Regardless of industry, content marketing is essential to attracting quality leads and establishing your business as an authority. But, companies in the healthcare space are uniquely positioned to attract potentially massive amounts of traffic.
According to a Pew Internet survey, the third most popular activity people do online is check for answers to health questions. In other words, there are more than one billion health-related searches every day on Google alone.
With all that traffic, there are millions of people searching for answers to their health-related questions. Therefore, content marketing and healthcare go hand in hand. However, writing content to answer those questions is no light task. Depending on the condition, misinformation, or poorly written content a reader’s health condition could potentially worsen.
In this blog, learn about the responsibilities of content marketing in the healthcare space and the best practices for healthcare content marketing.
The Responsibility That Comes With Fusing Content Marketing and Healthcare
The content your business publishes online is very likely to be read—especially, if it contains detailed information about common health problems.
A Philips study found that 1 out of 10 people believe that web-based health information has saved their lives. Had those people not found that information, they could be severely incapacitated or even dead.
Therefore, content marketing and healthcare have a vital role to play, providing accurate, accessible information that will direct people to a physical doctor if need be. Increasingly, people want to avoid making a trip and paying for a visit to the doctor because they think they can self-diagnose and self-treat.
In reality, the internet contains so much information that people can sometimes self-diagnose and recover without the aid of a certified doctor. But, that is not always the case.
Content marketing and healthcare should always respect the limits of the diagnosis process. If the content cannot give 100% reliable methods of diagnosing a condition, a recommendation should be made that the reader visit a doctor. In other words, give people the knowledge to know when they should and should not see a medical professional.
Targeting the Right People With Your Healthcare Content Marketing
Even though millions of people search for health-related answers on the internet every day, those searches are distributed across tens of thousands of different health conditions.
If your business writes a content piece about back pain and pushes it to people who have frequent headaches, they won’t care. After all, if their backs are perfectly fine, why would they read content about diagnosing back pain that they don’t have?
Instead, your business should create buyer personas with different conditions that your healthcare business treats. Based on those buyer personas, content should be written that caters to each of them. That content can then be pushed to people who look like your buyer personas.
But, your business cannot always know who has what symptoms. So, how do you correctly target people with content that fits their needs? Target people whose lifestyles result in injuries that you treat.
For example, if your business specializes in treating back pain, you are not limited to targeting people who openly have back pain. Instead, you can target people whose lifestyles lead to specific injuries and conditions. For example, to target your back-pain-related content to the right people, you could target content to cyclists.
Over time, more than half of cyclists will develop lower back pain because of the hunched position they sit in for hours. Therefore, if you target your content to cyclists, you have a good chance of attracting their attention and bringing them to your website.
Regardless of what type of injury or condition your business treats, create buyer personas and target your content to people whose lifestyles commonly lead to the condition you feature.
Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Healthcare Content
Once you have your buyer personas made and targets solidified, you still need to choose the right keywords to funnel your target audience to your content. Even if you write the best, most accurate content on a health issue that someone has, they will never find it in their organic searches unless it includes the right keywords.
However, when choosing keywords, do not fall into the same trap that so many companies do in content marketing. The majority of companies all chase the top 20% of keywords. They are keywords that have massive amounts of search volume but an even larger amount of competition. Because they have their sights set on top-shelf keywords, they end up ranking far lower than the first search engine results page (SERP) and get next to no traffic.
On the other hand, you can get better results by ranking for many different, less popular keywords. Because these keywords don’t have as much traffic, there is not as much competition. But, if you can rank on enough of those keywords, their cumulative traffic can exceed the traffic you would receive by ranking on a few highly competitive keywords.
We like to use the skyscraper analogy. If you look at a city skyline, chances are that you only notice the skyscrapers. After all, they are the biggest, most impressive buildings. In this case, they represent highly competitive keywords.
But, look below the skyscrapers, and you will see the thousands of smaller buildings that make up the bulk of the city. Although they don’t get the same spotlight that the skyscrapers do, they make up the majority of the city. In this scenario, the smaller buildings represent the smaller, less popular keywords.
By writing content to rank for many small keywords, you have a higher chance of ranking and attracting traffic to your website. Once you have written enough content, your business starts to establish itself as an authority in Google’s eyes. Once you have a good enough domain authority, you too can begin attacking those more significant, more competitive keywords.
Content Marketing for Your Healthcare Business
While healthcare businesses have special requirements for their content, they also have a unique opportunity to attract traffic. However, the healthcare space is extremely competitive, meaning you need to nail your content to rank highly. To do so, we recommend that you:
- Ensure that you publish high-quality, accurate content.
- Create buyer personas for the treatments you offer.
- Write content that appeals to those buyer personas.
- Target your content to people whose lifestyles naturally lead to specific injuries and conditions.
- Incorporate small keywords into your content to rank highly on many different SERPs and to build your domain authority.
With that said, perfecting every element on that list takes years of experience and marketing know-how. In addition, hiring the right employees to make a successful content marketing campaign work is often very expensive. Therefore, we recommend that you use a team-based approach for your marketing.
With a team-based approach, you get access to a large team of full-time, experienced marketers, but without the cost. When you partner with us, you save at least 40% compared to any traditional marketing alternative while receiving better marketing results.
If you want to partner with an agency with a proven track record of content marketing for healthcare, click here to learn more.