If your website is already an online destination and patients already know about you but would like to check your address and phone number, you still need to do more in order to make patients really aware about your brand. What you have to do is make sure your patients return again and again because they see your website as a place where they can always find something valuable. You may already be doing a great job of producing high quality content but you need to write foundational healthcare content. Foundational healthcare content, in the context of healthcare marketing is content that goes the extra mile and gives extra information, extra value and something extra.
Try to think of your content as something that your audiences would want to pay for. This means that when people provide their email, name and location to you, they should be getting something that solves their problems and provides value that will make your readers become leads who your healthcare marketing team will then pursue. Foundational healthcare content can be a long content that places all kinds of important information into a single article and a single download. You can also create foundational content in video formats. An animated video about different heart problems is a good example.
Identifying your customer’s needs
Before doing anything, you should prioritize knowing what your audience needs and what they want. You may want to research about the types of patients that you attract and also the type of patients that you want to reach. Your doctors must be able to help, talk to them regarding questions that they get most of the time along with information that patients regularly need that they can’t seem to find answers for. You can also send out surveys to see what topics your patients are interested in if you have an email list. The important rule is not to assume what your audience is thinking. Make sure your data is accurate and real.
Think about topic ideas based on the research of your audience
After doing your research, you should already have some idea about topics your audience is interested in. The next part is to gather your healthcare marketing team and go through some of the ideas that your customers need and find extra useful. You may find that some of the ideas are already on the web or already written by your competitors so check out some online content and see if you can get any ideas there too. This will save you time and effort if you know what the other healthcare organizations are writing about.
Try to bring in something new
If the topic you are writing about is already out there and has been talked about a lot, try to present it differently. You can maybe try to present it from a different perspective or you may simply try to do something which is comprehensive by gathering as many ideas as you can about a particular topic and putting them into one place. You can also check just the most recent content about the topic and see if there has been anything new said about it. You can also change the tone or the way the information is delivered. So, if the piece of content is too formal, you may want to present it in an informal way.
Ask yourself how your foundational content can be useful
When you compose your content, try to ask yourself how it can benefit you. If you don’t find any use for it for yourself, there’s a good chance other people will not find any use for your content at all. Then, try to put yourself in the shoes of the audience personas that you’ve created with your marketing team. How will your content benefit these personas? A strong foundational healthcare content emphasizes the benefits that your service or product can provide more than anything else. So, if you are caught between writing more details and spelling out the benefits, you should choose the benefits that your audience get.
Promotion
Never forget to promote your brand in your article. Usually, you can do this at the end of your foundational healthcare content, once the reader knows the value of what you’re saying. Promotion should be like proactively selling yourself in a truthful way. This is really a good practice because even if your readers do not buy anything from you, they are made aware of your brand and that is the last thing they can think of or their most recent memory after reading your content. If your content were a sales page, the promotion part should be more like the offering part of your content.