Connect with us

content marketing strategy

8 Things Healthcare Should Know Before Launching a Content Marketing Campaign

Published

on

It’s interesting.

Healthcare has taken longer than other industries to get into content and social media marketing. In fact to their credit, many healthcare marketers I’ve talked to are not interested in ‘me-too’ strategies.

They want to know ‘the why’ of content marketing. Many of them understand the concept though not necessarily the strategy, and they’re asking some really good questions. I strongly believe this is the right way to go.

So if you’re a healthcare marketer who’s feeling the pressure to launch a content marketing campaign just because everyone else has, don’t.

Content marketing is a long term commitment. And while it is a beneficial strategy used by industry giants such as Johns Hopkins and GE Healthcare, beginners should give themselves enough time to be thorough, and to ask the right questions. Here are eight things you should know before you begin.

#1. What’s the goal?

Your organization has specific business or financial goals it needs to achieve, such as lowering costs, increasing patient acquisition or physician retention and so on. Before you launch a content marketing program, you should be able to identify how the new campaign will contribute directly to these goals.

Launching a patient education blog for example should attract people who are searching for online health information, and thus convert them into actual patients.

#2. What makes you interesting?

People want to share and discuss interesting information on the social web. The question that healthcare marketers (even those of boring brands) must ask themselves is, “What makes our organization so interesting that people will want to talk about it with their friends.”

It’s hard to succeed in content marketing if you have nothing compelling to share. Find out what makes you interesting or different from other organizations, and plan how to showcase that in your content marketing properties.

#3. Do you really know your customers?

Think of customers as people with needs and challenges, rather than people who can buy your products and improve your bottom line. Yes, content marketing is a business strategy. But unless you help others first, don’t expect a profitable exchange to take place.

Helping people means you have to understand them (and their problems) first, before they ever open up their wallets. The best way to discover who your customers really are for the purpose of content marketing is to develop patient personas.

#4. What do they want?

It’s safe to assume that every one of us is at some stage in the wellness journey. Which means we will all at some point need a doctor, a hospital or just a simple band aid. But talking endlessly about your comic hero band aid brand, won’t get me to buy it. In fact, I’ll simply tune you out.

However if you understand my lifestyle as a mom of (several) young boys, boys who climb and fall from trees, and my desire to keep them safe (i.e. not bleeding), then I might be interested in what you have to say. Are you acquainted with the lifestyles of your customers? Again, deeper insights about your customers are obtained through research (see #3).

#5. What kind of message will appeal?

Related to #4 is the idea that your message has to appeal to potential customers. Remember that they’re not interested in your product. At least not at first. They are interested in how you can provide for their lifestyle, or make their dreams come true.

People are tired of being sold to and traditional marketing is becoming less and less relevant. Smart healthcare marketers understand this. Rather than pitching your products, deliver information that will make your customers more intelligent. Ultimately they will reward your valuable information with their business and loyalty.

#6. Where do we need to be?

If you understand your customers (beyond demographics) and where they hang out both online and offline, you can determine which platforms you need to reach them. For instance plastic surgeons have a lot of success on Facebook (due to the image-friendly environment where they can share before-and-after pictures).

However it’s equally important to be where your story will flourish the most. Sometimes that means that you may also have to go offline and meet your customers at in-person events.

#7. Who’s going to do the work?

Content marketing is about giving away so much free information, that you actually become a publisher. This is hard for healthcare marketers whose primary task is to promote the organization’s products or services.

Yet content has to be planned, created, and published on a regular basis. Before you launch a content marketing campaign, you should determine if you have in-house talent to get the job done, or whether you need to outsource the work. It’s short-sighted to start a blog, only to realize you don’t have the time or resources to keep it going. Plan ahead.

#8. How will we know this is working?

Content for content’s sake is no strategy at all. The only reason why a healthcare brand should launch a content marketing campaign is to move your subscribers in the direction you want them to move, and that includes buying your stuff. If your campaign is working then you’ll see some of these goals come to fruition.

The best way to measure success is to have measurable goals to begin with. So if you start off with a goal of acquiring 25 new patients within three months, it’s easy to see how well your efforts are working simply be calculating how many new patients you have acquired since you started.

Your Turn:

Intrigued? If you have any questions about healthcare content strategy, don’t hesitate to give us a call.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

content marketing strategy

6 Content Curation Tips for Delivering Maximum Value to Your Audience

Published

on

Do you curate content from other sites on your own blog?

If so, you’re probably doing it one of two ways. Either you’re just posting excerpts (not the whole thing!) of other people’s articles and including a link back to the original source (this is actually called content aggregation).

Or you’re posting excerpts of other people’s articles and adding your own commentary to provide additional insights and context to the article (true content curation).

The first method offers some value to your audience in the sense that you’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting on their behalf thus giving them a quick resource for keeping up to date with relevant content. In exchange they rely on you to point them in the right direction for content on a particular topic(s). See Alltop.com as an example.

The second method offers even more value (to your audience and to you!) because adding your voice and unique perspective to the curated article tells people why the topic is important and also positions you as a trusted thought leader and expert in that area.

If you’re curating content on your website, here are 6 best practices to ensure that you’re delivering maximum value to your audience:

  • Make sure the excerpt from the original source is not too long
  • Include your own commentary to give insight and guidance to your audience
  • Turn off your ‘no-follows’ – the no follow attribute on hyperlinks tells search engines not to give SEO credit to the site you have linked to. Don’t use no-follows on links to the original publisher.
  • Make your commentary longer than the excerpt because it reduces the amount of duplicated content and is thus better for SEO value.
  • Re-title the article so that you’re not competing for the same title on search engines.
  • Share only the thumbnail size of the original image unless you have permission to share the full-size image

For more content curation tips check out Curata’s blog.

Continue Reading

content marketing strategy

6 Tips for Using Content Marketing & Social Media for Any Doctor

Published

on

Are you a doctor who’s interested in learning how content and social media marketing can help grow your practice?

For decades doctors were able to get away without investing too much money in advertising or marketing. Then when the Internet changed everything, many of you started to use (and are still using) costly methods of online advertising to market your practices e.g. banner ads.

The problem is patients have completely tuned out to some these tactics and developed chronic cases such as banner blindness.

According to Pew Research, today’s patients are increasingly turning towards the Internet to find information (not advertisements) about symptoms, treatment and support. That means if you want patients to find you when they go online, you need to be involved in content marketing and social media.

And in case you’re wondering how social media and content marketing are related here’s what you should know…

Both are about educating people, answering their questions, and sharing interesting news about your practice. When you do this primarily on your blog it is content marketing

But there’s more.

Social media promotion is critical to online content marketing success. Because there are millions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social sites, it is very likely that people who need your medical expertise (yet don’t know that your blog exists!) are hanging out there.

The best way to reach them is by taking the stories that you’ve posted on your blog and placing them in these sites.

It’s that easy?

Well, yes and no.  Yes, because once you have all your content ready, all you have to do is promote it on your social media networks. But preparation is key.

Social media is a very active space. There are a lot of interesting conversations taking place at the same time and since your target audience has a short attention span, they can get distracted very easily.

The challenge for you as a doctor using social media, is that you have to be more interesting and more creative than the other people or brands in your target audience’s network!

How do you that?

Here are 6 content marketing and social media success tips for your medical practice.

#1. Blog Regularly

If you don’t already have one, develop an editorial calendar to help you blog regularly and consistently. Remember too that social media content benefits from planning and regular updating.

You need to plan for the interesting stories that you will share on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest. Of course many of these stories will be inspired from your blog, but once in a while you may also need to add other content (photos, video, podcasts etc.) to engage audiences within those specific networks.

#2. Tell Awesome Stories

Use your blog to tell stories about your industry, practice, people and events. Each story should be unique and interesting enough to create appeal and draw new audiences on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites that you use.

Human-interest stories are very popular on social media. As a doctor, you have no shortage of such stories although you have to be careful not to violate patient privacy. Patient stories help to illustrate how your practice is impacting people’s lives, and thus generates more interest from other online audiences.

#3. Execute well

Even though 99% of patient stories are interesting by default, how you execute them on social media is very important.

For example on Facebook and Pinterest, posting visually appealing and well-edited photos will go much farther than posting links to your blog. On Twitter you will need different executions skills such as how to craft a compelling tweet with 140 characters, or how to use relevant hashtags to make it easy for people to find your content.

Every social media platform is different. It’s important for you to learn those environments and leverage their unique features to reach a wider audience with your message.

#4. Include location

One of your primary marketing goals is to attract more patients to your practice. So start by creating or updating your Facebook page, Twitter profile and Pinterest account and adding your physical location and your contact information.

When patients come in for their appointment, encourage them to ‘check-in’ to your location using Facebook Places.

Checking-in on Facebook has the same effect as word-of-mouth marketing. When a Facebook user sees (on her Newsfeed) that her friend (your patient) has checked into your location, she’ll be curious to learn more about your practice and will probably click through to your Facebook Page for more information.

#5. Work on your ‘About’ section

The ‘About’ section of your Facebook page should be optimized with keyword rich names, categories and descriptions. The words you use to describe your practice should reflect the natural conversational language that your audience uses. This will increase the likelihood of appearing on Facebook’s Graph Search results.

Similarly, the ‘About’ page of your website should not just focus on keywords that match the medical conditions you treat, but also on answering questions that typical patients would ask. Think about some of the common questions that your patients have asked in the past and update your About page with content that provides those answers.

#6. Consider contests, promotions & giveaways

Contests, promotions and giveaways are very effective ways of acquiring new clients via social media. Because contests can produce outstanding results, it’s important that you make yours stand out by offering a prize that will create excitement and enthusiasm among your audience. Giving away a free iPad has nothing to do with your practice, so don’t bother.

You can give away a relevant product with a ‘limited time only’ message to create a sense of urgency and interest. Avoid giving away free services as this might encourage people not to buy until they find out if they’ve won. To ensure high participation encourage Facebook fans to submit photos of themselves, or share stories for a chance to win.

Your Turn:

Which of these content and social media tips have you used to market your medical practice? Please share your experience in the comment box below.

Continue Reading

content marketing strategy

Social Listening: Consumers Don’t Like It and What Your Brand Should Do About It

Published

on

It’s common for companies to listen to conversations on social media. This way, they can understand consumer opinion about brands, products, and services.

The problem is consumers don’t like it.

A 2012 study by JD Power and NetBase shows that 40% of consumers think social listening intrudes on privacy, even though this is “social media.”

False Expectations?

The question is should users even expect to have online privacy in the first place?

Last summer Google basically told a federal court that people who care about privacy should not use their service and as Molly Wood, executive editor at CNET subsequently pointed out:

“Google reads your e-mail, knows what’s in your calendar, looks at your photos, and knows who your friends are, and that’s just via its in-house services. When you include the breadth of its search, Google knows everything about you that’s public information, from your address to all your online profiles, to your marital status and much, much more.”

I think part of the misunderstanding between consumers and marketers is that they look at privacy differently. Marketers spend a lot of time online – researching, studying and trying to understand how vast amounts of online data can be used to improve services.

But consumers aren’t as informed (no disrespect) about online data and how it’s used. Most of the time, they’re just afraid that their personal information is being used for something “covert” and they don’t like it.

But I want to have my cake and eat it too!

What’s interesting is that consumers want it both ways. They don’t necessarily want brands listening to their conversations, but they definitely expect them [brands] to respond if a consumer has a complaint!

There is no magic formula to help brands figure out what to do. What’s clear though is that marketers have to act in such a way that consumers are persuaded about the benefits of social listening.

What’s a brand to do…?

At the end of the day it’s all about respecting the customer, always getting their permission and going out of your way to explain why you need specific personal information from them. Here’s what social listening should look like:

  • Don’t just listen; understand the full picture before you respond.
  • Consider the context of online updates and conversations – your response should always satisfy consumers’ expectations.
  • Engage with the intention of delivering mutual value i.e. better experience and incredible customer service.
  • Demonstrate how listening builds relationships, rather than simply ‘intruding’ on consumers’ conversations.

The benefits that come from social listening end up flowing through to consumers as well. Marketers should therefore be bold about educating their customers and explaining how online conversations are used. This not only builds consumer trust, it also alleviates fears based on lack of knowledge.

What do you think? How should marketers behave in order to leverage the benefits of social listening? Please leave your feedback in the comment box below.

Continue Reading

Pick Up Post

Marketing2 months ago

Why A-Frames and Banners are Still Key Components of Every Top Brands’ Marketing Strategies

Local marketing is essential for the growth of every business. If you are a business owner and focusing only on...

Business2 months ago

5 Signs Your Business Needs a Better Facebook Page Management

Since we are living in a digital age, and social media play a crucial role in our everyday life, it’s...

Marketing2 months ago

Why SEO is Important for e-Commerce? 5 Unavoidable Reasons

Any business be it huge or little acknowledgment is the establishment. In this period of gadgets, to get effective, it...

Marketing2 months ago

How to Measure Digital Marketing Effectiveness

Considering websites are continually growing and improving, needing to measure and determine the rate of efficiency of employed digital marketing...

Marketing2 months ago

8 Strategies To Enhance Ecommerce Customer Retention And Loyalty

Marketing experts say that keeping an existing consumer is easier and more inexpensive than engaging a new prospect. There is...

Marketing2 months ago

4 Effective Bitcoin Marketing Strategies to try in this Year

We can all agree that blockchain technology has brought many changes, and it didn’t just shooked up our financial world,...

Business2 months ago

5 Reasons To use Custom Stickers For Marketing Your Business

With the help of the Internet today, advertising a brand, product or service is easier than ever. There are various marketing...

Marketing2 months ago

Use Emoji as a Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy in 2024

There are more than 6 billion emojis that are being sent every day. Emojis are one of the most often...

advertising Allows articles Attract benefits blog Bloggers blogging Blogs Brands business Businesses Cant Comments communication Compelling Consistent Consumer Consumers content Content marketing Conversations Creating creation Develop Didnt Digital digital marketing Discounts Doesnt Efforts email Encourage Engage Engaging Engines Ensure Facebook followers Generate goals Google healthcare marketing healthcare social media Heres Hospitals Images Improve Insights Instagram Interact Invest keywords LinkedIn marketers Marketing Mobile networking Offers opportunities Organizations Peoples platform Platforms Posting Posts Products Promote prospects Providers Provides Providing Publish publishing Purchase Reader readers Relevant SEO Sites social media strategies technorati Text Thats Theyre tweets Twitter updates User Users Variety Videos website websites Whats Wont writers YouTube Youve

Trending