With the high rates of misinformation about health and people turning to the internet to get their health information, diagnosis and treatment it is important for health businesses to churn out health contents not just for marketing purposes but also to educate the public and guide them towards making better health choices.
What is content marketing?
Is a form of marketing that involves sharing content relating to your business in form of articles, videos, social media content, podcasts, etc
Goals of content marketing
- Creating awareness
- Generating traffic
- Generating new leads
- Customer Education
- Customer retention and loyalty
The content creation process
- Know your audience/ customers: this is the first step because knowing who you are creating content for guides you on what type of content you should be creating. Read our article on branding. It will help you get started the right way.
- Map the content to the sales cycle: Lets face it, you are not just creating content because you love to. It is part of the process to close the sale and retain customers. Before creating you need to know which content works for each stage of the process. The content you need to create to raise awareness about your business is not the same type of content you need for people who have already used your service or bought your products.
- A practical example of this is, you are a cardiologist with your own practice. You want to start raising awareness about your practice. You need to start creating content around the importance of getting your heart checked regularly.
- When you have a pool of patients who have consulted with you, the type of content they need is information about their condition, their treatment plans, emerging treatment, etc.
- Create the content: Most people get stuck in this phase, maybe you have an idea on what content you should create but you have no idea how to start. We advise you to just start, do not wait until it is perfect, do not overthink the process. People are after the value, not the aesthetics.
- Remember “constant creating helps you get better”
- Promote content: What is great content if it does not get seen by the people it was created for? Promoting could be free or paid. Just make sure you are on the right platforms. You can read our blog about How to choose which social media platform to use for your business to help you get started.
- Measure and analyze: this step is important because it helps you track your progress, gives you an overview as to what is working and what is not. It helps you make decisions as to hat area you should be spending more time and resources on.
Easy ways to start creating health content
- Focus on quality and not quantity: whether you are creating for your vlog, blog, social media, etc it is common for you to hear: post consistently, show up everyday, etc. However, showing up everyday with shallow content will do more harm than good for your brand. Show up with well thought out content.
- Keep it simple, stupid: health professionals tend to go throw out medical terminologies when talking or writing in their element. Remember when creating content, you are not doing it for yourself but for your patients/audience. That being said, always create with them in mind. Explain things in simple relatable language that is easy to understand.
- Do not start what you can not sustain: Showing up daily can be challenging and sometimes unrealistic, especially when you wear multiple hats in your business.
- Do not start showing up everyday or 5 times daily if you can not sustain. A more realistic way to help you be more consistent is to alternate the days you post out content. Ensure all your content checks off one of the goals of your content marketing. Another option is to batch create all your content in advance. We will talk about this in detail next time.
- Fact check: while creating health content, before you post your content for public viewing make sure that all your information is updated practice. Check for errors because as a health business creating and putting out content, people read your content and make decisions about their health.
- Just start: overthinking and shooting for perfection hinders you from hitting your content marketing/ business goals. Start creating and refine as you go.
There are so many benefits of content marketing for your health business. However, the content you create helps to make a lot of people live better lives. Keep Creating!
