Healthcare Content Marketing: How to Come Up with Winning Content Ideas?

You have a game-changing healthcare brand, but your target audience doesn’t know it exists.

What can be done?

The answer is simple: Leverage content marketing. Create content that your audience wants to read.

Content Marketing Can Help You Differentiate from The Rest

Content marketing can help you make a long-lasting impact. It can help you increase brand awareness, build authority, overcome sales objections and generate leads and sales.

Unlike the traditional “Push marketing” strategy, content marketing focuses on building trust and adding value to the customers’ lives. Its main purpose is to educate the target audience, help them solve problems, and make well-informed decisions.?In healthcare, this also means following the applicable regulations, and guidelines when delivering content to your audience.

As per SEMrush’s content marketing report , 78% of companies that succeeded in content in 2021 had a documented content marketing strategy. A solid documented content marketing strategy can help you create impactful content but coming up with winning healthcare content ideas can be a challenge.

In this article, I cover six steps that healthcare businesses can follow to come up with winning content ideas.

6 Steps to Come Up with Engaging Content Ideas for Your Healthcare Business

Step 1 - Assess your business goals

Your first step when planning your healthcare content marketing strategy should be aligning the content production as per your company’s objectives and goals.?For this, your team should work towards achieving strategic clarity.

Start by crafting clear content marketing goals and objectives. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my company’s long-term?goals?
• What problems are we trying to solve?
• What outcomes do we want to achieve?
• Who will be involved in the process?
• What role will each stakeholder play in the overall content strategy?
• What is the company’s content marketing budget?

Step 2 - Create a customer-centric content strategy - Learn what your target audience wants

After defining your goals and objective, develop customer personas for your target audience. Providing content that is useful to your target audience is a sure-shot way to increase engagement.

Healthcare content marketing can have business-to-consumer (like patients), as well as business-to-business audiences (like investors, hospitals, and healthcare companies). Reach out to your audience and learn about the questions and challenges they have. Next, analyze how you can address them using your content - see what unique value proposition your brand or service can provide.

Understanding the customer’s psychological triggers and implementing them in your strategy can help increase brand trust. Make sure to plan the content as per the stage of the buyer's journey. Also, decide on the content distribution platforms as per your target audience.

Some ways to understand your customer’s needs and challenges include:

• Using community platforms, surveys, and customer interviews.
• Understanding customer feedback patterns– is there a customer problem that is popping up again and again?
• Liaising with your customer-facing teams – These teams can be a powerful source to get customer insights and feedback.

One thing to note when carrying out such exercises is that never store or share any sensitive personal or medical information about your customer.

Step 3 - Review the latest industry happenings and trends

The next thing you can do is review the latest happenings and trends in your industry. Staying up to date with the latest healthcare research and trends is a must for any company to succeed.

Review authoritative websites in your industry that publish the latest happenings and market trends. This can be a new drug approval, a novel medical device, or a ground-breaking discovery. Check what would be of interest to your customers. You can involve your scientific/technical team in this step to check for facts and relevancy.

Now, use topic research tools to come up with a list of topic ideas around the latest industry news and trends. Next, search for the best keywords.

The goal should be to build expertise on a specific topic and niche (authority content) to empower your audience.

Step 4 - Audit your competitors - Differentiate to succeed

Conducting a healthcare competitive landscape can help you identify your competitors and their marketing strategies. This exercise can help you get an idea of what’s working well in your sector. The goal here is not to copy but to build authority, differentiate and succeed.

Generate a list of your direct and indirect competitors and analyze their content strategy. Check what content formats and channels they are using, and which categories they focus on. Analyze their content quantity and quality. Check the engagement levels. See which content gaps you can fill.

Step 5 - Ask the expert – Consult authoritative sources and subject matter experts

With healthcare information, quality and reliability are always at the forefront. Google ensures that the healthcare information it displays is accurate, up-to-date, and from a reliable source.?Google uses the Expertise–Authoritativeness–Trust (E-A-T) factors when deciding how to rank content in the search engine results pages. Avoid information that contradicts well-established expert consensus, is debatable, and is unverifiable. For example, content encouraging people to lose weight in unhealthy ways.

Seeking ideas and answers from authoritative sources and medical professionals should be your go-to strategy.?Leverage expert medical writers to create your healthcare content. If that is not possible get the content reviewed and verified by medically qualified experts. For example, if it’s a blog on “What are the 5 warning signs of breast cancer?”, get it reviewed by a breast cancer specialist.

Step 6 - Experiment with different formats

Content marketing using multiple channels and formats is more effective than initiatives using only a single medium.

Blogs, videos, and success stories are the top content formats in healthcare.

Apart from these popular formats, you can use infographics, and downloadable pdfs (checklists/e-books/guides) in your content plan.

The Key to Healthcare Content Marketing Success

Success in healthcare content marketing depends on how well you understand your customer’s needs and your company’s goals, what quality standards you follow, and your creativity.?

With the right strategies, content marketing can differentiate your healthcare business from the rest and help you earn your audience’s trust.

So, when should you start it?

The right time is right now!

NMR MedComms is a medical writing agency that helps pharma, biotech, and healthcare industries with high-quality medical content. We combine medical expertise with the right creative solutions to help our clients achieve their content marketing objectives. Get in touch to discuss more.

www.nmrmedcomms.com