Why Content Marketing Is a Good Tactic for Healthcare Marketers

By David Brond and Samantha Oscar

Content marketing—the business process focused on creating and distributing relevant and valuable information to attract and engage target audiences with the objective of driving action—is one of today’s business-growth strategies getting a lot of attention from marketers in many organizations, including those in healthcare. And with good reason.

According to HubSpot and the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, content marketing is highly relevant in today’s digital world:

• 72 percent of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year.
• 77 percent of online health seekers say they began their last session on a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. The most commonly researched topics are specific diseases or conditions, treatments or procedures, and doctors or other health professionals.
• Patients are using the internet to find and engage with healthcare organizations. According to a Think with Google study, 84 percent of patients use both online and offline sources for hospital research. In addition, search drives nearly three times as many visitors to hospital sites compared to non-search visitors, and 44 percent of patients who research hospitals on a mobile device scheduled an appointment.

Content marketing is vehicle-neutral. It can be blog posts, podcasts, videos, webcasts, e-mail newsletters, Facebook posts, etc. The important thing to remember is that your goal is to share meaningful information to specific audiences.

Here are five reasons why our healthcare marketing team thinks that you should embrace content marketing:

1. It helps establish thought leadership and helps your organization become a trusted source of information—building brand awareness around the clock, since your content is always available.
2. Good, relevant content helps to increase your findability and ranking in search results. This allows you to be present when potential patients are looking for information, in order to help them make more informed decisions about their well-being.
3. Your content creates a relationship with health care consumers—including current and potential patients, families and referring providers—that will contribute to a positive Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).
4. You can strategically offer subscribers (engaged consumers) additional information to help them make a medical decision, such as scheduling an appointment or a consultation with your physicians or providers—whether for themselves or as a caregiver.
5. Content marketing provides subject matter for your other marketing tactics, like social media and public relations.

Writing and publishing content about your clinical and patient/family support services on a consistent basis establishes credibility for your brand. Over time, your brand can become a DIO (Destination Information Organization) for audiences researching key patient-care services and healthcare solutions on the web. A solid content marketing strategy can complement your paid and earned media strategies with a dose of “owned” media.

Samantha Oscar is Inbound Specialist at Mojo Media Labs and formerly Manager, Marketing and Inbound at AB&C.