Many healthcare providers are aware of the fact that providing blog posts or other forms of written content can greatly improve their search engine rankings in addition to their patient volume. Sadly, they don’t know the art of crafting optimized and engaging content. And with traditional marketing slowly fading away, it’s imperative to have a dialogue with your audience, and create loyalty and trust with them overtime. Remember that Google rewards sites with high-quality, original content.
Here are two important rules while creating engaging content:
These two points can keep you on the path of making engaging content that will yield returns for years to come besides helping you in other aspects of your business.
Now whether you’re a writer working for healthcare provider or a provider yourself, we are here to help you with these 11 tips for creating engaging content for your healthcare facility.
These fantastic tips on creating stellar health content will be actually loved by your readers!
Focusing on healthcare-related keywords and trending topics is important for two main reasons. First, it provides your readers with updated information. Secondly, it helps you in getting a ton of traffic to your website.
Pay attention to what competitors are writing about. Of course, you wouldn’t want to copy their content. However, seeing what other facilities are publishing can surely provide you with some vivid ideas for creating your own content.
The best tool to find the right keywords for free is Google Keyword Planner, though the hard work doesn’t end there. Besides using the proper keywords, you need to ensure that you are putting them in the right places and not simply stuffing them. It’s extremely important to use your keywords in your content title so that you can be easily found.
Facts make your content greatly readable and give your website equally greater credibility. They can be incorporated in different ways to help an article or blog post make a stunning impact on readers.
Here are some pointers while including facts into your content:
Try backing your claims with facts as this will help your content gain greater trust and integrity, which is of prime importance in the healthcare sector. Remember that you’re creating content that could impact the lives of readers. You owe them accurate and well-researched information.
Examples are important for creating content that readers can actually comprehend. For instance, just don’t tell them that maintaining a healthy lifestyle can help curb heart disease since “healthy lifestyle” is a vague term, which can have different meanings. Rather, get specific. Build a list of practices that readers should start implementing. For example, you might include things like reducing the amount of processed sugar they consume or getting regular cardiovascular exercise. Real-life applications and anecdotes can also be extremely helpful in driving home a specific point to your audience.
They might ignore the very fact that they’re at a risk for heart disease. However, when they read a similar story, it might motivate them to make lifestyle changes. Slowly, they start trusting your content and start building a brilliant rapport.
This tip goes beyond simply choosing words that are SEO-friendly-although that’s crucially important. It’s related to the language you describe the services offered by your facility. It’s all about understanding the language of your audience-not line items on a marketing spreadsheet. Building a buyer persona can assist you in proper understanding of who your readers are.
Most healthcare content describe their facilities with buzzwords like “cutting edge” or “advanced” while describing their services. However, patients are generally interested in words that are more applicable to them including “caring,” “compassion” and “patient-centric.”
As you create your own content, always keep in mind who you’re writing for and tailor your language to their needs and not merely focusing on bygone marketing ideals. Note your prospects are not brand loyalists. In fact, they are condition haters who are in dire need to find a solution on alleviating their health issues. So, the more quickly your content offers them solutions to cater to their requirements, the better.
Without any doubt, your staff is the most valuable asset to your facility and a powerful source of telling the story of your facility with a human face. Profile physicians, assistants, nurses, doctors and even caregivers on your website, newsletter, blog and your social media channels to paint a picture of the real people behind your organization.
As far as building a profile is concerned, you can share the personal story of your individual staff member at least once a week or month to discuss their experience at the hospital or some of their major highlights/achievements of working at the facility. It’s important to include a picture of the staff member as it makes your readers easier to connect with them and make their story greatly appealing.
Does your facility release a series of articles, videos or podcasts on a given subject consistently? If so, it’s wise to feature your staff members in these pieces of content to bring forth the full circle experience. It’s also best to feature the accolades and accomplishments of your staff to exhibit support and emphasize on how your team is doing great. Highlighting staff members in your content brings authenticity and originality, which is an important technique of building trust with your target audience in the long run.
Here’s an example of a fascinating video created on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) by The Baptist Medical Center Jaksonville.
In the healthcare industry, there is a consistent downpour of development, trends and news that can have an impact on your staff members in some way or the other. As a means of crafting original content or repurposing existing content, take a cognizant stance on the latest news story, trends or issues in your industry and publish the opinion in the form of an article, video, interview or other forms of media to get the opinion of your facility far and wide.
This is a productive way to create content and build a unique stance on an existing and relevant issue to your industry. An important point to note here is to lend your opinion only on issues or topics that you have expertise or authority on as it relates to the credibility of your organization.
Florida Hospital posted this engaging video on their doctor discussing a surgical procedure after Angelina Jolie caught attention of the operation among the general public. As a representative of the facility, the doctor discussed the procedure elaborately which happened to bring the organization to the limelight, while creating engaging content simultaneously.
Video has turned out to become one of the most important channels for telling a story to your target audience and can help build immediate credibility. Based on Smart Insights, approximately 83% of marketers are of the view that video is gaining prominence, and 53% of customers engage with a brand after watching a video on social media.
It’s best to create a strategy of programming, something similar to a TV series by featuring your services, staff, expertise, patients and any other important information that is unique to your hospital. The type of content professionals in the healthcare industry is privy to is immensely valuable in its allure to a huge, mainstream audience. We all know that some information in hospitals is extremely sensitive and private, but other insights and information could have a wide array of benefits for your facility while sharing with the public.
University Hospital has uploaded an interesting video featuring one of their patients, their condition and the surgery performed to help reverse their gymnastics injury. By sharing this magnetic recovery story in the form of a video as opposed to written content, it helped in illustrating the value of the hospital better as their audience came to know of the particular patient experience by listening to her voice, watch her explain everything and see her smile.
Hospitals can easily get unique access to experts and data related to their expertise directly and also from the strong relationships they foster with various university students studying and amassing information on the services they offer. Collect this information and include this in the form of an infographic on a specific topic related to your industry. Once you share this information and knowledge in a visual format, it somehow bolsters people to read, link and share to this resource most of the time. Infographics reduce information overload, are more engaging, accessible and increase the willingness to read by 80%.
The data for the infographcis can even be sourced online; however, it’s important to see that the information you use is accurate and updated. Some of the best online tools for creating infographics are Visme, Canva, Easel, Piktochart and Infogr.am. You can even consider hiring a freelancer or outsource it to an agency.
If a dentist decides to create compelling content about his services, he can highlight the negative effects of poor dental hygiene in a visually captivating way. This helps the dentist to better inform prospects of the pitfalls of not visiting a dentist regularly.
Healthcare facilities very often find difficulties on approaching social media effectively because of limitations and time constraints on content types that can or cannot be shared. A great source of engaging content that is completely free and worth sharing is the feedback you get from you audience on various social platforms. To do this effectively, browse your comments and wall posts on Facebook, mentions on Twitter and comments on your YouTube channel to name a few. By doing so, you can get excellent feedback that’s worth sharing among your fans, which can be done through a blog post, newsletter, video or other forms.
Here are some effective ways to gather feedback from social media:
Post a question to your followers via a status update. This way your business will be able to gather immediate feedback from your community about your services and products. You can then proceed to ask them if you could feature their story on your blog.
Not all your fans will be open to leave detailed and public feedback via replies or comments. Some keep it a low key affair. That’s when creating a survey can be the best solution for gathering patient feedback without spotlighting any patients in the process. The best free website to get you started is Survey Monkey. Once you create the survey, you can share the link via a status update.
Getting regular feedback from your partners and patients is of paramount importance for the success of your facility both offline and online. Surveys can assist in gauging the satisfaction of patients, determining the greatest concerns plaguing your organization and understanding how patients perceive your services.
Your organization does not always have to approach patients directly when asking for feedback. You can just monitor their engagement on your social platforms, indicating keeping a close eye on their sentiments, voice tone and key issues.
If used wisely, the feedback you get from social media can be used to create powerful and engaging conent.
E-books consist of long-form editorial content related to a particular subject that provides in-depth value compared to an article or blog post on account of their length and multitude of sources. These resources help in educating your target audience and providing value around a given subject. The advantage of a healthcare facility is that it can pull data from studies and experts that can be used to compile an eBook. An eBook can include topics ranging from the seven latest innovations in heart transplants to the impact of artificial intelligence on healthcare. A common determinant among these books is they help in generating leads to an organization’s website as they provide high-quality information along with value absolutely free. If you want to make your eBooks greatly effective, try gating the resources with a sign-up form that entails visitors to exchange their email or other contact details with the free resource.
Becker’s Hospital has created a list of eBooks related to patient safety, curing medical bill ills, turning raw data into actionable insights and more, and offers it for free by entering the reader’s name and email address.
Create a monthly, quarterly or annual online magazine about your hospital, services, seasonal updates and news. This will make your facility look like a publication and blaze the trail on providing high-quality content related to healthcare to your readers based on your expertise. Including a magazine can be a great aspect to your content strategy because of the frequency at which it’s released. As a result, your audience will start expecting it, similar to their much-loved TV program, if it’s released consistently based on the needs of the organization. Use information from your eBooks, infographics and blogs for your magazine and ensure to include a variety of unique content too. The magazine can be as extensive or minimal as your facility deems fit. But keep in mind that it has to provide a lot of value.
You can find some terrific ideas of creating a magazine by hovering to the magazine section of Asian Hospital & Healthcare Management. It gives visitors and patients information on wellness tips besides the latest happenings in the healthcare industry in the form of both images and texts.
Your’re Not Too Late to Start Creating Content
As a healthcare marketer, you have all the power to aid people through a complicated and frustrating time in their lives. Is your brand offering educational resources and telling stories that can inform and support your prospects? It’s never too late to begin. It’s super simple and free in most cases. So what are you waiting for?