Photo: Courtesy of AMA Marketing News Blog, where this article first appeared.
Does your brand need to create content to stay relevant and engaging?
Do you lack the quality content creation services that will help your brand communicate and support your vision for growth?
If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you are not alone.
In fact, the most recent Content Marketing Institute Study found that the number one factor that 66% of B2B Marketers attribute to their lack of content marketing success is content creation challenges.
66% of B2B Marketers attribute their lack of content marketing success to content creation challenges.
If you are reading this, you already know that content creation and content marketing is critical to support an effective digital marketing strategy for healthcare organizations, whether yours has a B2B or a B2C focus. While effective content creation is critical for today’s digital environment, it requires planning and expertise from a content marketing agency, and writing content alone isn’t enough.
Four Tips For the Content Creation Process
As a strategic communications firm with a full range of content creation services, here are four tips for taking a more strategic approach to your content creation process:
Tip No. 1: Know Your Audience
It might sound basic, but before you create content, challenge yourself (or your team or practice) to clearly answer these questions:
1. Who reads our content, or who do we want to read our content?
2. What will compel people to read our content?
3. What do we want readers to take away or do after engaging with our content?
When planning to create content about your hospital system, medical practice, understand what type of information your customers, patients, employees want to read.
You’ll need to develop a content plan based on a clear platform or theme. Consider developing content based on two to three themes that support your organization’s story or purpose. For example, a theme might be keeping people healthy. Using this overarching theme allows for the development of a framework for your content. In this example, supporting content could focus on areas such as wellness tips, patient success stories and a community angle.
Tip No. 2: Create Content That Supports Strategic Communications
You’ll need to develop a content strategy and plan based on a clear platform or theme. Consider developing content based on two to three themes that support your organization’s story or purpose.
For example, a theme might be keeping people healthy. Using an overarching theme allows for the development of a framework for your content creation. In this example, supporting content could focus on areas such as wellness tips, patient success stories and a community angle.
Creating these topic areas that ladder up to a core theme will help with building out strategic communications. It is essential to be flexible with your content plan to address unexpected topics that arise either at your practice or hospital system or a sentiment that has suddenly taken hold about such things as a new regulation or acquisition.
Tip No. 3: Content Creation Needs Content Marketing
Content creation without a content strategy is not smart as posting doesn’t automatically lead to people reading it. Rather, you need to put the marketing into content marketing.
In order words, clearly answer the key question: How will customers find your content?
Here are some core digital marketing tactics that will help people find your content — and ultimately your practice or health benefit plans.
Website and SEO
Content marketing works hand in hand with SEO — especially when fresh content is regularly posted on your website in a blog or news section. Posting content on your site will support your SEO strategy to help your organization, clinic or practice rank better within search engine results. With this in mind, it’s important to identify the keywords your customers are using in their searches. The content developed should be optimized for these keywords, whether it is “best medicare advantage plans in Illinois” or “best orthopedic doctors in Atlanta.” Remember, more than 90% of search traffic is directed to sites ranking on page one of the search engine results. The right content creation supports this.
Email and Social Media
Email is still one of the most effective digital channels. Highly relevant and helpful content should be developed and shared versus purely self-promotional content. Repost content developed for your website’s blog and email on social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Tip No. 4: Measurement
While you are focused on content creation and marketing, remember before you put your plans in motion, establish how you will measure the success of the content you are creating. For your website, key metrics might include visits, likes or time on page, as well as search engine rankings. With email it might be open rates. With social, we advise against collecting likes, but rather measure other metrics such as positive engagement with the content.
Following these tips will help you establish the fundamentals when shifting toward a more strategic approach to your content creation — along with the marketing of it!
Note: This article first appeared in the September AMA Marketing News blog found here.
About the Author | Carolyn Kopf
Carolyn is the found of C.E.K. & Partners, an Atlanta-based B2B marketing agency offering content creation services for health plans, hospital systems, manufacturers, fintechs, payments and technology companies. Our writing lab provides content creation for white papers, case studies, websites, solution sheets, infographics, articles, blogs and more.
Need insights to write about? Our market research team designs custom quantitative and qualitative market research studies to capture data and insights. Our creative team develops interactive and digital design solutions communications from eNewsletters to websites and everything in between.
Content creation is hard! It's exactly why we're here to help.
Contact us today at carolyn@cekpartners.com. What are you waiting for?
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