Content marketing is important to doctors, hospitals, and healthcare providers for communications with patients, vendors, and for attracting new business. Websites need healthcare marketing in order to engage the reader and help businesses entice new patients or clients. A professional healthcare marketing agency can help you develop a plan to improve your content marketing. Continue Reading Article >
"The Importance of Infographics": As Told By An Infographic
If there's one thing we all know with certainty, it's that we're in the age of the infographic. At first it was all about content marketing: write as much as you can, make it compelling, churn it up and expel it onto as many platforms as you can. Then things changed, and it wasn't just about content anymore, it was about visual content marketing: don't just write as much as you can, find a way to make it pretty, make it visual, make it engaging. We're still living in what will most likely end up being the decade or even century of visual content marketing, but it's clear that we've already segmented even further. In today's marketing world it's all about infographics, baby!
When you look at the statistics out there, it's obvious why marketing has shifted in this direction. We came across Hubspot's 37 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know In 2016, and we found some visual content and infographic statistics that were literally eye-popping. We don't have time to share them all, but here were a few that we thought were particularly relevant:
1. Researchers found that colored visuals increase people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. That's insane.
2. 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual assets (photos, video, illustrations and infographics) are core to how their brand story is communicated. We can tell you for sure that this is 100% at our company as well.
3. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.
4. Infographics are Liked and Shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content.
At this point it's undebatable that infographics are one of the hottest trends in our industry, and for good reason. That being said, not all infographics are created equal, and if you're going to put the time and money and effort into creating an infographic then it's vital that you're making sure it's one stellar information-packed piece of visual glory. Because we love the irony of this, here's an infographic from the content marketing geniuses at OneSpot that will help you do just!
The Importance of Content Marketing in Healthcare
Content marketing is, without a doubt, the foundation of great marketing. Want to drive patients to your website and therefore your center? Want to simply find ways to engage with past, current, and future patients? It all starts with great content. As a healthcare marketer in the 21st century, one of your main jobs, if not your MAIN job, is not just to develop engaging content for your practices, hospitals or health care organizations, but also to place it where it's the most likely to drive business and engage patients. For most healthcare practitioners, that's your website.
Often times, health care professionals think their website doesn’t really matter when it comes to getting new patients. 100% of the time those health care professionals are wrong. A medical practice’s website is usually the first means of contact the modern patient has with a new physician. A patient’s first impression and experience depends solely on the content on that website, which means if your website is bogged down with irrelevant, boring, or even just poorly organized content, that first impression is going to be a bad one. On the flip side, if you can wow them with an awesome website full of meaty, informative, and entertaining content? Now you've got their attention.
Let’s discuss some of the ways that great content can help your practice, and how bad content can hurt your marketing efforts.
What is BAD content?
It's important to first distinguish the difference between "great content" and "bad content". "Bad content" doesn't necessarily have to be content that's poorly written, it can be really well written content that's simply organized in a bad way. There are a lot of different things that determine what makes up "bad content", but generally speaking bad content looks like one of the following:
Unclear or overly clinical language
Content that's inappropriate for the audience you're trying to reach (i.e. content written for doctors when you’re trying to target patients)
Duplicated content on multiple pages
Content that is clearly stuffed with keywords in an effort to improve SEO, to a point where it doesn’t even make sense
Lack of enough content
Content that is poorly organized or doesn't "flow" right
How BAD content can HURT you:
If a patient can’t find what they are looking for in the first few seconds, they will bounce right off your website. We know this because we've done it.
When they leave your website, they will find another option with a more easily navigable website and they will call them instead.
A website with bad content could leave a patient frustrated, giving them a negative impression of you before they even walk in your doors.
If a patient can’t find an easy way to communicate with you through your website, you could see an increase in cancellations.
You could be seen as “old fashioned” and in healthcare, no one wants an antiquated physician who isn’t up on the most advanced technology.
What is GREAT content?
Great content is content that motivates your website’s visitors to take action, guides them through the website and provides the kind of information most of your visitors are looking for on your site. There are a lot of different things that determine what makes great content, but generally speaking it usually follows these rules:
Content that is relevant to your customers
Content that is easy to understand
Content that's interesting and makes readers want to engage
Content that's well organized and silows readers through to other areas on your website
Content that utilizes proper spelling, grammar, capitalization/punctuation, and word choice (avoids using "big" words that confuse readers, but still sounds authoritative and intelligent)
How GREAT content can HELP you:
The best content can help improve your organic rankings on Google so you can reach more savvy patients searching for your services online.
Content can help you drive patients where you want them to go on your website, creating pathways for them.
If your goal is to get more patients to schedule appointments, the right content can help you drive more patients to fill out online appointment forms.
You can become a valuable online resource for patients, encouraging them to return to your site for more than just appointment booking, but for health tips and medical advice.
You will appear more advanced, giving you more control and being seen as an authority in your medical community.
Most importantly, great content makes you memorable. It keeps people wanting to come back for more. It's what determines your brand identity in the mind of your patients, and it's what makes them decide whether or not that brand is worth engaging with.
Get a free blog written for your site:
Creating content is easy, but creating great content? That's a little more tricky. It's a pretty impressive skill, but it's not one that everyone in the healthcare industry is going to have. That's where we come in. If you're following these guidelines but are still struggling to produce great content that's engaging and relevant to your patients, don't worry. We can help with that. It's not rocket science, it's content marketing, and it's what we do.
Understanding Viral Content Marketing
Sometimes it's impossible to tell which of your marketing efforts have the potential of going viral; it can be even harder to understand why. So how can healthcare marketing professionals work to create content that has the potential of attracting widespread attention?
The Basics of Viral Content Marketing:
- Understanding Metcalf's Law and the network effect which can help you calcuate the value of your target market or their "network"
- Know that not all content has the potential of going viral, but in order to have the potential it should beneficial to those sharing it in either message or entertainment.
- Be familiar with the various kinds of content that can go viral; most commonly these are videos or articles but infographics and image content such as popular memes or GIFs can all grow to be wildly popular.
- Utilize the right design combination of functionality, meningfulness, integrity, appearance and form.
- Be in the minds of your audience to understand why they share certain things.
- Make it easy to share and encourage your audience to help expand your campaign.
(Read More: 6 Lessons Beyonce Can Teach Healthcare Marketers)
Why we share content:
- It makes us laugh
- It makes us cry
- It makes our jaws drop
- It makes us ponder
- It makes us feel connected to others
- It makes us gasp
- It makes us shake our heads
- It makes us question why it's not common knowldege
Infographic Designed by: Voltier Digital and guest posted on ProBlogger
10 Tricks for Small Healthcare Marketing Teams
For all those small marketing teams who have been forced to outsource a lot of their design work, social media or content marketing we are here to save the day… and a lot of money. We know what it is like for small teams where your marketers have to wear a lot of hats and not everyone can afford to keep on a full time graphic designer, pay for expensive stock photography or spend thousands on a social media professional. Try these tricks to see where you can cut corners without sacrificing quality work.
1. Hubspot
We’ll get this one out of the way first, as it’s going to be your most expensive trick. Hubspot is an awesome content marketing program that helps analyze and adjust your website’s SEO content, helps you develop content, create lead nurturing campaigns, track and qualify leads you capture online and report on the success of your SEO, social media and email marketing efforts. They do have some special pricing, but it’s a great tool to help you learn the ropes of SEO without outsourcing to an expensive SEO service provider.
2. Canva
Canva is a free, online application that helps you design graphics like Facebook ads, documents, business cards, posters etc. with no graphic design knowledge necessary. The drag-and-drop style program makes it beyond simple with customizable templates. You can upload your own images or pay for their $1 per image options, then download your creations.
3. Death to Stock Photo
This website sends you a zip-file of 10 creative “stock” photos each month that you can use free of charge. The images are unique and fun and much better than those expensive photos you’ve purchased in the past with the models in scrubs you see plastered all over healthcare marketing materials.
Click For: Death To Stock Photo
4. Squarespace
This is a great, inexpensive way to create an SEO and mobile optimized website. They have tons of customizable templates and they make designing your site super simple. The lowest level option only costs $16/month and you have 24-hour support if you ever have questions. Want to add a Youtube video to your Home Page? Easy peasy. Want to add an e-commerce section to your site? It’s a breeze. Think you need an appointment request form on your contact page? No sweat.
5. Syplur’s Healthcare Hashtag Project
If you are interested in what your industry is tweeting about but don’t have access to a robust social media platform to run reports, just check out Symplur’s website. They share insights on social influencers, trending topics related to healthcare and upcoming events like tweet-chats.
Click For: Symplur's Healthcare Hashtag Project
6. MailChimp
Gone are the days of paying too much for email marketing programs that require coded email templates. MailChimp is free, easy to use, easy to design and actually really fun to use too. Very cool company culture. Oh yeah, did we mention it’s free?
7. Snagit
Snagit is an application you can use to screenshot documents and websites then annotate and edit. You can do some minimal design work in the program too. It’s free for the first 30 days then you have to pay a whopping $49.95 and it’s yours for.ev.er. (Bonus: If you’re only snagging website images and annotating you can download the FREE Chrome extension Awesome Screenshot.)
8. Intern Match
Looking to bring some fresh insight to your team but not sure where to start? Your communities local universities or colleges are great resources, but if you also want to post online, don’t pay for a subscription on Monster.com. Create a free account with Intern Match and your first few job postings are FREE. Bonus: You’ll get some AWESOME applicants from far and wide.
9. Tweetdeck
This is a free and very intuitive application provided to you by Twitter. You can schedule tweets to go out throughout the week, track keywords and lists of users all in one place. No expensive social media monitoring software necessary.
10. Woobox
Some social media campaign programs can cost up to $150 for a simple, one month campaign, even if you only have 100 followers. Woobox makes it easy and cheap to create photo contests, caption contests and even Pin-It to Win-It campaigns starting at just $15 per month.