Your Content Matters. Are You Giving It The Right Priority?
Content is a major driver of just about every marketing tactic’s success. It could be written content, or it could be video or audio content.
For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to focus on written content, because that’s where our agency thrives, and it probably has the lowest barrier of entry for any business that’s looking to improve its approach to publishing content.
The fact of the matter is, if your healthcare brand wants to be more successful, then, in addition to delivering great products, services, and care, you need to be visible. People need to be able to find you online, understand what you offer, and have a good reason to choose you over your competition.
This is where great content comes into play. Your website, landing pages, social media, blogs, and emails all need great content in order to differentiate and connect.
Here’s how the Formada team approaches creating great content for your business.
Essential Marketing Content: Websites
Your website, like all of your marketing materials, serves a very specific purpose for your business. I like to think of a website as your business’s home on the internet.
It’s a destination for your audience that should be welcoming, organized, and give people a very unique experience.
Your website should feature easy to read, to the point copy — you only have a few seconds to capture a person’s attention.
Use simple headlines. Concise descriptions of products and services. Clear calls to action.
Move people through the site logically so they can find what they need where they need it.
And don’t forget about the value of good aesthetics. Original, professional photography, useful content, and a secure, well-designed, quickly loading site will create positive brand associations.
Essential Marketing Content: Landing Pages
Landing pages are a distinct experience from a website. They are typically used to focus on a specific event, service, sale, or other action where you want our audience to focus on one thing and one thing alone.
Often, a landing page is a destination where your audience has traveled to via a paid social or search advertising campaign.
The ad will have captured the reader’s attention through simple, actionable copy, and the landing page is a place where more details can be found, and greater action can be taken.
This is critical information territory. This is a place where you’re urging people to complete a form, make a purchase, etc.
Your copy should be persuasive, compelling and oriented entirely around giving your audience the information they need to take action.
Essential Marketing Content: Social Media
Social media for businesses and healthcare practices is wonderful because it gives you the opportunity to humanize the people and the mission behind your brand name.
You can showcase the people whom you serve, the people who provide the service, and the reasons why your organization exists in the first place.
It is a creation tool for creating a reflection of your culture, and for fostering emotional connections with the people who interact with your posts.
Social media is also extremely flexible, in that you share many different sides of your business’s personality.
You can be humorous, informative, conduct polls, hold contests, share other people’s content, and much more under the umbrella of social media.
It is incredibly important to be consistent in posting and interacting with your audience. Consistency creates a sense of reliability. Interaction deepens the sense of community.
We encourage everyone interested in delving deeper into social media to:
- Pick a single platform that makes the most sense for your business and audience
- Appoint a social media captain to be responsible for posting, sharing, and responding
- Create a calendar that outlines how often you’ll post, when you’ll post, and what subjects you’ll be posting about are
- Stay active! A stale social media account can sometimes be worse than no social media
Essential Marketing Content: Blogs
Blogs are a wonderful and unique marketing tool because they give you the opportunity to do a few special things:
- Expand on a topic in a way you wouldn’t normally on a product or service page
- Explore highly niche topics that showcase your expertise
- Establish authority with search engines to improve your visibility online
Knowing that people conduct research on just about anything and everything before making any sort of purchasing or healthcare decision, it’s important that your brand can be found online.
Furthermore, if you can be found, it’s important that you can prove you’re an authority on your respective area of expertise.
We work with our clients to create content that is original, thoughtful, and useful in order to help them achieve their goals.
Why does original matter? One, because you want to create differentiation from your competition, but more than that, you have the opportunity to share a new perspective on an age-old topic, or cover a topic that others have yet to explore. That’s valuable!
Why does thoughtful matter? Because you’re thinking about the strategy of your content and how people can better find it online.
This means considering things like how you organize your content, the structure of your URLs, internal and external links, as well as your keyword strategy.
We’re trying to make your content relevant to your audience, but our goal is also to make content that web crawlers will analyze and identify as relevant and useful to a search audience.
Speaking of useful, publishing content that is useful to your audience matters because, at the end of the day, it’s not for you — it’s for them, so it’s important to publish things of value, things that will inform them, help them, and ultimately associate your brand with positivity and trust.
Essential Marketing Content: Emails and Newsletters
Emails and email newsletters are a great way to keep your brand top of mind with an already engaged audience.
In spite of that fact that there are a million reasons to email your database, but you don’t want to email them a million times. The goal isn’t to overwhelm them, it’s to keep them informed of newsworthy events, time-sensitive promotions, or to deliver them useful information.
A great way to get started with an email newsletter is to use them as a vehicle for directing your audience to your website’s blog.
If you’re publishing a weekly blog, for instance, at the end of each month, you can include exciting snippets of each story and push the audience to your site to read more.
This is a great way to gather useful data regarding what subjects best resonate with your audience.
Compelling subject lines, concise preview text, and informative, actionable body copy are the keys to a successful email campaign.
Ready To Learn More About Creating Great Content?
The Formada team specializes in creating comprehensive, effective marketing strategies for healthcare professionals.
In conclusion, if you want to learn more about how you can create better engagement and increase your leads, then we’d love to talk with you! Contact me today to learn how!