Healthcare Content Marketing: How Providers Can Benefit

July 23, 2022

No Comments

377

Healthcare content marketing is the promotion of companies in healthcare and consists of sales promotion measures, marketing tools, and strategies that are used in healthcare. While sales and marketing in healthcare are traditionally clearly separated, digital sales are assigned to healthcare marketing as part of the marketing mix.

Healthcare companies can be broken down into the following categories:

Physician practices
Pharmaceutical company
Healthcare service providers
Manufacturers of medical devices and software
Manufacturer of consumables
Manufacturer of surgical and therapy equipment
Manufacturers of healthcare infrastructure (hospital equipment, etc.)
Health insurance companies
Doctors, pharmacies, and medical supply centres
Medical billing companies

The marketing focus represents a significant differentiation between doctors, pharmacies, and physician practices. While physicians usually do marketing to gain visibility with potential consumers, many companies, for example in pharmaceutical marketing, often deal with it to reach doctors, pharmacies, and healthcare services providers.

Added to this is the increasing relevance of marketing for healthcare:

66% of internet users look online for information about a specific disease or medical problem.
Approximately 7 %of all Google searches are health-related.
According to Google, search drives 3x more visitors to hospital sites compared to non-search.
There are 70,000health-related searches per minute, every day.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans (73%) obtain health-related information from the internet.

With increasing digitization in everyday practice, the relevance of digital formats and channels also increases. This is how the content marketing agency will become a digital sales partner now.

Healthcare marketing for doctors, pharmacies, and healthcare services providers

The healthcare market has long been dominated by outbound marketing efforts such as flyers, postal mailings, and articles or advertisements in professional journals. However, inbound marketing is more important than ever. 89% of patients actively research health-related topics before seeing a doctor. This research takes place primarily on the Internet using the Google search engine. At 49%, the majority of doctors are already actively researching relevant topics on the Internet. In the context of inbound marketing, content marketing for healthcare must deal with attracting potential customers or multipliers with relevant and needs-oriented content.

Content marketing in healthcare

Healthcare Content marketing is intended to attract potential customers or multipliers with relevant content. The aim is to win new customers, improve the brand image, increase awareness of a brand or a product and establish your own company as an expert and problem solver.

In contrast to classic advertising, no advertising message is communicated in content marketing, but valuable content is created for the respective target audience. For example, patients with chronic illness can benefit from information on how to mentally deal with their illness. Applying the same example to doctors, for example in pharmaceutical content marketing, a targeted article on the mental needs of certain patients can add value to the doctor’s treatment approach.

While healthcare companies like to talk about medical topics, it is often forgotten that doctors, for example, have needs that go beyond medicine. Even medically less relevant topics such as practice management or revenue cycle management can play a major role for the respective doctor and thus offer great added value. The credibility of the content created is particularly important in the healthcare sector. For example, medical information must be sufficiently supported by study results and experts to be credible and therefore relevant.

Three steps to successful content marketing in Healthcare

1. Identify relevant topics

The first step in healthcare content marketing in healthcare is to identify relevant topics for the respective target audience. Here it is usually not enough to look through the first ten search results from Google or to read what the medical journal currently considers relevant. To develop relevant topics and not just repeat known knowledge, in-depth web research, quantitative and qualitative evaluation of social media and direct exchange with the respective target audience is necessary.

2. Create well-researched content

When creating and preparing the content, the focus is clearly on the added value for the respective target audience. The more specifically a problem is tackled, the better the response from the target audience and the resulting perception as a problem solver and expert. An appealing graphic elaboration of the content and a writing style that suits the topic and the target audience are of course required.

3. Publicize content to the respective audience

To publicize the content to the respective target audience, the following marketing instruments are primarily used in the healthcare sector.

Healthcare content marketing agency

For companies in the healthcare sector, a content marketing agency often plays a central role in marketing and digital sales.

This not only provides content for patients, doctors, or even your own sales staff but also ensures that the digital interactions can be measured and evaluated.

While it is impossible to measure how many of the addressees have read a brochure that was sent by post, for content it can be precisely traced how many potential customers or multipliers read the content, interact with it, and where it comes from. In this way, content can be continuously evaluated and further adapted to the needs of the target audience.

Healthcare SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for healthcare, which deals almost exclusively with optimizing your content for the Google search engine, is a central marketing tool, especially for communication with patients. A large part of the sick population is actively looking for symptoms, therapies, and treatment approaches. Depending on the product or service, SEO can also play a pivotal role for businesses in generating leads.

Social Media in Healthcare

While target audiences such as doctors are difficult to separate from end users through SEO, social media such as LinkedIn offer effective and targeted targeting of the desired niche. For example, certain audiences of doctors can be specifically addressed and won as leads.

Healthcare seminars and white papers

A target customer may only be contacted by e-mail if he has consented to this. An effective way to gain opt-ins is to provide quality content in the form of downloadable white papers or online events and seminars. The more valuable the content in question appears to the target audience, the higher the likelihood that they will leave their email address and agree to be contacted with an opt-in.

Healthcare email marketing

Email marketing will remain one of the most relevant marketing tools. This applies in particular to communication between companies and doctors, pharmacists, and Healthcare services providers. Potential and existing customers can be reached via targeted e-mail campaigns and your positioning as an expert and problem solver in the market can be expanded.

How the success of content marketing in healthcare is measured?

As a rule, the success of content marketing measures in the healthcare sector is of course measured by the sales generated. However, this is often not directly attributable to marketing measures – this makes it difficult to show tangible results.

The biggest mistake in healthcare marketing

The biggest mistake in healthcare marketing is often losing sight of customer benefits. It is assumed that sales success can only be achieved if the products on offer are also discussed. What is forgotten here, however, is that the foundation of successful sales is always the trust of the customer. Trust in the salesperson, the brand, and the company! If you only spam your customers with advertising, you lose more trust than you gain.

TextProz is a leading partner agency of physician practice and healthcare services providers. Contact us for effective and robust healthcare marketing.

For more details visit our Medical Writing Service page.

Jim Frost

Jim Frost is an experienced content writer with a decade-long experience in helping businesses grow. He has written multiple articles on topics such as business, finance, technology, marketing, and more.