than they trust what brand presents to them—and this is even more prevalent in healthcare (rightly so).
Enter social proofs.
From user-generated content to testimonials, you can show real people on your social platforms to build credibility and trust. Nowadays, brands prove a great share of authenticity through social media channels.
Here are some practices that you can adopt:
- Post customer reviews: You can display real patient stories on your social media (plus website). Video testimonials work even more effectively in building reliability and authenticity.
- Highlight success stories: See those “Before and After” posts? You can encourage your patients to do that. This will help inspire trust among your other patients.
- Show user-generated content: Encourage your patients or users to share their experiences with your product/services.
Note, social proof is a fantastic tool to validate your claims and help patients feel comfortable in trusting your brand. All you need to do is put in some work.
Go with Consistency
Would you trust a doctor who is always late?
Would you trust a doctor who doesn’t seem consistent with their approach to certain health concerns?
No, right?
The same applies to your content. Consistency in content publishing reflects reliability—and helps you build a loyal audience. Regular content updates can help keep your audience engaged, and make them look forward to your next post, video, or email. It also gives a hunch to search engines that your site is active, and in good health—thus, boosting SEO.
Here are some health content marketing tips for you on consistency:
- Maintain content calendar: Schedule posts, social media, and newsletter content to keep things running smoothly.
- Have a regular posting schedule: From daily social media posts to a couple of blog posts a week, ensure regular content posting to keep your audience engaged.
- Repurpose content: You don’t always have to keep creating something fresh; take a look at old posts, update them with new information, stats, trends, etc.
Final Thoughts
Healthcare is a hyper-crowded space; you will find it easier getting lost in the noise than making the cut. But, here’s the catch: you don’t have to. Healthcare content marketing can help you navigate the straight road to your target audience, and create your own big community of loyal customers. With the right practices, you will no longer need to navigate the competition on a broader level. From reading your customers to connecting with them on social platforms—every little to big effort weighs value in healthcare content marketing. And as long as you remain consistent, and true to your brand voice—nothing shall keep you from setting new standards of healthcare in the industry.
Also Read: Cracking Finance Content Writing: Effective Tips & Strategies (+ Mistakes to Avoid)