Believe it or not, blogging should be an integral piece of your healthcare content marketing strategy. If you’re in the healthcare industry, it’s important to understand how potential patients make medical decisions in this day and age in order to tailor your content strategy.
Simply putting advertisements on Google or having an informative website is no longer enough to build trust with your target audience, and create a loyal patient base. Why is that? We’ll tell you.
Although blogging may seem like a secondary thought to healthcare professionals, there is no denying that consistent blogging should be a pillar in your healthcare content marketing strategy. Before we dive in, let’s cover the basics.
What is healthcare content?
The easy answer: it’s content about healthcare. But on a deeper level, healthcare content can be any educational or informational content that you publish online. This can include web pages on your company’s website, social media posts, or relevant and timely blog content.
The purpose of content marketing is to attract your target audience by creating content that will potentially interest them. Once you have their attention, they are more likely to interact with your brand. But in order to grab their attention, your target audience first has to see your content — more on that later.
Now that we’ve established what healthcare content is, here is how blogging can take your healthcare content marketing efforts to the next level.
The benefits of blogging for healthcare providers
When consumers are looking into potential healthcare providers — whether they’re researching or simply searching — they want to engage with a brand they feel they can trust and that appear to be knowledgeable about their craft. This is where blogging can set your practice apart from the rest. Here are some of the key benefits of integrating blogging into your healthcare content marketing strategy.
1. Blogs optimize organic search engine results
Patients may not know that they need your services until something is wrong — so it is crucial that they are able to find your business information FAST. The best way to be seen online is to utilize an SEO-driven content strategy. Any content that you publish online should be optimized for SEO keywords to improve the likelihood of search engines like Google making your content visible to users.
Blogs are a great way to publish long-form content, which is favored by most search engines. For example, in our case study written about our healthcare client Complete Care, we discuss how helpful blogs seized valuable SEO opportunities and increased rank on Google, which resulted in more users interacting with the brand.
Healthcare is an incredibly competitive market, but if search engines make it easier for potential patients to find your content, they will be more likely to choose to interact with your practice.
2. Blogs enhance the patient experience
When patients are searching for a healthcare provider, they are looking for a doctor or a clinic that looks credible and trustworthy. You want potential patients to see your content and think, “Wow, they really know what they’re talking about!” In order to do this, you need to have content that centers around thought leadership by answering questions that patients may be searching for online. An easy and effective way to go about this is with regular, high-quality, SEO-driven blogging.
Blogging establishes credibility by providing your patients with a reliable resource that can help them to make an informed decision. If your blog content is educational, the patient can walk away with scenarios in which they can utilize your services and become aware of what types of treatments they may receive at your practice.
3. Blogs can increase in-person and online leads
At the end of the day, you utilize healthcare content marketing to bring more patients into your medical practice. However, users rely heavily on trust when choosing a healthcare provider. Aside from Google reviews and general word-of-mouth, your content can become a space where your expertise and brand personality shine through.
The idea that blogging can help a user learn more about your brand and your practice revolves around the ability to build trust. When visibility and trust are combined, the user will begin to see your content as a useful resource. For in-person traffic, this can position your practice as the healthcare professional they should choose to turn to if they need care. For online leads, they may bookmark your blog or save a link to look back to. This can increase traffic back to your website, boosting your content’s performance online, and allow your blogs to be seen by more people.
Your blogs can empower consumers to make decisions that can have a healthy impact on their lives, and position you as a thought leader with a loyal patient base.
4. Blogs can promote your practice’s services and announcements
New and exciting discoveries are prevalent in the medical field. Whether there is a new FDA-approved product or a groundbreaking procedure, blogs can be a great tool to advertise what your practice can offer to its patients.
For example, in May of 2022, Eye Center of Texas announced that they were the first ophthalmology practice in Houston to provide the recently FDA-approved EVO Visian ICL implantable lens. Through optimized and relevant webpage and blog content, they were able to rank highly on Google for anyone searching for information about this groundbreaking procedure. The absence of optimized blogs in this strategy could have stunted the website traffic, and therefore the qualified leads, related to this huge opportunity.
How can healthcare marketing be improved?
To sum up the section above, blogging can help you to increase your rankings on search engines, increase traffic to your website, build trust with users, and bring in more potential patients to your practice. However, understanding how to blog effectively is the key to a successful blog strategy.
Anyone can blog, but not everyone can blog well. There is more that goes into effective blogging than simply writing and publishing healthcare content. Your website’s blogs need to achieve three objectives in order to inspire leads and be ranked highly on search engines:
- The information needs to be relevant
- The information needs to be up-to-date
- The information needs to be helpful
One way to improve the quality of your content is to complete a website audit. This can include skimming through old web pages and seeing what can be updated or rewriting older pieces with updated SEO keywords and information. Keeping your content relevant and useful will keep it in favor of the search engines, and not buried beneath your competitors.
If you’re unsure where to start or how to improve your own brand’s marketing strategies, partnering with a digital agency that specializes in healthcare content can be beneficial.
Baal & Spots can help you to implement an effective healthcare content marketing strategy
Baal & Spots is a results-driven, full-service digital marketing agency that has experience developing successful healthcare content marketing strategies for multiple healthcare providers including Eye Center of Texas, Kaplan Sinus Relief, and Complete Care.
Our team will come up with a healthcare content marketing strategy that is unique to your medical practice, frequently develop optimized blog pieces to drive rank on search engines, and rewrite old pieces of content to keep them relevant and fresh. We create content that is rooted in thought leadership and aims to establish credibility for your brand. Together, we can help your practice stand out amongst the steep competition.
Ready to upgrade your healthcare content marketing? Let’s connect.