How to Build a Healthcare Content Strategy That Works

With a well-crafted healthcare content strategy, the right words can change the world. In the dynamic healthcare industry, connecting with patients goes beyond providing excellent medical services. And this is where a solid content strategy comes into play.

With an estimated 7% of Google’s daily searches being health-related, there’s an undeniable demand for reliable, accurate, and engaging healthcare information. That’s roughly 70,000 medical queries every single minute.

Given these figures, it’s evident that healthcare providers leveraging a robust content strategy stand to reach a wider audience, provide value, and establish a stronger patient connection.

But why is a good content strategy crucial for healthcare providers?

Well, healthcare is no longer just about treating ailments — it’s about fostering solid relationships with patients, providing comprehensive care, and empowering individuals with knowledge. That’s where content comes into the picture. From blog posts to social media updates, content is how healthcare organizations can communicate their message effectively and engage their audiences meaningfully.

This guide will educate you in how to understand, create, and implement a successful healthcare content strategy:

• Understanding the critical elements of a healthcare content strategy
• Identifying your audience and tailoring content to their needs
• Establishing clear, measurable goals for your content
• Choosing the suitable types of content to resonate with your audience
• Building and implementing your content strategy
• Measuring the success of your content strategy and making necessary improvements
• Case studies of successful healthcare content strategies
• How to outsource your creative production to a global expert

By the end of this guide, healthcare marketers and organizations will be equipped with all they need to take their content marketing efforts to new heights.

Understanding Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

What exactly is a content marketing strategy for hospitals?

At its core, a healthcare content strategy is a plan that guides creating, delivering, and managing valuable, relevant content to achieve specific healthcare-related goals. This could be educating patients, promoting health services, or strengthening the healthcare organization’s brand image. It involves a content creation process that considers the audience’s needs, the healthcare provider’s goals, and the best methods to deliver the content effectively.

Why is this so crucial in the healthcare sector? Here’s why:

• Patient Education: A strong content strategy enables healthcare professionals to educate patients about diseases, treatments, prevention strategies, and more. This helps patients make informed decisions about their health and fosters a stronger patient-provider relationship.
• Brand Awareness: Content strategy significantly raises awareness about a healthcare provider’s services, unique selling points, and overall brand. By consistently creating content that resonates with the audience, healthcare companies can build brand recognition and loyalty.
• Patient Engagement: High-quality, relevant content can engage patients, keep them connected with the healthcare system, and encourage them to take proactive steps toward their health. This leads to better health outcomes and increased patient satisfaction.
• Trust and Credibility: Healthcare is a sector where trust is paramount. By providing accurate, up-to-date, and helpful content, healthcare systems can establish themselves as reliable sources of health information, building trust among patients.
• SEO and Online Visibility: A robust online presence is critical in an increasingly digital world. Consistent, high-quality content improves search engine rankings, making it easier for potential patients to find your healthcare organization online.

Developing an effective content strategy is not just about creating content — it’s about making the right content. It’s about understanding your audience’s needs, the healthcare landscape, your organization’s goals, and how all these elements interplay in your content production and distribution. It’s about delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right audience, in the right way.

The Elements of an Effective Content Strategy in the Healthcare Industry

Several key elements must be considered when crafting a successful healthcare content strategy. These elements form the backbone of your strategy, guiding your decisions and actions in content creation and distribution. Here are the main components you need to focus on:

Audience Analysis

Before you begin creating healthcare content, you need to identify who your target audience is. Your audience could be patients with specific conditions, healthcare professionals seeking continuing education, or general consumers interested in preventative healthcare.

Each group will have different needs and preferences, influencing the type of content you create, the tone of voice you use, and the channels you use to distribute your content.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is to understand their needs and preferences. This involves researching your audience and gathering data about their demographics, behaviors, and attitudes toward healthcare. Some questions you might ask include:

• What health issues are most relevant to this audience?
• What type of content do they prefer? (e.g., blogs, infographics, videos)
• Which social media channels do they frequent?
• What questions do they have about healthcare, and what information are they seeking?

Understanding your audience’s needs and preferences allows you to create engaging content that resonates with them. It enables you to provide value, which can help build trust and loyalty.

However, it’s also important to remember that audience preferences can change over time. As part of your digital marketing strategy, you should periodically review and update your audience analysis to ensure your content remains relevant and practical.

In addition, a deep understanding of your audience can also guide other aspects of your healthcare business, from service design to customer service. By putting your audience at the heart of your content strategy, you can ensure that your content is a powerful tool for connection and communication.

Content Goals

Setting clear, measurable goals is a cornerstone of any content strategy. Your goals guide the type of content you create, how you distribute it, and how you measure success. Without clear goals, your content efforts may lack focus, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.

When setting your goals, consider what you want your content to achieve. Are you looking to raise awareness of your healthcare brand? Do you want to educate patients about a particular health issue? Or perhaps you aim to attract more medical professionals to your team?

Your content goals should align with the broader objectives of you as a healthcare provider. For instance, if your organization aims to improve patient outcomes for a specific ailment, one of your content goals could be to create and distribute valuable educational content about that condition.

On the other hand, if your goal is to increase your patient base, you might focus on creating content that showcases your services and success stories.

Consider using SMART goals when setting content strategy:

• Specific: Define your goals as precisely as possible. Instead of saying, “we want to increase website traffic,” say, “we want to increase website traffic by 20% over the next six months by distributing valuable healthcare articles on our social media channels.”
• Measurable: Make sure your goals can be quantified. This allows you to track your progress and make necessary adjustments along the way.
• Attainable: Set realistic goals. While it’s good to aim high, unachievable goals can demotivate your entire team.
• Relevant: Your content goals should align with your healthcare objectives and contribute to their achievement.
• Time-bound: Set a deadline for your goals. This creates a sense of urgency and helps keep your team focused.

Setting content goals isn’t just a task for content marketers. It’s essential to involve key stakeholders across your organization in this process. This could include medical professionals, who can provide valuable insights into patient needs, and management, who can ensure goals align with the broader healthcare objectives.

In straightforward language, let everyone involved in writing content and generating content ideas know what they aim for. By setting clear, measurable content goals that align with your healthcare objectives, you’ll have a roadmap to guide your content creation and distribution efforts.

Content Types

As you venture into healthcare marketing, it’s essential to understand the different types of content you can create. Each type of content serves a different purpose and resonates with different target audiences. Therefore, understanding these content types and how to choose the right one for your goals and audience is critical to your strategy’s success. Here’s a quick overview of some content types you may consider:

• Blogs: Blogs are versatile tools for sharing in-depth information about health topics. They can be written by subject matter experts in your organization, ensuring that the content created is accurate and valuable. As with much written content, blog posts are a great opportunity to use some SEO skills.
• Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of data or information. They are a great way to simplify complex medical concepts and present them in an easily digestible form, especially for visual channels such as Instagram and TikTok.
• Videos: Videos are highly engaging and versatile. They can be used for patient testimonials, tutorials, facility tours, or healthcare professional interviews. A study by Wyzowl shows that an overwhelming 91% of businesses will use video as a marketing tool in 2023, indicating their popularity in engagement and information delivery.
• Podcasts: Podcasts are an increasingly popular content format, especially for audiences who prefer listening to structured content whilst on the go.
• Ebooks and Whitepapers: These are excellent for providing in-depth information on specific healthcare topics. They can be used as lead magnets to attract new patients or retain existing ones.

The type of content you create should align with your content goals and the preferences of your target audience. For instance, if your goal is to educate patients about a specific health condition, an in-depth blog post or an informational video might be more effective than an infographic.

However, it’s important to keep diversity in your content development. Using a mix of different content formats can cater to various audience preferences and keep your content fresh and engaging. A content audit, which involves reviewing your existing content and its effectiveness, can help you understand what types of content work best for your audience.

Regardless of the type you choose, remember to create content that provides relevant information in plain language to ensure compliance with health literacy guidelines. This will make your content more accessible to your audience, especially those with limited medical knowledge.

Content Distribution

Content distribution refers to the methods and channels you use to share your content with your target audience. Distribution is as crucial as content creation because even the most engaging, informative content won’t serve its purpose if it doesn’t reach the intended audience. Some of the distribution channels you can consider are:

• Social Media: Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter can be great for sharing content and engaging directly with your audience.
• Email Marketing: This method allows you to deliver content directly to your audience’s inboxes, making it especially effective for personalized and targeted communication.
• Your Website: Publishing content, such as blog posts and articles, can improve your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and draw organic traffic. A website already populated with content appears as established and trustworthy.
• Partner Websites or Blogs: Guest posting or content collaboration can help you reach a wider audience and establish authority in your field.

Continual Evaluation and Improvement

Building a healthcare content strategy isn’t a one-time task but a continuous process that involves regular evaluation and improvement. It’s vital to constantly monitor and measure the performance of your content against the goals you set.

Some key metrics to consider could include website traffic, social media engagement, content downloads, and leads generated. By regularly evaluating these metrics, you can identify what’s working well and areas where improvement is needed.

It’s also crucial to stay updated with industry trends, new content formats, and changes in your audience’s needs and preferences. This allows you to continually refine your strategy and ensure your content remains relevant and effective.

Building Your Healthcare Content Strategy

Developing a Content Calendar

Developing a content calendar is the first step to building your healthcare content strategy. A content calendar is a scheduled plan of what content you’ll publish, where you’ll publish it, and when. It provides a bird’s eye view of your content initiatives, allowing you to plan strategically and coordinate amongst your teams.

One of the primary considerations in developing a content calendar is the timing and frequency of content publishing. Depending on your resources and audience’s preferences, you may publish content daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Whatever frequency you choose, it’s essential to maintain consistency. Consistent publishing helps build patient trust and improves your visibility in search results, boosting your organic content reach.

Another crucial aspect of a content calendar is balancing different types of content. Mixing up your content—like blogs, videos, infographics, and podcasts—ensures that you cater to varied audience preferences and keep your content fresh and engaging.

While developing your content calendar, consider the following:

• Relevance: Schedule your content according to what’s relevant at a particular time. For example, content about flu prevention would be more appropriate during the flu season.
• Patient Journey: Plan your content according to the different stages of the patient journey. This helps ensure you provide the right content to the right audience at the right time.
• Holidays and Special Events: Leverage holidays and special events to create topical and timely content.

The content calendar should be flexible and adaptable. As a content strategist, you should be prepared to adjust your plan based on emerging news, trending topics, or changes in your audience’s needs and behaviors.

Creating Engaging and Informative Content

Crafting engaging and informative content for your healthcare organization is a balancing act between ensuring medical accuracy and maintaining readability. On the one hand, the information you provide must be reliable and backed by medical research. On the other hand, the content needs to be understandable and engaging for readers who aren’t healthcare professionals.

One way to achieve this balance is by making use of storytelling. Weaving a narrative around the information you’re sharing can help humanize your content and make it more relatable to your readers. For instance, patient success stories, staff profiles, or narratives around the discovery and treatment of specific conditions can provide a human touch while also delivering important health information.

Remember, the digital channels we use today, including search engines and social media platforms, reward content that engages readers and keeps them on the page. Therefore, your content must be accurate and engaging enough to capture and hold your readers’ attention.

Another critical aspect of creating engaging content is establishing topical authority. This means that you consistently create content around specific health topics, which helps position you as a thought leader in that field. It builds trust with your audience and signals to search engines that you’re a reliable source of information on those topics.

As you create content, remember that your ultimate goal is to educate and add value to your readers. This focus will guide your content creation process and ensure your content is beneficial to your audience and successful in the digital landscape.

Incorporating SEO in Your Content Strategy

Simply put, SEO is optimizing your content so it can be found by search engines, leading to higher visibility and more website visitors.

In the healthcare industry, where potential patients are constantly looking up symptoms, treatments, and medical practices, a strong SEO strategy can make the difference between being found online or remaining hidden in the vastness of the internet.

The first step to incorporating SEO in your content strategy is keyword research. This involves identifying the words and phrases people use to search for healthcare services or information related to your field. There are many tools available online that can assist you in this process.

Once you’ve identified these keywords, the next step is optimization. This involves strategically incorporating the keywords into your content, including titles, headings, body text, and meta descriptions. But remember, while it’s essential to include keywords, they should always feel natural within the content and never compromise the readability or quality of the information.

In addition to keywords, other SEO best practices include creating high-quality, valuable content, optimizing for mobile, using internal and external links wisely, and ensuring your website has a fast load speed.

By incorporating SEO into your healthcare content strategy, you enhance your chances of reaching a wider audience, attracting more potential patients, and establishing your medical practice as a leader in your field. SEO does not have to be undertaken alone; alternatively, outsourcing to an agency has particular benefits here.

Compliance and Ethics in Healthcare Content

Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, and content creation within this sector is no exception. Navigating these strict guidelines can be complex, but understanding and adhering to them is crucial to your healthcare content strategy.

Healthcare regulations are designed to protect patients and maintain the integrity of the healthcare system. For instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the U.S. sets guidelines for protecting patients’ personal health information. Similar regulations exist in other countries and must be adhered to when creating healthcare content.

Ensuring privacy and confidentiality is another crucial aspect of compliance and ethics in healthcare content. You must be careful not to disclose identifiable patient information without explicit consent. Even when sharing patient success stories or case studies, obtaining permission or sufficiently anonymizing the information is essential.

In addition to regulatory compliance, ethical considerations should guide your content creation. This includes presenting information honestly, avoiding exaggerated claims, and always prioritizing the well-being of your audience. Your content should aim to educate and inform, not mislead or exploit.

Maintaining compliance and ethics in your healthcare content not only helps you avoid legal issues but also builds trust with your audience. Patients are more likely to engage with healthcare providers they perceive as trustworthy and ethical.

Implementing and Managing Your Healthcare Content Strategy

After building your healthcare content strategy, the next step is to implement and manage it. This involves promoting your content, tracking key metrics, and continuously improving your strategy based on feedback and results.

Promoting Your Content

Promoting your content is as crucial as creating it. After all, even the most compelling content won’t make an impact if your audience does not see it. Two effective channels for promoting healthcare content are social media and email marketing.

Social media platforms allow you to reach a broad audience and engage with them directly. They’re also a great place to share various content types, including blog posts, videos, and infographics. Plus, with features like sharing and commenting, social media can facilitate discussions around your content and spread it even further.

Email marketing, on the other hand, allows you to reach your audience directly in their inboxes. It’s a great way to share your latest content, remind your audience about important health information, and keep your healthcare organization in mind.

Another effective way to promote your content is through collaborations with influencers and advocates in the healthcare space. They can help amplify your content to their followers, increasing its reach and impact.

Measuring and Improving

Tracking key metrics is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of your healthcare content strategy. This could include measures like website traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, and more. These metrics can help you understand what’s working, what’s not, and where there’s room for improvement.

In addition to tracking metrics, listening to your audience’s feedback is essential. This could come through comments, surveys, or direct feedback. It’s crucial to use this feedback to adjust and improve your strategy continuously.

Remember, building a healthcare content strategy is not a one-time task. It’s a continuous process of creating, promoting, measuring, and improving. By staying dedicated to this process, you can create a content strategy that truly resonates with your audience and achieves your healthcare organization’s goals.

Leverage Global Expertise: Outsource Your Creative Production to We Are Amnet

As leaders in Smartshoring and creative production services, WeAreAmnet have the global expertise to elevate your healthcare content strategy.

Outsourcing your creative production to us means tapping into a pool of skilled professionals specializing in finalizing high-quality, engaging, and compliant content tailored to your audience’s needs. Plus, with our Smartshoring model, you can enjoy cost-effective services without compromising quality.

We manage all aspects of your content production, giving you more time to focus on your core healthcare services. With We Are Amnet, you’re not just outsourcing your creative production—you’re partnering with a team committed to achieving your healthcare objectives.

Ready to revolutionize your healthcare services with a robust content strategy? Contact us today and take the first step toward creating effective and efficient healthcare content.

FAQs

What Are the 3 Cs of Content Strategy?

The 3 Cs of content strategy refer to Create, Curate, and Circulate.

• Create: This involves generating original and valuable content that aligns with your healthcare organization’s goals and resonates with your audience. It includes blog posts, videos, and infographics.
• Curate: This is the process of gathering and sharing relevant content created by others. It could be industry news, studies, or articles you believe would benefit your audience.
• Circulate: This step involves distributing your content effectively to reach your target audience. It could include using social media platforms, email marketing, SEO strategies, or influencer collaborations.

What Are the 4 Steps of Content Strategy?

The 4 steps of content strategy are often called Plan, Create, Distribute, and Measure.

1. Plan: This step involves identifying your goals, understanding your audience, and outlining the content you need to create.
2. Create: Here, you generate the content according to the plan, keeping in mind the preferences and needs of your audience.
3. Distribute: This involves sharing your content through appropriate channels to reach your target audience.
4. Measure: This is where you evaluate the effectiveness of your content based on key metrics and feedback and adjust your strategy accordingly.

What Are the 7 Steps in Creating a Content Strategy?

The 7 steps in creating a content strategy can vary depending on the source, but they generally include the following:

1. Define Your Goal: What do you hope to achieve with your content?
2. Conduct Persona Research: Understand who your audience is, what they want, and how you can cater to their needs.
3. Run a Content Audit: Review your existing content to identify what’s working and what’s not.
4. Determine Content Types: Decide on what types of content you will create based on your goals and audience.
5. Develop a Content Calendar: Schedule when and where to publish your content.
6. Create Content: Generate high-quality and valuable content that resonates with your audience.
7. Distribute and Market Your Content: Share your content through various channels to reach your target audience.

Remember, creating a successful content strategy involves a continuous cycle of planning, creating, distributing, and evaluating. Each step is crucial in ensuring your content achieves its intended purpose.