Statistically, more and more people prefer to be informed directly by social media instead of reading newspapers or watching news bulletins.
As a result, in recent years the term “Content Marketing” has become the keyword in the health sector.
According to the new modern trends, several companies claim to be “specialists” and offer to help you develop the content strategy needed to attract more patients.
To save time and money, consider following the four most important steps to creating your own content marketing:
Pay attention to your Specialty
If your specialty is orthopedic and I’m a potential patient, the last thing I might be interested in is your favorite recipe for a healthy juice or healthy recipes for family dinner.
However, most blogs and social media are full of such content.
In some cases, the content is not even original and is linked to websites not related to your specialty.
This is because many believe “some content is better than no content”.
Unfortunately, this works against to a really productive content strategy.
By publishing unrelated topics without original content, you weaken your practice.
Instead, prefer writing about case subjects that your potential patients are really interested, such as possible treatments, signs of injury or habits that aggravate or relieve their pain.
Any content created for your specialty should be hosted on your official website under a “blog” or similar domain.
Guide them how much they should read
How many of you have clicked and read a post because you already knew the title of how much of it you actually read?
If the article was titled “57 steps to write content that really attracts patients” or even “How to write content that really attracts patients”, I guess that few of you would click on it.
In the era of social media, the time to catch the attention of a potential patient is just a few seconds.
Many patients are looking for information about their health while they are at work or during their day-to-day activities, so they do not have the time to read a text of 2,000 words.
The writing style of the content should aim at meeting the need for direct, quick and juicy information.
Without exception, we all want to be able to read something in less than 3 minutes, to get only the basic points we need to get informed.
By creating original content that is relevant to your specialty, you ensure that patients can get the information they need and then proceed to the secondary action i.e. call you, send you email, contact you, and arrange for an appointment.
How to Develop Content
As mentioned above, it is essential that all of your original content be hosted on your site.
However, once published, the reasonable question is: “How can I make potential patients visit my site and read it?”
One of the most effective ways to attract potential patients through your content, is to publish and promote on social media. However, this may cause unpredictable costs, making it important to first calculating the proper promo budget.
The main reason to have a promo budget is because social media (Facebook and Twitter) limit the number of people who will see your content, if you do not pay for it.
This means that your page could have 700 likes or followers, but only 50-70 of them will see your content on their homepage.
This type of “free promo” is called “organic approach” and is deliberately limited by Facebook and Twitter, since they are profit organizations and need to make profits in every possible way from their websites.
In addition, it is vital to reach those who already follow your page, but it is equally important to address those who do not know you but could be your potential patients.
In this case you will need to define your goals and calculate the budget to achieve them.
Know Your Goals
Facebook and Twitter know everything about you.
Social media websites use consumer and personal data that they have purchased from large third-party data collection centers to create a unique consumer profile for each user.
This data contains thousands of data elements, like web search history, goods you buy online, income, work, your age, your family status, your credit, and your interests.
Although this may sound a little scary and quite intrusive in your life, it is incredibly useful to attract potential patients.
By understanding the habits of someone who needs, for example, orthopedic care, you can develop content and attract only those who meet your criteria, maximizing the chance to read and proceed to the next step, to contact you.
Below find some examples of how you may target potential patients by creating content on social media and results:
The first step is related to the location.
Create content by targeting those close to your practice locations and identify the age groups associated with your specialty.
The next step is interest-based targeting, which is a collection of some of the data items mentioned above, including Internet search history.
Knowledge about demographics, psychology and patient profiles will allow you to create relevant and targeted content.
