When it comes to healthcare marketing, one of the most important things to do is connect with your patients and potential patients on a deeper level. Building a relationship and establishing trust is especially important for businesses focused on healthcare. So how can you successfully do this? Through content marketing for healthcare.
Establishing a content marketing strategy will allow you to increase engagement with your audience, reduce your spending on promotion, and increase awareness of your brand.
However, there are a number of myths associated with content marketing that are considered facts. We’re here to help you separate what’s true from what’s not so that you can see how content marketing will help make your business even more successful.
Myth #1: Social Media Isn’t Important
Many businesses tend to think that social media isn’t important for them or won’t provide much value, especially when discussing content marketing for healthcare. It’s common to believe that social media is only used by young, tech-savvy people, but at this point, that just isn’t the case. Social media is used by just about everyone, so as long as you know your audience, you’ll get value from using it.
In addition to this, being active on social media will help you make your business more visible to potential patients. Many businesses, particularly those in healthcare, feel that they can rely on organic search and paid traffic to reach potential patients, but you have to do more. Organic search and paid traffic will help you create greater brand awareness, but social media allows you to interact and engage with your audience. This will help patients get to know your business and build a sense of trust, both of which are cornerstones of content marketing.
You also can’t count on your audience to seek out your service and find it. Being indexed on search engine rankings takes significant time and effort, and even once your business is indexed, your website may not outrank your competitors’ websites. The algorithms used by search engines to determine rankings are also ever-changing, making it too unstable to place your entire marketing strategy upon. Finally, simply focusing on your website and how you can bring your audience to it doesn’t create a relationship or build trust. Potential patients will be familiar with your business and services, but this doesn’t create loyal, returning patients.
The bottom line is that interacting with your patients, or potential patients, on social media allows you to nurture a relationship with them over time. This is a very effective strategy for creating patients that will return to your business or recommend your business to others.
Myth #2: Content Marketing Doesn’t Work for all Businesses
Just as many businesses tend to think that social media won’t work for them, many businesses also believe that content marketing won’t work for their business. This is especially common when trying to determine the effectiveness of content marketing for healthcare. However, every business has the potential to find a way to make content marketing work for them.
Content marketing is all about telling stories. All you need to do is determine what story you want to tell and how to tell it. It’s also important to make sure that the content you create offers value to your audience in some way, whether through entertainment, education, inspiration, or something else along these lines.
You should also keep in mind that your content should be engaging because the goal of content marketing is engaging with your audience to build a relationship.
So as long as you’re telling the right story for your business, providing value to your audience, and engaging with them, you’ll gain plenty of value from your content marketing.
Myth #3: Once Your Content is Posted, You’re Done
A common, but untrue, thought when it comes to content marketing for healthcare is that once a piece of content is published, your work on the piece is done and you can move on to the next piece. While it’s entirely possible to get away with this, you’ll miss out on having a truly successful content marketing strategy if just publish then forget about it.
Wondering what’s left to do once your content is published? The answer is simple: monitor it. It’s important to monitor your content for insights that can help you improve your content marketing over time.
Monitoring your content might lead you to realize that certain pieces of content perform better than other pieces. Once you notice this, you can focus on figuring out why it performs better and you can replicate that in the future. Checking on the performance of your content will also reveal what isn’t working, so you can avoid that in the future. Doing this will allow you to focus only on content that will bring value to both your business and your audience, rather than wasting time on anything that isn’t working.
Optimize the content you create by making monitoring insights part of your content marketing strategy.
Myth #4: Content Marketing Can and Should be Completely Automated
Even once you’ve decided to implement content marketing into your healthcare marketing strategy, you’ll want to avoid automating too much of it. There are a lot of great tools that will help you automate your content marketing like SharpSpring and HubSpot, but it shouldn’t be entirely automated.
It’s great to use these platforms to help you segment your leads, schedule your social media posts, automate workflows, and more, but too much automation can make your content marketing feel impersonal. For example, the process of creating content should never be automated, in order to make sure it feels human and provides value to your audience. Even if you don’t have anyone on your team that can do this, it’s better to hire a professional that will do this for you than to automate it.
Overly automated, impersonal content will hinder your ability to establish a relationship and build trust with your audience, failing to accomplish one of the greatest goals of content marketing.
Myth #5: If You Can’t Directly Connect Your Content to Revenue, It’s Unsuccessful
When determining the value of your content marketing for healthcare, it can be almost impossible to directly link a specific piece of content to a purchase, but this doesn’t mean that it’s unsuccessful. This also doesn’t mean that putting effort into your content marketing isn’t paying off or that it’s a waste of time.
Content marketing provides value in a variety of ways like brand awareness, guiding purchases, and keeping your business top of mind. Increasing brand awareness makes your audience more likely to purchase your products or services. Content marketing can also help guide patients that are ready to make a decision but may be unsure of which service or treatment is best for them. Finally, producing consistent content also keeps your business top of mind for your existing patients. This ensures that they’ll recommend you to anyone they know in need of your services or return to your business themselves.
Regardless of whether or not you can directly tie pieces of your content marketing to revenue, it provides value by pushing customers toward purchasing
RESULTS ARE VITAL
Content marketing for healthcare can be just as successful as content marketing for any other business, so don’t ignore it! Implementing it into your overall marketing strategy will only provide you with greater value and better relationships with your patients.
However, we know that creating content isn’t easy, so if you feel that you need some help implementing a content marketing strategy, Vital Digital is here to help!
We provide digital marketing services including, but not limited to content marketing, search engine optimization, and website development. We also provide HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier consulting to ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible. Request a free quote today and let us know how we can help!