Your Guide to Finding a Healthcare Content Marketing Agency

Content marketing is the marriage of creating quality information and helping it reach the right people at the right time. Find out how your healthcare system can use high-quality content from an expert agency to bring traffic to your website through evidence-based, empathy-driven content writing.

How Healthcare Content Marketing Works

Let’s do a bit of roleplay here. Suppose you’re a person in their mid-fifties living in Wisconsin who has severe, persistent pain in their shoulder. They know they need to treat it, but they’re not sure where to go to get the best treatment option for them—so, they turn to Google.

Here are the results they find when they type the phrase, “shoulder arthritis treatment near me,” into Google:

There are localized, informative results with multiple treatment options on page one.

Think about the person searching for this. They’re likely in the early phases of looking for treatment. Google understands that people have unique health issues, so it wants to offer relevant, unique solutions to help them find what they need.

Why Do Healthcare Organizations Need Content Marketing?

The reason your healthcare organization needs a content marketing strategy partner is simple: People prefer to look for answers to their health problems themselves before they get a hospital involved.

While they should still work with a doctor to find the correct diagnosis for their conditions, providing content about the conditions your service lines address helps them feel more informed. As a result, they’ll view your organization as a source of expertise and come to you when they’re ready for elective surgery or other high-value services you offer.

How to Use Content Marketing for Healthcare

Content is at the heart of how you can engage with a wide, dedicated audience of potential patients in your area. These are some common ways you can use empathy-based, data-driven content to promote your healthcare organization.

Using Patient Empathy to Market Your Healthcare Services

Chances are, your patients are searching for possible solutions and diagnoses to treat conditions they know they can’t treat on their own. By researching your patients and the reasons they’re looking for your help, you can help them directly address the problems they’re facing.

This same concept applies to businesses and organizations that support healthcare systems. Content marketing for B2B healthcare businesses is all about offering solutions and expertise that hospitals and clinics need to focus on serving their patient populations—whether that means providing medical supplies or locum tenens physicians at short-staffed organizations.

The key to effective content writing and marketing is to address these problems directly, so you bring more of the right kind of traffic for your healthcare services.

Promoting Your Organization’s Service Lines

Whether it’s digital or in print, content marketing allows you to bring more patients into your most valuable service lines. No matter if you offer major procedures to improve quality of life such as foot or ankle surgery or cosmetic procedures like bariatric or LASIK surgery, content marketing lets you show your patients you offer these services so they know they can receive treatment near them.

It also pays to find the keywords your patients are using when they look for your services. Understanding the available keywords—and whether they’re achievable based on their specificity—can help your content marketing strategy achieve better results.

Parts of a Good Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

Target Audiences

It’s important to know who you’re trying to market your service lines to, first and foremost. Every group you’re targeting will have different sets of needs and concerns they want to address when they come to you, so understanding who they are is essential.

For example, a 60-something grandfather who’s been dealing with arthritis in his knees will have a very different set of needs and ways of looking for information than his daughter who is getting ready to have her first child and is looking for an obstetrician to provide prenatal care.

While you might use a similar brand voice, you likely won’t talk to these two audiences in the exact same way—so it’s essential to know who they are, and how they consume information or look for solutions.

Helpful Content to Answer Patient Questions

Your patients are looking for direct answers. Providing information and solutions through your content allows your brand to stand out and build credibility as a resource and potential option for treatment when they’re ready to address their problems.

However, there’s a balance to strike with this—you’ll want to make it clear to your website visitors that your content is not a substitute for medical advice. Your legal team can help you craft the language for this.

Content Across All Media

A good content marketing strategy or service partner will also provide more than just blog posts. While they are still important for attracting visitors to your site, content writing also encompasses long-form content like infographics, video content, and more.

While you don’t necessarily need to create a feature-length film about your service lines or have your doctors write an entire book on your service lines, producing a diverse variety of content allows you to capture all the different ways patients want to learn about you.

Equal Parts Creation and Distribution

The adage, “If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t quite apply to content marketing.

Distributing your content is just as important as creating it in the first place—if not even more so. While publishing your content to your website might allow it to bring in a few visitors with the right keywords, it’s important to make sure people know it exists. Your distribution and promotion strategy might include:

• Adding links to your content from other parts of your website
• Promoting it on your social media channels
• Including links to your written content in your marketing emails
• Incorporating QR codes linking to your content

There are very few places where you shouldn’t promote your content, as it will help bolster Google’s algorithm while the piece is still new.

Emphasis on Conversions

Every piece of content you create should have an established purpose—even if that purpose is just for your visitors to keep reading more content.

“Converting” can have multiple meanings, depending on your desired goals for your content. Here are some of the most common goals for conversions you might use:

• Subscribing to your marketing emails
• Downloading another piece of content
• Submitting on a form
• Scheduling an in-person consultation
• Clicking to call
• Reading the content itself

These aren’t the only examples, either—almost any action relating to making your website visitors into leads and guiding them down the path to purchase can qualify as a conversion.

SEO for Healthcare

Why are we discussing SEO in an article that’s supposed to be about healthcare content marketing? Because the content itself is only half of the equation for digital healthcare marketing. Your content strategy won’t attract new patients without SEO, and your SEO strategy won’t get very far without quality content.

How to Use SEO to Spread Your Content

SEO allows you to distribute your content to the masses who are searching for the conditions you treat and services you provide through the keywords you use. For healthcare organizations, on-page and off-site SEO are essential for this.

On-Page SEO for Healthcare

On-page SEO mainly refers to the content directly on your website pages. Some common examples of improving on-page SEO include adding relevant and targeted keywords to the copy on your pages, page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and other signals that tell Google about what’s on your site so it can bring your content to people searching for health-related questions.

Content writing plays a key role in having robust on-page SEO. Your website pages need well-written content to convey your services and medical expertise around common conditions to people who read them. Incorporating keywords into that content and having your physicians review it as experts in their field is just as essential, as it allows Google to show your pages to its users as results and possible solutions.

Off-Site Healthcare SEO

Off-site SEO refers to the tactics you use to optimize your healthcare brand’s presence on platforms you don’t own. While off-site SEO isn’t as easy to control as your website content, it’s incredibly valuable because it helps your business build credibility with search engines. Common tactics for improving off-site SEO include:

• Link building: Link building is the process of building relationships with other legitimate websites, including blogs, healthcare directories, and insurance websites, so they will provide links back to your site to improve its credibility with search engines. The process can take time, but it can make a massive difference in how your pages rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), where your patients will see you among the top websites in their area.

• Using social media: This includes both posting regularly and including links to your website in your organization’s social media profiles. Encouraging your satisfied patients to review on social media sites or your various Google My Business listings can also support your off-site SEO tactics.

• Brand monitoring: Whether you use a brand monitoring tool or hire an agency to help you with the work, this helps you track what people are saying about your brand and where on the internet there are links to your site.

Our Services: Work with the Best Healthcare Content Marketing Agency

Anyone who has tried writing strong, authoritative marketing content for their clinic or hospital knows how hard it is—especially when you’re trying to handle all other aspects of your internal and external marketing strategy on top of it. That doesn’t include any other factors like distribution or the time it takes to build a strong baseline for SEO.

However, content writing can be a worthy investment when you have those baseline strategies in place. That’s where we can help.

At Avalanche Creative, we specialize in developing data-driven healthcare content marketing and SEO strategies that help your system attract high-value patients.

Message us today to learn more.

Evidence-Based Healthcare Content Marketing Strategies

At Avalanche Creative, we create evidence-based content marketing and search engine optimization plans for healthcare organizations that are easy to execute, no matter the size of your marketing department. Our process removes the mystery from marketing for healthcare providers and offers a watertight plan for SEO and content strategies that drive more traffic, attract more patients, and build your brand authority.

Our healthcare content marketing services mitigate the risk of bad investments in search engine optimization. We reduce these risks by researching and planning more thoroughly than anyone else, using data science to drive our creative content. We also ensure your SEO and content marketing strategies are viable for your organization.

Other Healthcare Marketing Resources

For healthcare companies of all types, your patients and healthcare customers are more likely to look for your services when they need them to solve problems. Therefore, it’s essential to establish brand awareness early in their journey. That way, they’ll be more likely to seek you out when they need you. Outside of content marketing and SEO, this includes:

• Paid search, also known as search engine marketing (SEM)
• Email marketing
• Social media advertising
• Network marketing

Bring More Patients to Your Service Lines

Ready to establish relationships with your patients by investing in content marketing and SEO strategies? Connect with us today.