The success of your business depends on a healthcare content strategy that delivers results. That may sound intimidating but bear with me. I am going to break it down into a few steps to drive your strategy. Ultimately, the goal is to lead existing and potential clients to your product. You can achieve that by offering quality healthcare content. Let’s map out a blueprint of fail-proof ways to drive clients to your business.
Why You Need A Healthcare Content Strategy
In 2023, you might think everyone out there has content on the internet, even beyond the healthcare industry. But, many of them have no strategy. If you have content with no strategy, you are wasting valuable time and money on efforts that will get you nowhere. Think of it as a roadtrip with no destination. It might be okay, at first, if you don’t know where you’re going. You’re cruising along, driving, enjoying the breeze, but eventually, you’ll get bored. You won’t see the end and will probably turn around. In the content world, it’s the same. Oftentimes, companies love to start the content creation process by writing because they have so much to share with their audience, but over time, it becomes boring and unfortunately, no results help that feeling of “it’s not working” set in. Then, you give up. You pull back marketing dollars and invest them elsewhere when you didn’t have a good strategy from the start.
If you had started with an effective healthcare content marketing strategy you would have results, not overnight, but you will see it over time.
Another reason you need a good strategy is to know what’s ahead. Back to our roadtrip, without a map, aka Google Maps, you may not know to avoid traffic up ahead or a faster route to your destination.
With a content strategy in place, you know what that next content piece will be and you’ll know what the goal of the piece will be, without hitting writer’s block or feeling overwhelmed.
The Five Pillars Of A Successful Healthcare Content Strategy
When you think of the pillars of a healthcare content strategy, I want you to think of these five pillars:
- Editorial Content Calendar
- SEO
- Writers
- Launch
- Evaluate
Now let’s break those down
1. Editorial Content Calendar
Creating an editorial content calendar will help you map out a strategy for all 12 months. In my experience, I like to focus on three months at a time because then you can go back and see what’s working when you plan the next month. The first part of creating your calendar is to understand your goal for the content you produce. Most of the time, my clients say, “To create new customers.” Of course that’s what we want, right? Customers=money But, to gain customers, you must first build their trust. I will dive into this more when we talk about the three funnels of content development. When you work on developing a content calendar, think of 3-5 content pillars/categories to work from. All of your content should fit inside these categories.
Now that you have some objectives for your content, think about how often you will produce this content. Are you creating it weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? Before you ever put out your first piece of content, create many posts in draft mode/scheduled mode. This will ensure you are ahead of schedule and then you can keep writing. If you miss a week, you still have a blog scheduled to go live to your audience. If you wait until the day you want to post, you will feel rushed and want to get something out there without perfecting it. Put into your own calendar the times you will create weekly/monthly content. I like to batch this as a content day on my calendar. If you are too busy to create content, you can hire a subject matter expert to help you create a piece.
2. SEO
The second piece of the five pillars is SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is a crucial part of the strategy because you want to ensure your content works its way to the top of Google when your customer searches for the topic you are writing about. There are many tools out there to help you decide which keywords to target and you’ll want to make sure you use them so that your content does well because again, without an SEO strategy, your content will not get the results you’re aiming for when you set the objective earlier.
Some of my favorite tools are SEM Rush and Ubersuggest. I also do a Google search and see what customers of my clients are searching for – oftentimes it’s a “how”, “why”, or “how do I?” question.
3. Write
The next pillar for content strategy is finding your writers. Who will be writing your content? This is a crucial question. When WriteRN obtains a client often, it’s because the owner, content director, or content manager does not have the time to write a piece (because of all the other duties involved). You can hire a writer, but don’t forget to create a content brief with keywords and an outline to help your content rank. If you use a subject matter expert, create an author page or byline so that Google sees your company as a thought leader in your field.
For example, at WriteRN we have many healthcare clients who have nurses as their audience. They seek us out because they know our nurse writers can “speak to the nurse”. We work with the client to create an amazing strategy, create the content briefs and keywords to rank for, and find a writer to write the content. Then, when the content is published, we include a headshot and author bio crediting the nurse who wrote the content.
4. Launch
Once you create the content, it’s time to launch it. As discussed in pillar one, your editorial calendar, you have to create a launch that includes a frequency that people will remember. If it’s every Tuesday, make sure you produce something every Tuesday to build that trust with your audience. Once you have that down, make sure your blog post is optimized and it’s time to LAUNCH. Push it out to your social media followers and create an email for your email list.
5. Evaluate
This step is a step that is often forgotten. We love to create, create, create, but we never stop to go back and evaluate. Put into your Google calendar time each quarter to evaluate your content. Check the analytics to see what is popular and when you go to create more content, lean into what’s working and what your audience is searching for.