Website and content marketing is a tricky thing for most healthcare businesses. While your company is staying current with all the latest medical developments, your marketing efforts may fall to the wayside. However, savvy content and website marketing can play a big role in attracting more business for your company.
While a well-designed website can help build your business, solid website and content marketing really drives home the results. So, put your website and content marketing to work with these easy tips!
The first and most important step of website and content marketing is coming up with a strategy. Without a concrete plan in place, you have no way of figuring out what marketing methods are effective for your healthcare company and which ones are a waste of resources.
While it may seem like an obvious first step, only 35% of marketers actually document their plan. Be one step ahead of the game by assembling your team and coming up with some marketing strategies for your business.
When coming up with a plan for your content and website, it’s important to know your objectives – essentially, what you want to achieve for your business through your content marketing. Some common content marketing objectives are:
– Build your target audience
– Increase your website’s SEO rankings
– Grow relationships with patients
– Establish your company as a healthcare industry expert
– Provide shareable content
– Become the top name for healthcare for potential patients
Once you have your objectives, it will be much easier to come up with goals and the content strategy to help you achieve them.
The next step of your marketing plan is setting goals for your objectives. Keep in mind that goals should outline exactly what you want to achieve with your content and website marketing within a given timeframe.
Document your goals as an easy reference for your team and to ensure you are all on the same page. While writing out your goals, follow the SMART method:
Specific: Outline exactly what you want to achieve with your goal.
Measurable: Use quantifiable measurements to track your progress.
Achievable: Be realistic with your goals, to keep up team morale.
Relevant: Set goals that align with your marketing objective.
Time Bound: Give yourself a deadline to achieve your goal.
An example of a SMART goal for a healthcare company trying to build a target audience would be: Obtain 100 new subscribers for our email newsletter within the next business quarter.
Once you have your marketing plan in place, it’s up to you to determine if your efforts are working. Regularly check in with your strategy to gauge your progress and see where your successes are and what needs adjustment.
Keep in mind that you may not see huge changes right away – some content marketing strategies take a little time to garner results. However, if progress seems stagnant, it may be time to brainstorm new strategies or change directions to achieve your goals.
When it comes to marketing strategy, content is king. In order to attract an audience, you want to offer informative and valuable information that establishes your company as an industry expert. However, that’s not to say that everything needs to be presented in a blog or newsletter.
For truly effective content, you want to be entertaining as well. So step outside the traditional marketing methods, and consider other forms of media that will engage your audience.
With more and more users preferring viewing content on mobile devices, marketers are trying to find easier ways to provide lots of information that’s easy to consume. One of the most popular methods is framing your content within a short video that your followers and target audience can view any time.
Consider creating a regular series of videos that you can put out every week or month that is easy to share via email or social media. Feature the video on your blog and website to help drive traffic while still providing important information to your audience.
Fo a little visual stimulation, consider using an infographic to beef up your facts. A well designed infographic can help your content shine and allows you to present complicated data in an easy to digest format. Not to mention it’s much easier to view on social media and email as opposed to a blog link that directs users to a different site.
To create the best infographic for your content, follow these best practices:
– Follow a simple design (two colors or less)
– Organize information top to bottom and left to right
– Optimize image for mobile devices
– Provide a call to action (CTA) – what your audience should do after reading your information.
Interactive content has been sweeping the marketing industry by storm, and the healthcare industry is a perfect environment for it to thrive. Use health calculators, quizzes and social media challenges to engage your audience while helping them understand complex medical information.
When done correctly, interactive content can provide a customized experience for your audience, tailoring your content exactly to their interests – and it can be really fun!
Establishing your company as a healthcare industry expert builds trust with your audience and confidence in your services. However, becoming an expert requires more than just top notch content – you also have to show that your business is innovative and knowledgeable about a variety of topics within your field. That may sound like a difficult task to achieve, but it can be done with the right content strategy.
Before your audience considers your company an expert, you have to show them that you know the basics. Answer some of the most common questions upfront and center on your website, so most patients can quickly find what they’re looking for when they just need an answer to a basic question. This will drive more traffic to your website and save your staff time from answering the same questions repeatedly.
Newsjacking is a common marketing tactic in which a company grabs onto a current event or new industry development, and provides additional insight for their audience. Whenever a medical advancement is being made, consider it your time to shine.
Offer a professional commentary that breaks down the news into comprehensible pieces, via blog, video or infographic. It keeps your content relevant and gains social proof of your company’s healthcare expertise.
The medical world is driven by data. Everything can be broken down into percentages, studies and results. However, facts can get dry fast. Although it may build your credibility, it doesn’t do much for an average patient who can’t get past the medical jargon or statistics to understand your message.
You should keep the facts in your content to continue building confidence in your expertise. But take things a step further by telling followers what to do with that information or how it relates to them. Add context or even emotion into the data to drive your point home.
While informative content is valuable to your audience, it can only get you so far. An emotional connection will help build trust in your company and humanize it in the eyes of your audience.
While most healthcare companies can be intimidating to patients, using the voice of the people you helped or the team that built your company is a great way to show that your company cares about more than numbers.
Your staff is the backbone of your business and the people who will interact with your patients. Introduce them to your audience to add a human level to your content strategy and show your audience who they will be working with if they come to your facility.
Run a profile on your staff members on your blog, newsletter, website or social media to show your followers about the doctors, nurses and caregivers that would be treating them. Highlight if any team members achieve an accomplishment or accolade.Showing the people that make your business great adds a level of authenticity to your content.
It’s not just your staff that makes your business shine. Turn your patients into advocates for your business with their testimonies, reviews or experience with your company.
Healthcare companies tend to focus on just their services and products when trying to appeal to an audience. However, the patient perspective can go a long way. After all, the people reading your content may one day need your services. Hearing about another patient’s positive experience could be what keeps your business in mind next time they’re looking for help.
Influencer content is a common strategy in marketing. When done correctly, it effectively demonstrates that leaders in your industry trust in your service or products. In turn, that provides proof and builds trust with your audience.
Usually, influencer content recruits the glitz and glamour of a celebrity to persuade their audience. And while having a Kardashian praising your healthcare facility may be effective, it is a bit bewildering from a marketing perspective.
Instead, focus on influencers that are relevant to your industry. Find a specialist or top physician to feature on your blog or podcast to get an expert perspective on medical developments for your audience.
Now that you have these effective website and content marketing tips in your back pocket, you can apply them to your healthcare business and watch your engagement soar.
Thank you for reading our blog! How can we help you? Contact us today.
