Starting a healthcare blog as part of your healthcare marketing campaign can be a very challenging task. The good thing is, just like any project, you can divide a healthcare blog into manageable stages and parts until its completion. Also, writing a healthcare blog can be a rewarding experience especially in learning how the online world works and how your patients and your customers interact with online resources. It is quite different from face-to-face interaction so you need to pay attention with the data that you gather from your healthcare blogs.
Identifying your Audience
In any form of writing, there is an author and an audience. The author influences the reader by sharing his or her ideas and the reader influences the author because the author always imagines his or her readers when he/she writes content. In a healthcare marketing setting, you need to ask yourself if your audience are going to be patients, medical professionals or both? Depending on who your audience is, your content will vary in complexity, depth, tone and topic.
Outline a Calendar Schedule for your Posts
As soon as you know who your audience is as well as the kinds of topics that are going to give them benefits, you need to outline the calendar with the topic, the month it needs to be published as well as the corresponding healthcare marketing campaign. As an addition to topics that are specific to hospitals, you may want to look into health initiatives which are nationally recognized. An example would be Heart Month or February, where you can post heart-related topics.
An editorial calendar is an amazing tool to show your group that you are ready and you have a definite direction for the blog. It is rare that blogs are posted at random. 90% of the time, there is a strategy and a pattern behind the post’s timing. The calendar will make it easy for everybody in your organization to contribute. It also needs to be versatile and reasonable so everyone can follow the calendar.
Align your blogging strategy with a plan
Healthcare groups usually base their healthcare marketing plan on when they reveal their latest developments. You need to make sure that you brainstorm with your marketing team and talk about the developments so you can write about them in blog topics. You also need to know when the blogs are going to be released so that you can schedule the posts to be published on the release dates.
Gather details regarding specialists and doctors that you can interview to improve the blog post. As soon as you begin adding content to your blog, make sure that you include keywords that patients are going to search for the new topics.
Allow Enough Time for Approval and Feedback
As soon as you have written your blog posts for the first month, have your team members review your posts for accuracy and quality. They could give you edits and guidance on the posts where you have questions. Their feedback will help you improve and learn about topics that you will be writing regularly. Feedback and approval will also ensure that your team members will not feel left out in the writing process.
Blogging about healthcare has many positive benefits such as education of your patients about health trends and creating an online community that presents your healthcare professionals in a human way. If you can create a process or cycle that you can consistently rely on from choosing your target audience to the feedback, writing a healthcare blog should be an interesting activity and little projects can become huge ones in a convenient and easy way.