Good Content Can Convert Your Online Healthcare Marketing

Hospitals and health care professionals have difficulty advertising like traditional consumer based businesses. Where “buy one, get one free” specials work for the local Mexican restaurant, they don’t work for for a primary care physician. Likewise an OBGYN can’t put out radio ads offering deliveries for a “short time only”. With this in mind online marketing with good healthcare content becomes essential for attracting new patients.

In the health care industry patients typically choose a provider based on referrals, reputation, insurance acceptance, use of technology and information presented online through healthcare websites. The content placed on your website and blog has the ability to attract new patients but in order to do so you must be viewed as a knowledge expert, providing information patients care about.

Studies show that over 80% of users look for health care information online and are often converted into patients. Creating informative and compelling content will establish your practice as a resource for patients looking for answers, while establishing your reputation and your healthcare website. In the US physicians are the number one trusted resource with the internet coming in second. Healthcare content combines the two and allows physicians to share their expertise with a wider audience.

Engage Patients

Before you incorporate healthcare content into your online marketing campaign, establish a plan for how you want to engage patients. Focus your articles on topics that pertain to your area of expertise and are interesting to patients. For example if you are a primary care physician, trying to encourage patients to have annual exams, discuss health conditions that you look for during these exams. You could have the following articles written, “Ways to prevent heart disease”, “Foods that decrease your risk of a heart attack”, and “Early detection can save your life”. These articles work together to promote annual exams that test for risk factors leading up to heart disease. Healthcare content is supposed to provide information and encourage patients to think about its implication in their own life. By presenting the information correctly, you can also encourage patients to act, and in this case make an appointment.

Keep It Friendly & Pleasant

Avoid discussing concepts that are too technical in nature. If you want healthcare content that converts it needs to be geared towards patients, so everything should be presented in layman’s terms. Don’t use online marketing as a way to promote your reputation among your peers, white papers can do this. Instead focus all of your efforts in communicating with patients in a way that establishes trust.The information placed on your healthcare website needs to be in an informative yet friendly tone, similar to how a doctor with “good bedside manner” would speak to a patient in the office. The tone in which you present the information will cause prospective patients to decide whether or not you are a doctor they can trust and get along with.

Use Search Engine Optimization

SEO strategies are important to making sure that your healthcare content is found. Across the industry search engine marketing budgets have risen, on average, 20% a year due to how effective SEO is in driving revenue. If you write an engaging, informative and friendly article that no one reads, your practice will not reap the benefit. Incorporating popular key words, and and working with a social media marketing company, will help to make sure that your content is found, and read, by the patients that need you. Google Analytics can help you determine which key words and articles are having the greatest impact in increasing your search rankings. Studies have show that if you are among the top three resources a patient reads, you are more likely to become their healthcare provider. Increasing the rankings of your healthcare website is essential to being one of the first sites a patient visits.

Engaging healthcare content is an essential part for any practice’s online marketing strategy. Website are important for presenting the basic information of who you are and social media campaigns let you interact with patients. Healthcare content establishes you as an expert in the field and creates a bond of trust with current and future patients. Powerful content converts people visiting your website into patients.