Understanding your target audience is essential to running your healthcare business’s blog, website, and social media pages. Naturally, targeting patients in promotional ventures is crucial to ensure the services provided by healthcare organizations and their providers reach the people who would most benefit from them. In this blog post, we will explore how important it is for healthcare businesses to understand and engage with patients as a target audience and how to reach out to them most effectively.
Before posting to your blog, it is essential to pinpoint the audience you are trying to reach, called the target audience. The first way to reach your target audience is to assess who your healthcare business caters to and what services it provides. If running a chain of nursing homes is your business, then your target audience would be those residing in nursing homes and their families. Once you’ve identified your audience, you can use SEO to reach your patients.
What is SEO? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and involves optimizing your website and the content you create for search engines, such as Google. An algorithm determines where in the search engine your page populates when a user searches for a word or group of words based on your content. According to these operations, your social media marketing strategy needs to be SEO-friendly, so your content can reach more users.
How do you develop an SEO-friendly blog post? Strategize the content you put out in the world. Use a keyword research tool to find high-ranking keywords. Assess the effectiveness of the keywords you choose and adjust the ones you use based on those findings.
Optimize your title tag and meta description. The first thing users will see is your title tag, and the meta description is the description provided below. Be sure to customize your URL, or web address, to include the target keyword.
Now that we have covered the importance of using patients as a target audience and how to create an SEO-friendly post, we will segway into five strategies to increase patient engagement with your blog posts.
You have established that patients as a target audience are the population you serve. This group is likely to contain many people, each with unique aspects to their care. Implement a content strategy that speaks to those individual qualities. Focusing on the distinct needs of your patients may not apply to the entire population, but it will expand the information provided to your audience. This method of reaching subsets based on more personalized aspects of your audience is called target market segmentation.
Some patients experience iatrophobia, or the fear of physicians or medical professionals. But we live in a time when we can really engage with our patients on social media through blogs and websites. They must see that we, too, are human.
As healthcare professionals, we can get caught up in talking generally, as most of our charting is worded “The patient is…” and is highly impersonal. However, we can improve communication by speaking to them through blog posts and using “you” and “your” language. Make them feel included through the content they are reading. Encourage comments or ask your readers what they want to see in the future of your blogging.
When you encourage your patients to give their opinion, ask questions or provide suggestions, learn from them. This process is what makes us unique as providers and why clinicians drive healthcare content creation. Make future blog posts about these topics, reach out to them personally to see why they think that way, and use their recommendations by altering the treatments you provide. They will remain engaged with your content if they know that you listen to their concerns.
You can use your blog content to advertise your other social media pages. When your patients are in the office, tell them about your blog and social media pages and how your content can help them. Ask your patients to ask questions, leave reviews, or contact you with their questions. This process will provide you with more content and foster engagement with your patients, all the while providing advertising for your institution.
How do you optimize your content for your patients as a target audience? Let’s go through a few steps to elaborate further on this topic.
Humanize yourself, determine what your audience wants to see, and provide it. Encourage interaction with your posts, and if you have a patient you have an upcoming appointment with, and they interacted with your post, thank them in person. This gesture aids in humanizing you and letting your audience know that you see them and are genuinely appreciative.
Remember, use writing tools and keep your information at about the sixth-grade reading level to ensure readability. Define all medical jargon that slips in and keep it to a minimum. This effort will most effectively educate your audience on the topics you are writing about and keep them returning for more.
Utilizing technology to reach our patients as a target audience is becoming the norm in our society. We can put information into the world and help them grasp concepts they may be struggling to understand. We also have the luxury of using our social media pages to reach beyond our audiences. Let us help you optimize your content strategy and build lasting relationships with your patients as your target audience.
American Marketing Association. (2022, January 25). What is SEO marketing?. https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/what-is-seo-marketing/#:~:text=SEO%20marketing%20is%20a%20subset,major%20search%20engines%20like%20Google.
Lake, L. (2022, December 30). What is a target audience?. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-a-target-audience-2295567
Newberry, C. (2022, October 5). What is a target market (and how to find yours in 2023). Hootsuite. https://blog.hootsuite.com/target-market/
Kirsten has worked in the nursing profession for ten years and currently writes blog posts and works as a Cardiothoracic Surgery Nurse Practitioner with End-Stage Heart Failure patients. She enjoys spending time with her kids, husband, and dog and loves traveling to explore new places and trying out the local foods.
Want to understand the difference between B2B and B2C healthcare content? Read on for information, tips, and strategies to get your business’s desired results.
Knowing how to use your social media to drive traffic and conversions is vital to a social marketing strategy. Let’s discuss best practices and content ideas.
Using social media to engage with your patients is the new norm. Here is how to best use patients as a target audience and optimize your content accordingly.
