Do you know that more people are looking for healthcare information online? If this is your industry, then you're in luck. You've got prospects waiting for you.
But you must have a robust content marketing plan in place to encourage them to listen to and patronize your brand. This blog post will show you how to do that successfully.
5 Healthcare Content Marketing Tips to Grow Your Brand
According to Digital Authority Partners (DAP), supercharging content marketing campaigns shouldn't be stressful. For one, you can always work with a digital marketing agency that specializes in scaling industries like healthcare. This team knows how to tweak effective strategies to align with your brand's message and goals.
However, it doesn't hurt to know what these techniques are. Whether you want to do the marketing process on your own or with a firm, you can use the guide outlined below.
1. Define Your Audience Clearly and Specifically
Many compelling, search-engine-friendly articles fail to convert because they are a mismatch to their targeted audience. Before you even type the first words, know who you are addressing. Are you reaching out to patients, caregivers, healthcare organizations, or competitors?
You can properly define your target audience with these ideas:
• Audit your content. Assessing the quality and condition of your content helps you identify the weak and strong points of your marketing plan. In particular, it tells you who's reading them. Are they the ones you're aiming for?
• Be specific. Craft a buyer's persona, a semi-fictional representation of your target market. Touch on their demographics, interests, and challenges. Name them. Here's an example: Max is a 38-year-old working dad in Cleveland, Ohio, trying to manage his diabetes. He earns $75,000 annually and has trouble looking for the time to exercise.
• Know your competitor's market. This tip benefits you in two ways. First, you can beat them better when you understand their target audience and offer something better through content in the process. Second, you can identify opportunities for domination. They might have missed a market that you can target.
2. Optimize Your Content for Human Consumption
Healthcare content marketing usually sets its sights on conquering the search engines, a.k.a. search engine optimization (SEO). This is already a competitive landscape, and most marketers make a crucial mistake: they get obsessed with it.
This doesn't mean you should ignore SEO basics. Keyword research is mandatory. You're already one step ahead of others if you get this right. But more than anything, write and optimize your healthcare articles for human consumption.
Consider these your foundations:
• Follow the E-A-T guidelines. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's Google's way of showing only the most relevant and credible content to searchers. When writing an article, ensure it meets all three criteria. Are you an expert on the topic? Can you back up your claims? Is your website a reliable source?
• Embed visuals. Visual assets like images and videos add more context to technical healthcare content. They also improve user experience (UX) by breaking down long (and sometimes boring) copies. Even better, you can optimize them to improve SEO performance.
• Write various content types. Nearly 65% of Americans have listened to a podcast. That’s 60% up from last year. Also, they listen everywhere. These days, people get information in many ways, so diversify your content. Use infographics, case studies, reviews, podcast and interview transcriptions, webinars, and email marketing.
3. Get Performance Data
At the end of the day, the goal of your healthcare articles is to convert. It may mean increasing online appointments, generating more leads or sales, reducing bounce rates, or something else.
Getting performance data is the only way to know if you're achieving your targets. But how do you measure content outcomes? Try these ways:
• Conduct a split test. A/B testing, or split testing, compares two versions of an asset to see which performs better. For example, you can test two headlines and see which one gets more clicks. You can also test different call-to-action (CTA) buttons or forms. Google Optimize is an amazing tool for this one.
• Install Google Analytics. This free web analytics service from Google shows how people interact with your website. It provides essential data like page views, average session duration, pages per session, and more. Furthermore, it has a conversion tracking feature to know how your content contributes to your overall marketing goals.
• Use heat-mapping tools. Heat maps are visual representations of data that show the areas where users click or scroll the most. This data helps you understand user behavior and identify elements that need improvement on your website.
• Track social engagements. Shares, likes, and comments are valuable social signals that show the reach and virality of your content. Social media platforms have insight features to help you measure key performance indicators (KPIs). You can also use third-party tools like BuzzSumo.
4. Don't Ignore Technical SEO
The success of a healthcare content marketing campaign doesn't rest on good grammar, keyword research, and facts alone. It also relies on other vital factors, such as technical SEO.
Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a website for Google's search crawlers. It's about making your site as visible and accessible as possible to the bots that scour the Internet and index web pages. Otherwise, your articles won't rank in the SERPs, and you'll miss out on organic traffic.
Here are some technical SEO tips to follow:
• Optimize your website's speed and performance. Google considers page speed as a ranking factor. A slow site also frustrates users, resulting in a high bounce rate. Use tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix to check website speed and get actionable insights on how to improve it.
• Make your site mobile-friendly. More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Google also favors responsive websites in its mobile-first indexing. Use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool to know if your website is optimized for smaller devices.
• Ensure that your website is secure. Google gives priority to websites with HTTPS encryption, indicated by a padlock icon on the address bar and a green "Secure" label.
• Fix back-end errors. Crawl errors like 404 pages and broken links damage your website's SEO. Use the Google Search Console to find and fix these issues.
5. Promote Your Content
You can have the best healthcare article in the world, but it won't do you any good if no one sees it.
Use these content promotion tactics:
• Share your articles on social media. Create a post for each social media platform, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Don't forget to use relevant hashtags and take advantage of growing sites like TikTok.
• Partner with non-competing businesses. Collaborate with other industry organizations or companies in a related niche. For example, if you're a healthcare provider, you can work with a health and wellness blog. You can also do a guest blog swap, co-host webinars, or feature each other in case studies and testimonials.
• Maximize offline marketing strategies. You can also use traditional marketing techniques to promote your online content. You can include your website in brochures, banners, and other printed materials.
• Email your subscribers. Send your latest article to your email list. If you don't have one yet, start building your list by offering a lead magnet, such as an ebook or white paper.
Summing Up
Many healthcare-related online marketing strategies rely on a good content marketing plan. Making one won't be easy, but these five tips give you the ideal head start.
Know that you can reach out to a digital marketing agency specializing in healthcare marketing for more help. Sit down with them, talk about your content marketing goals, and personalize the process to achieve the best results.