Content Marketing Tips and Trends for Healthcare Professionals, Part 1

Join us for a monthly series on social media trends, ideas to address hot topics and other content marketing tips for healthcare professionals. Each month, you'll find insights designed to guide hospitals and health systems in maximizing content investments and optimizing marketing outcomes.

True North Custom has always been passionate about sharing our key learnings with marketing leaders who are working to drive consumer engagement and patient acquisition priorities. There’s a shift happening in healthcare content marketing, making it a more effective and critical strategy than ever. To help hospitals and health system marketers maximize their efforts, we’ve decided to start a monthly content series focused on content marketing tips for healthcare professionals.

In this first installment, you’ll learn about an evolution in how content is promoted on social media, Alexa as a marketing research tool and this month’s hot button topic for blog and social engagement.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Many healthcare lead generation campaigns executed on social media are purely lead generation strategies intended to capture attention and drive to a conversion landing page. COVID-19 putting a strain on healthcare budgets makes it more and more challenging to justify a hard-sell approach to healthcare lead generation. As a result, marketers are consolidating their content marketing efforts with their growth marketing efforts. What does this mean? Well, instead of using content to engage and entertain, it’s now also being used to convert. Topics are getting more specific and more actionable, and are designed to encourage behavior change and clinical interventions, while still being engaging and entertaining. Easy needle to thread, right?

Here’s a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

• Bites and rashes—what to watch out for and when to seek telemedicine advice, urgent care or head to the emergency center.
• Surgical solutions for GERD? It’s not just heartburn and there really is relief!
• Weight loss surgery options at 200, 400 and 600 pounds.
• Hurricane preparedness—get comfortable with telemedicine, first aid basics and healthy non-perishable food choices.

Furthermore, more and more marketers are adopting Instagram as an advertising channel to tap into the growing audience and high volume of brand interactions per user. Proven effective strategies include using paid and organic strategies, a link in bio app that provides a good user experience and relying primarily on stories for content promotion. In paid Instagram strategies, the targeting and reporting available is just as robust as paid Facebook. You can even link the two platforms to be even more efficient.

ALEXA

Amazon really does everything now, especially for advertisers! Alexa.com, an Amazon company, now provides an alternative to digital marketing tools like SEMrush and Spyfu. Alexa is now providing marketers with tools to help do competitive research, SEO analysis and even audience analysis.

Building off the data that Amazon has been collecting—while plugging into sources such as Google Analytics—Alexa is able to help compile and produce insights that can have immediate impacts on marketing strategy. The key is knowing how to connect this data to effective content planning and campaign strategies (or having partners like True North who can lead you in the right direction).

For most brands, the biggest win is simply in Alexa’s ability to help better understand your customers. Similarly to how Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter operate, Amazon has been collecting data on their consumers for years, building a database that will provide them with unique insights into individual users, and even large audience segments.

TOP TRENDING TOPIC

We promise that this isn’t going to be a COVID-19 series. But, this month, steroids and coronavirus have been showing up in a big way in search trends across the country. Do steroids help treat COVID-19 symptoms? Do they actually have adverse effects on the patient? Depending on clinical trials happening at your organization, or the stance of clinicians leading the charge against COVID-19 for your teams, you have an opportunity to be a leading voice in your community. Consumers are turning to hospitals and health systems for health information now more than ever. Educating them on critical topics like this will position your brand as a trusted guide on their healthcare journey.

Here’s how you might structure your article:

• Title: Breaking down steroids as a potential treatment for COVID-19 symptoms
• Key questions to answer: Has prednisone been tested against COVID-19? Can a steroid shot help for a respiratory infection? Can prednisone mask an infection or a fever?
• CTA: What to do if you’re experiencing symptoms of COVID-19

We hope you found this month's piece on content marketing tips for healthcare professionals useful. Look for more trends, tools and other insights next month! 

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Jane Crosby