One of the foremost challenges within the healthcare industry is both attracting new healthcare consumers and retaining existing ones. A powerful way to achieve this is through strategic content marketing, specifically by creating high-quality, valuable content that captures Healthcare Professionals’ & patients’ attention and enhances your reputation amongst them.
Do you know 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing? Content marketing serves as a great tool for the Life Science & Healthcare industry to develop relationships by sharing valuable medical information with all healthcare consumers interested in expanding their knowledge. If done correctly, it will boost your awareness, generate leads and convert them into customers.
In this blog, we will outline healthcare content marketing, its types, and the best strategies to master it.
What is Healthcare Content Marketing
Healthcare content marketing is a powerful way to help Life Science & Healthcare brands to reach and educate Healthcare Professionals and patients through valuable and sharable online content. Some content examples are blog articles, infographics, case studies, videos, and newsletters. To emphasise the importance of content, understand that 81% of marketers view content as a core business strategy.
Content marketing within the life science companies like Pharma, Medical Device, biotech, etc., and the Healthcare sector is straightforward: It revolves around developing and sharing digital materials drawing in healthcare professionals and patients based on the stage of their customer journey. These resources not only increase awareness but also boosts trust and engagement.
However, in healthcare, content marketing isn’t merely about putting out generic information and waiting for healthcare professionals and patients to discover it. It demands crafting medical information, visuals, and stories that resonate specifically with these audiences, drawing them towards your offerings in an organic and non-intrusive manner.
Benefits of Using Content Marketing for the Healthcare Industry
Content marketing has numerous benefits; here, we outline a few, especially which Life Science companies like Pharma, Medical Devices, Biotec, etc. and the Healthcare sector can take leverage.
Strengthening Trust and Credibility
As patients and healthcare providers take a more active role in healthcare decisions by looking up on search engines insightful healthcare content. It becomes vital for healthcare organizations to provide reliable information sources. Content marketing enables these organisations to solidify their position as trusted authorities by delivering accurate, current, and pertinent healthcare information. By investing in your content marketing efforts and consistently publishing valuable content, it not only showcases its expertise but also converts online visitors into qualified sales leads.
Patient and Healthcare Providers Education
More precisely, content marketing plays a pivotal role in patient and healthcare providers’ education, offering insights about emergent health conditions, possible treatments, and prevention strategies. Healthcare content marketing is also a key factor for lead generation, as it enables you to increase online traffic and ultimately acquire new leads.
Boosting Search Engine Rankings
The healthcare field is big and important, so getting to the top of search results is tough. Using robust SEO strategies and good content can help healthcare brands show up higher in searches, which brings in more visitors.
Leveraging Online Reviews
Successful healthcare content marketing is often reflected in positive online reviews. In today’s digital age, where healthcare professionals and patients rely heavily on the internet for product exploration and educational content, reviews gain significant importance. Strategic content marketing usage can motivate more patients and healthcare providers to leave reviews about your healthcare business. These reviews, serving as user-generated content, can be highlighted on your website. Healthcare consumers often base their decisions on these reviews, which consequently influences the reputation of healthcare brands.
Types of Content Marketing
There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate into your strategy. Each type offers a unique approach to engaging healthcare professionals and patients, from in-depth online articles to visually compelling infographics.
Online Content Marketing
In Life Sciences and Healthcare, online content serves as the backbone for any engagement strategy. This type of marketing includes informative web pages, digital brochures, and ebooks. Tailored specifically for healthcare professionals and patients, it aims to provide relevant knowledge, highlight the latest research, and offer solutions to pressing health issues.
Social Media Content Marketing
Social media platforms offer a dynamic space to interact with Healthcare Professionals and Patients. Content on these platforms can range from timely updates on healthcare advancements and interactive Q&A sessions to sharing patient success stories. It’s a two-way street, enabling feedback, discussions and building community engagement.
Infographic Content Marketing
In healthcare, information often involves complex data, research outcomes, and intricate processes. Infographics simplify this complexity by transforming data into visually appealing and easily digestible formats. Infographics can help healthcare professionals understand complex medical research processes, and patients can better understand the treatment process.
Blog Content Marketing
Blogs provide an opportunity to delve deep into topics, share insights, and present thought leadership in Life Sciences and Healthcare. Whether it’s exploring a new medical breakthrough, offering health tips, or discussing policy implications, blogs serve as a platform to educate and engage both professionals and patients. Combining your content development strategy with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is also worth every effort. It will not only scopes the blog content marketing plan but will also help you achieve higher rankings in the search engine.
Video Content Marketing
According to Wyzowl, 91% of people want to see more online videos from brands in 2023. Videos offer a dynamic way to showcase procedures, explain complex topics, and share testimonials. For healthcare professionals, it can be a means to learn about new techniques, while for patients, it provides a more immersive understanding of their conditions or treatments. With their storytelling ability, videos resonate emotionally, making the content more memorable and impactful.
Paid Ad Content Marketing
Paid advertising in the life sciences and healthcare sectors can be a powerful tool to ensure your content reaches the right eye at the right time. Organisations can promote their services, products, or informational content directly to healthcare professionals and patients through targeted ads on search engines, social media platforms, and industry-specific websites. Whether it’s promoting a new medical device, a revolutionary treatment, or creating awareness about health campaigns, paid ads offer a direct route to a broad and engaged audience.
Content Marketing for Healthcare: Top Strategies
Even if content marketing is a powerful tool without a strategic approach, leveraging it for your own success can be challenging. Hence, here are a few steps to maximise content marketing for your organisation.
1. Identify Topics That Spark Interest
To get started with healthcare content marketing, it is essential first to understand what type of relevant topics would interest the target audience. For example, a healthcare company can opt for a traditional approach to gain insights into the target audience by running surveys.
This may enable a healthcare brand to gain relevant information and create personas of Healthcare providers and patients, which must be used when creating content marketing materials.
Another approach is to use tools such as Answer the Public or Semrush that enable healthcare organisations to explore relevant queries and topics that patients and healthcare providers are actively looking at on the search engine.
Content Competitive Analysis
A crucial phase in ensuring success in content marketing is the comprehensive competitive analysis. This process involves identifying your competitors and thoroughly understanding their content strategy, which allows you to differentiate yourself and aspire to differentiate your value proposition. The analysis also offers insights into your unique strengths and potential areas for improvement. Regularly conducting a competitor content analysis is vital to maintaining an up-to-date and competitive digital marketing strategy. When conducting your competitive content analysis, consider the following factors:
Identify Competitors
Generate a list of both direct and indirect competitors. The direct competitor offers identical products/services to your audience, while the indirect competitor presents similar solutions to the same customer problems differently.
Analyse Competitors’ Positioning
Examine each competitor’s core business. Focus on their brand positioning, product offerings, target audience, tone of voice, and messaging. Look at their SERP entries, meta titles, and descriptions.
Audit Competitors’ Content
Evaluate their content strategy by observing the main topics, subtopics, content types, and publishing frequency. Content types range from blog posts and webinars to case studies and infographics.
Study SEO Metrics and Strategy
Use SEO tools like SEMrush to analyse key metrics such as backlinks, domain authority, average time on site, keyword rankings, and organic search traffic.
Research Content Distribution
Understand how competitors’ organic & paid content is performing. Analyse their different social platforms for content distribution, like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In essence, competitive content analysis is crucial for a well-thought-out content marketing strategy. It allows you to measure your rivals’ strategies, identify successful tactics, benchmark your performance, and uncover potential areas of strength.
Targets Readers’ Specific Buying Journey Stage
Providing value and answering customers’ needs is only a part of the story. You should also target your customers’ specific buyer’s journey stage in each piece of content. Generally, the buyer’s journey has five stages: Awareness, consideration, decision, advocacy & retention. In the awareness stage, buyers are still researching their issues. In the consideration stage, they’re researching solutions. In the decision stage, they’re about to pick a provider.
Test With Different Content Formats
Now, let’s dive into the crucial cornerstone of content marketing: diversifying different formats. Switching between a range of platforms, from blog posts to video content and interactive content marketing materials, offers more creativity to your healthcare content without compromising your professional reputation. While healthcare content marketing can occasionally seem monotonous, integrating various content forms can instil creativity, reducing the risk of repetition. Implementing different types of content can diversify audience preferences and keep it fresh and engaging.
Examples of Healthcare Content Marketing
Here is an example of content marketing using a social media platform. This is an Instagram social media post from Johnson & Johnson educating about sleep from what they found in research. This is a great way to engage patients and obtain their personal health information.
Here is, for example, a blog post from also Johnson & Johnson outlining five things we now know about Peripheral Artery Disease. It is also a great way to engage the Healthcare audience by writing long-form blogs to engage web visitors by educating them.
Here, Hyperchildnet and Omoron Academy offer free educational training courses on healthcare content, for example, for medical professionals or if anyone is keen on following a course to acquire more medical content in general. Offering free materials, such as a training course, is an excellent way of applying content marketing.
Social Media Adverse Event Protocol
For Life Science and Healthcare companies, it is important to create adverse event protocol. Unfortunately, due to strict laws and regulations, Life Science companies cannot simply decide to use these channels. Issues such as side effects must be reported on time. If you use social media, you should remember that your reach continues beyond national borders. We recommend documenting current laws and regulations and including country- and region-specific regulations. Besides, all processes need to be mapped out and described correctly. Are there examples of when an adverse event does or does not occur? Who should report an adverse event, where and in what way? If you intent to create your own AE protocol, you can also go through our Checklist to support the process of creating AE protocol.
