There are times of the year when people worry about colds, fever, flu and stress. These times are definitely bad for a lot of people but as a health professional who has some idea about healthcare marketing, these times present an opportunity to strengthen your relationships with your patients. Healthcare marketers face a continuing challenge of figuring out what prospects are thinking. You might be wondering what ordinary people are thinking during any given day. The truth is, when talking about health concerns, people’s worries and questions depend on the seasons.
Seasonal content is timely and relevant
From the time customers begin to think about getting a flu shot or not, you can write a blog post about the importance of flu shots, how they can get these shots and where they can get them. Right about the time of Thanksgiving, you can write about Thanksgiving recipes and diet information as it relates to health. During holiday seasons, people have a lot of worries such as anxiety, overeating, depression and lack of anything to do. These times give you an opportunity to write about health facts, backed up with solid data and statistics to convince them how they can improve their health during the holiday season.
Healthcare content is evergreen
When marketers talk about healthcare marketing content, they usually admit that healthcare content is evergreen content or content that can be used all the time for the long term. Seasonal content may not be useful all the time but it is very useful at certain times of the year and at right seasons, so the content stays relevant and useful every time the season comes.
The blog post you wrote about managing anxiety in the holidays last year is still useful this year that you can include it in your emails to patients and customers this coming December. All your posts about avoiding colds and flu during cold weather is still useful during any cold weather.
Seasonal issues can produce many content marketing ideas
Many industries attempt to come up with great seasonal content ideas but they struggle to find out how to reconcile the brand and the season. In healthcare, it is relatively easy to do this. Different seasons bring about different health conditions with them. Anybody who works in a hospital is familiar with the medical issues that seasons bring in and the seasonal trends that follow.
For example, whenever allergies become really bad where you are located, you can produce resources on how to identify, treat and prevent allergies. During summer, you can talk about heatstrokes, sunburns and dehydration. You will probably have an endless list of ideas when it comes to seasonal topics.
What is different from seasonal ideas and regular content is that seasonal ideas can be predictably relevant. For example, if you write about cancer, you won’t exactly know how much traffic you are going to get or if it is relevant at the time of writing because you don’t know how many people have cancer at that given time. However, seasonal conditions are sure to happen and if you can prepare for them, you are almost assured of organic traffic.
Just make sure that you build brand trust along with your seasonal information because the only way your patients can differentiate your organization from the rest of the heap is your brand. You first need to gain their trust and once this trust is built, make sure you don’t destroy it. Possible causes of a ruined trust would be false or exaggerated claims on your content. Make sure you back up your content with accurate and reliable data because patients can easily verify them.