Content Is King, but Why Isn’t It Enough?

Does your brand need more digital content to stay relevant and engaging?

Do you lack the quality content that aligns with your brand communication and supports your vision for growth?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you are not alone. If you are reading this, you already know that content is critical to support an effective digital marketing strategy for healthcare organizations, whether yours has a B2B or a B2C focus. While the creation of effective content is critical for today’s digital environment, it requires planning, and writing content alone isn’t enough.

Here are four tips for taking a more strategic approach to creating effective content:

Tip No. 1: Know Your Audience

It might sound basic, but before you write content, challenge yourself (or your team or practice) to clearly answer these questions:

• Who reads our content, or who do we want to read our content?
• What will compel people to read our content?
• What do we want readers to take away or do after engaging with our content?

When planning to write content about your hospital system or practice, understand what type of information your customers, patients, employees or physicians want to read.

Tip No. 2: Develop Strategic Communications

You’ll need to develop a content plan based on a clear platform or theme. Consider developing content based on two to three themes that support your organization’s story or purpose. For example, a theme might be keeping people healthy. Using this overarching theme allows for the development of a framework for your content. In this example, supporting content could focus on areas such as wellness tips, patient success stories and a community angle.

Creating these topic areas that ladder up to a core theme will help with building out strategic communications. It is essential to be flexible with your content plan to address unexpected topics that arise either at your practice or hospital system or a sentiment that has suddenly taken hold about such things as a new regulation or acquisition.

Tip No. 3: Marketing Your Content

Creating and posting content doesn’t automatically lead to people reading it. Rather, you need to put marketing into content marketing. In order words, clearly answer the key question: How will customers find your content?

Here are some core digital marketing tactics that will help people find your content — and ultimately your practice or health benefit plans.

Website and SEO

Content works hand in hand with SEO — especially when fresh content is regularly posted on your website in a blog or news section. Posting content on your site will support your SEO strategy to help your organization, clinic or practice rank better within search engine results. With this in mind, it’s important to identify the keywords your customers are using in their searches. The content developed should be optimized for these keywords, whether it is “best medicare advantage plans in Illinois” or “best orthopedic doctors in Atlanta.” Remember, more than 90% of search traffic is directed to sites ranking on page one of the search engine results. The right content supports this.

Email and Social Media

Email is one of the most effective digital channels. Highly relevant and helpful content should be developed and shared versus purely self-promotional content. Repost content developed for your website’s blog and email on social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Tip No. 4: Measurement

While you are focused on content creation and marketing, remember before you put your plans in motion to establish how you will measure the success of the content you are creating. For your website, key metrics might include visits, likes or time on page, as well as search engine rankings. With email it might be open rates. With social, we advise against collecting likes, but rather measure other metrics such as positive engagement with the content.

Following these tips will help you establish the fundamentals when shifting toward a more strategic approach to your content — along with the marketing of it!

About the Author |Carolyn Kopf

Carolyn Kopf is the founder and managing partner of C.E.K. & Partners, an Atlanta-based branding firm. Carolyn can be contacted at 404.345.6447 or via email at carolyn@cekpartners.com.