Your healthcare content marketing strategy is the plan for how to create and execute stellar marketing content. Without a plan, your content will have no aim or focus, hurting your results. However, establishing a firm goal and processes to achieve that goal can ensure you are getting the most return from your efforts and investment.

Explore how to build a content marketing strategy in healthcare that will generate leads, increase website traffic, and lead to more sales.

Key Takeaways:

• A content marketing strategy keeps your content on track to reach your marketing goals
• A successful content marketing strategy starts with specific and measurable goals
• Create a content calendar to keep your message consistent across your channels
• Continually refresh and optimize your content based on new data and reports

Why Every Healthcare Organization Needs a Content Marketing Strategy

Even though 81% of marketers say content is a key strategy, not all marketers invest in a content marketing strategy. Your strategy is your plan of action. Without a specific aim and roadmap that directs your efforts, you aren’t using a content marketing strategy–you’re just creating content.

Here are three reasons why having a strategy backing your content decisions is essential to your success.

Establishes Yourself as a Leader

Thought leadership content is content that establishes you as an authority in your industry. It addresses the latest topics and offers new and insightful ideas. Over half of primary decision-makers in companies read thought leadership each week.

Publishing regular content that builds trust, establishes yourself as an authority, and appears in front of your target audience requires a strategy that outlines how to create quality content and where to publish your content.

Increases Your Brand Awareness

Just posting content online won’t increase your brand awareness. Over 90% of online content doesn’t see any traffic. If you want your audience to see your content and respond to your message, you must first establish a strategy for creating relevant content and distributing it through the proper channels.

Aligns Your Marketing Channels

Healthcare marketing strategies usually involve several platforms, including:

• Blogs
• Email
• Social media
• Third-party websites

An aligned content marketing strategy means your message remains consistent across those channels, and you aren’t contradicting yourself or confusing your audience. Establishing a healthcare content strategy keeps all your marketing channels on the same page and working towards the same goals.

5 Steps to Building a Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

Follow these five steps to build a healthcare content marketing strategy that reaches more of your target audience and generates quality leads.

Step 1: Build a Strong Foundation

Your foundational goals will guide all your content decisions. They should align with your marketing goals but with benchmarks and objectives specific to content marketing. For example, if your marketing goal is to generate more leads, your content marketing goal might be to generate 1,000 quality leads through a social media webinar.

When creating goals, make them specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timebound. These criteria ensure you have a clear benchmark that shows you are successful.

Image from Doug Thorpe

Step 2: Understand Your Market

Once you establish your goals, you can begin researching your market and understanding your audience. This stage gives you more information on how you can achieve those goals.

First-party data will be your most valuable source of information on your audience and market. This data is the behaviors of your current customers, website traffic reports, and responses to surveys you sent out.

When you understand your market, you know which marketing channels reach your healthcare buyers, their primary pain points, who the primary decision-makers are within those healthcare facilities, and what your competition is doing to reach this market.

Step 3: Create a Content Calendar

Your content calendar is a visual representation of your content strategy. Saying you want to post once a week isn’t enough for an effective strategy. You must plan weeks or months in advance. List the content you want to share, the channels you will use to distribute it, and how often you post.

As you brainstorm topics to fill your content calendar, use first-party data to identify common questions customers ask, issues that arise, and popular online searches in your healthcare niche. These are all sources of potential content topics where you can address relevant topics your customers are searching for and want to learn about.

A content calendar also unifies your omnichannel marketing strategies for healthcare because you can coordinate your posts and message for a consistent voice.

Here’s a general rule for how often to post content on each channel:

• Instagram: 3-7 times a week
• Facebook: 1-2 times a day
• Twitter: 1-5 times a day
• LinkedIn: 1-5 times a day
• Blog: 2-4 times a week

Step 4: Create and Optimize Your Content

You’re ready to start creating content now that you have your posts planned. However, content creation requires additional research as you optimize each piece for search engine rankings through keywords and links or social media through hashtags and mentions.

If your content calendar is overwhelming for your in-house content team, consider outsourcing your content creation. Roughly 81% of marketers outsource content writing, among several other parts of content creation.

Image from Statista

Step 5: Track and Update

Your content strategy doesn’t end once you publish your content. You must also perform tracking and report your results. Analyzing your content’s performance alerts you to any problems that might arise and highlights content that performs well.

Understanding how well your content performed is essential for measuring your success, optimizing your content, and addressing any problems in your strategy.

For example, you can use your reports to go back and update past content. Refreshing your content keeps it relevant and allows you to optimize it to the most updated customer behavior. For instance, if your readers respond better to specific wording, you can update old call-to-actions to use that new wording.

Reach More Goals with Your Content Marketing Strategy

Healthcare content marketing is constantly changing as healthcare facilities and workers’ demands and needs shift. Stay updated on today’s healthcare trends and marketing methods using our training and publications that offer insights and advice from industry experts.

Contact us to learn more about our healthcare marketing resources.