by Patrick Foster

Content marketing is one of the best ways to make patients aware of your medical practice. It’s measurable, works with budgets of all sizes, and has a great ROI.

To get the most out of content marketing you must use the tactics that boost your Google ranking, improve patient engagement, and drive people to your practice. Speaking to a specialist healthcare marketing agency puts your strategy in the hands of the professionals. However, if your budget doesn’t allow for this there are some great tactics you can use yourself.

My top tips for 2019 is that you use micro-moments, create infographics, and produce interactive content. Here’s how your practice can employ them.

Optimize your web content for patient micro-moments

Micro-moments are periods of extreme engagement. It’s when your patients know exactly what they want and demand an immediate answer to their problem(s). To get this answer, they grab their phone, head to Google and search “I want to:

• Know
• Go
• Do
• Buy”

70% of these searches lead to action within an hour, meaning that if you can catch a micro-moment you can win a patient. You can use content marketing to prepare your practice to do this. How? By optimizing your web content for these searches. All you need to do is write content that answers these questions: 

• What’s wrong with me?
• How can I cure …?
• Practices in (your local area)

These questions are a shorthand summary of your patients’ journey from diagnosis, to cure, through to appointment. To learn more about micro-moments, watch the video underneath:

Create infographics to give your patients facts & figures

Putting our patient hat on, medical content is often dry and difficult to decipher. When your patients search to find out what their symptoms mean they want a simple answer. Creating infographics for diseases (and other relevant topics) gives your patients want in a format they understand. But that’s not all – infographics are also great for SEO.

Creating an infographic is simple. List all the topics that your patients want to know about and strip away the key information, then angle that towards your target audience. Once you get to this point you can use a free tool to create your infographic. Canva is my personal pick. It’s easy to use and has a range of graphics to choose from. When designing your infographic you must remember to:

• Make the design as simple as possible
• Layout your data from left-to-right (for Western audiences)
• Optimize the images and content for SEO. This means:
  • URL
  • Title tag
  • H1 and all subheadings
  • Image filenames
  • Alt-text for your images
• Include a CTA (call-to-action)

Do all this and you’ll have a content marketing asset that ranks well and answers your patients’ questions. To get an idea of how your infographic could look, check out the image below:

Credit: U.S. Department of State

Produce interactive content to engage your patients

Bedside manner is all about making a connection with your patients. You have to understand them on a personal level and get them to trust you. Most importantly, you must get them to engage with you. While this is a difficult trick to pull off in your content marketing, you can give your patients something to work with. How? By producing interactive content.

Interactive is a broad term. In 2019 it goes all the way from giving people Bandersnatch style responsibility for decisions, to simply replying to comments. Your social media accounts are the ideal free platform for producing interactive content. Here are two ways you can use them to engage with your patients:

• Run a quiz competition: The prize could be anything, such as a free check-up. All you need to do is set up a Facebook poll or Twitter survey. This lets you collect data on your patients, as well as engaging with them
• Leverage user-generated-content: UGC is one of content marketing’s sharpest tools. People value the opinions of their peers as highly as the views of their family and friends and UGC content gets great engagement. There are many top examples of how you can leverage User-Generated-Content, just pick the one that works best for your practice

If your practice has the budget, you can use a specialist marketing tool or agency to give you access to more types of interactive content. There are some excellent examples in this article. To find out more about how to master interactive content in 2019, have a look at the video underneath:

Content marketing isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about using the tactics that work within your budget. Use the tips from this article and you’ll have a range of great ways of boosting your Google ranking, improving patient engagement, and driving people to your practice.

Content marketing isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about using the tactics that work within your budget. Use the tips from this article and you’ll have a range of great ways of boosting your Google ranking, improving patient engagement, and driving people to your practice.