Game Plan for a Successful Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
Every day Google processes about 63,000 search queries per second, and about 7% of the daily searches are about health. Every sector needs a sound game plan for effective marketing and the healthcare sector is no different. The pandemic has only accelerated the need for healthcare organizations to digitalize their resources. Healthcare content marketing has become the need of the hour since its demand has increased dramatically. Now would be a good time to hire a professional medical content writer or a digital healthcare marketing agency.
Why Do You Need a Game Plan to Survive in the Industry?
Before the pandemic, telehealth did not have a stronghold in India. But today, people have realized the importance of telehealth and its convenience. There is a never seen before boom in the telehealth sector. The pandemic has brought about many of these changes and has emphasised the importance of a proper marketing strategy for every healthcare organisation.
While over 66% of healthcare organisations have adopted a content marketing strategy, only 28% seem to have a documented healthcare content marketing strategy. The budget that has to be allotted for the content marketing strategy is expected to double in the following years.
A good content marketing strategy will help you create brand awareness and make you known among your potential patients. Providing accurate information that people want to know about at the right time will be the key to creating quality content. Healthcare content marketing is a dynamic industry and new strategies keep coming up. Thus, hiring a digital healthcare marketing agency would be best to make things work for you.
Read Also: Rules for Healthcare Content Marketing
Creating a Game Plan for an Effective Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
This might sound like an intimidating job, but once you get down to the details, it is a simple matter of planning and executing. It is also essential to document the strategy and the results to assess and tweak it in the future. It is better to divide an effective game plan into three phases.
1. Planning Phase
Assess the Situation
The first and most important phase of creating a content marketing strategy is to plan things out clearly. This will involve taking into account the company's objectives and long-term goals and creating a strategy that complements them. Setting out a clear path at the start will avoid confusion and misdirection.
It would help to ask yourself many questions before mapping out the strategy. Some of these questions can include:
- What is the desired outcome that you expect from the marketing plan?
- Is it brand awareness, more patients, or something else?
- What is the budget that you can allot for the strategy?
- What are the challenges that the strategy should solve?
- What are the short-term and long-term goals?
Figuring out the answers to these questions might help you create a clear-cut path.
Find Your Audience
A medical content writer can work for clients from doctors to hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and more. But it is important to know your audience before creating the content. You might want to target the hospitals or the doctors if you are a pharmaceutical company, while the doctors and hospitals will try creating content that grabs the patients' attention.
The SEO company should be able to find the problems (if there are any) and then suggest ways by which they can be improved. These changes should be discussed with you before they go live.
2. Building Phase
Build a Framework
Once you identify and define your audience, you can create an audience framework and create suitable content for each group. Research is the most crucial factor for creating the content, and it should focus on what your target audience wants to see.
With healthcare marketing, the results are slow, and self-promotion might be counter-effective. Thus, building a brand identity rather than focusing on bringing in more patients would be an effective strategy to start with. You can connect with the target groups and try content assessment or content audits to find the content gaps in the market.
Find the Right Channels
With the outline for your content ready, the next is to identify the channels that will effectively deliver the content to your target audience. It might be billboards, personal emails, TV advertisements, internet blogs, or social media posts. Understanding the persona of your target audience group will help you identify the channels through which the content can be delivered.
Create the Content
All the planning should go into the making of the content, and it should be relevant to the media through which it is shared. You can have a defined content creation process that maps out the work to be done by different departments for smooth operation. Starting from the layout to be used to the content's message, the process should be well oiled for it to be executed effortlessly.
Maintain an editorial calendar that plots all the essential details like budget, scope, and deadlines. This will keep everyone who needs to be in the loop posted and create space for new ideas to pour in.
3. Refining Phase
Publish the Content and Be Consistent
There is an overwhelming amount of healthcare content on the web, and it is a matter of who does it best and fast. Thus, you should be able to reach your audience with quality content at the right time. You cannot disappear after one mind-boggling article and expect people to remember you. Consistency is crucial and if possible, bring in your staff to create a sense of trustworthiness.
Monitor the Results
Remember that the one you created is not the final strategy, and it needs improvement to stay relevant. Monitor the performance and results of the content marketing strategy and its cost. This will help you to identify the flaws and rectify them.
LBN Tech Solutions
Healthcare content marketing is a growing sector, and it is vital to get the help of an expert. We at LBN Tech Solutions have been working with the leading names in the healthcare industry and are confident that we can help you improve your strategy. Check out what our clients have to say about our work.
- Jan 24, 2022