Creating a Healthcare Content Marketing Program: Step-by-Step Guide

In an industry as competitive as healthcare, freshening up your marketing tactics is an important way to attract and maintain a dedicated and satisfied patient base. While there are many ways to engage with prospective patients online, it’s important to continuously expand your reach. Healthcare content marketing, in particular, can be a subtle, but effective way to build up your facility’s reputation over time without busting your budget.

But what exactly is content marketing and why should facilities incorporate it into their operations? We’ll provide an overview explaining the basics of content marketing and outline steps for kickstarting a program that can benefit your facility.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing refers to the strategy of distributing relevant content to attract a targeted audience. Rather than selling services directly, the goal of content marketing is to provide informational articles, blogs, or videos that help readers solve everyday issues. When done well, this can help garner more attention from prospective customers who may want to take further action to engage with an organization.

How Can Content Marketing Benefit Healthcare Facilities?

Healthcare content marketing can be a great way for facilities to catch the attention of key stakeholders within their target audience. Incorporating content marketing into your facility’s advertising strategy can help you:

• Attract Patients: Patients want to find providers who they can trust. Content marketing is an important way for facilities to showcase their expertise in the healthcare space.

• Recruit Providers: Providing authoritative content also shows healthcare providers that you have a good grasp on the industry. This can help prospective employees feel more inclined to work with you.

• Build Brand Awareness: Creating accessible and impactful content also helps you build a positive and recognizable image with the public. This sets you apart from competitors and encourages brand loyalty among your patients.

5 Steps to Create a Healthcare Content Marketing Program

If you’re looking to build an in-house program rather than hire a healthcare content marketing agency to produce your content, you may be wondering where to start. Follow these five steps to get your healthcare content marketing strategy off on the right foot.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Before you start creating content, it’s important to identify the audiences that you want your content to speak to. In this realm of marketing, there are two main types of audiences to consider:

• Business-to-Business (B2B): This refers to other healthcare organizations or companies that you may want to enter a business partnership with.

• Business-to-Consumer (B2C): This refers to the specific types of healthcare consumers you want to reach — such as nurses, patients, residents, or clients.

Depending on the goals of your facility, you may want to create a program that caters to one or both of these audiences. If you do cater to both, be aware that B2B language tends to be more technical and industry-related while B2C language should be more accessible and digestible.

2. Identify Relevant Topics

After you’ve figured out your target audience, it’s time to start compiling healthcare content ideas that would best capture the attention of your intended readers. When it comes to content marketing and healthcare, it’s important to strike a balance between supporting your facility’s goals and remaining authoritative. To figure out how to find this balance, you can start by exploring the following questions:

• What types of services and areas of care are relevant to our facility?
• How do we objectively educate patients/providers about these services and areas?
• How can this information be positioned to serve patients/providers in a helpful way?
• How can this information be shaped around a relevant call to action?
• Can these topics help generate engaging health content for social media?

Example

Let’s say your facility is primarily a surgical center. To attract more patients and showcase your expertise, you may want to produce content educating patients on how to prepare for upcoming surgeries. This is a topic that’s helpful, educational, and can be built around a call to action that leads readers to explore your facility’s services.

3. Develop Article Assignments Around Keywords

After you generate a list of healthcare marketing topics, it’s also important to optimize your content for search engines by identifying keywords. Better known as search engine optimization (SEO), this involves utilizing keyword tools to find terms related to your topics that are being frequently searched and clicked on.

Example

To build on the example above, let’s consider a topic around surgery preparation. By entering the phrase “preparing for surgery” into a keyword tool, you should be able to see a list of relevant phrases as well as their search volumes, competitiveness, and intent. This will allow you to incorporate popular keywords into your content to help your article get promoted by search engines.

4. Streamline an Editorial Process

Once you have an initial list of article topics and corresponding keywords, it’s time to streamline a process for how your content will get written, edited, and published. Follow these tips to optimize this process from start to finish:

• Assign articles to writers who hold relevant expertise on your topics (e.g., nurses, doctors, surgeons, health policy advocates).
• Standardize a system for drafts to be submitted and reviewed by an editorial team (consider using shareable documents to facilitate collaboration).
• Establish which channels and web content management systems your team should use to distribute content.

5. Track Performance Metrics

After you’ve started publishing articles, it’s important to continuously track their performance metrics. This includes things like how many views, clicks, and conversions each article is obtaining over time. You can opt to use different analytical tools that provide these capabilities, or use a content management system that can track this information for you.

This will allow you to assess which articles are performing well and which ones may need to be updated with new keywords, information, formatting features, or other changes. Regularly updating your content is also a great way to keep it accurate and optimized for search engine updates.

Start Building a Stronger Brand for Your Facility Today

Kickstarting a healthcare content marketing program can feel like a daunting and resource-intensive endeavor. Looking for ways to ease the process? IntelyCare’s expert-written marketing tips and insights into other healthcare facility topics can help you get the information you need, at no cost to you.