Content Planning in Healthcare

You’ve heard it time and time again – “content is king.” While content is extremely important, it’s crucial that you consider who you’re creating your content for and find ways to get the right content in front of your target audience at the right time.

In the healthcare industry, marketers have a huge opportunity to create specialized content for many different audience groups. From healthcare providers and organization leadership to patients and the general public, each group is looking for more information, preferably in the form of content they can find online. Ready to have a go at creating that content?

Take a look at these tips for content planning in healthcare to get off to the right start

Define Your Target Audience

Before you set out to create your content, you’ll want to define your buyer personas or target audience. If your organization is a hospital, your personas might include “expectant mother” or “surgical candidate.” If you’re part of a large insurance company, your personas might include “uninsured patient” or “patient exploring insurance options.” What are your personas’ demographics? What questions might they have? What are their pain points? It’s important to first establish who you’re creating your content for, and then write with your personas in mind.

Answer Their Questions

Let’s follow the hospital example. An expectant mother might get online to search “hospitals with the best maternity program.” Ideally, local hospitals in her geographic area would appear in search results with content like “10 Perks of Kaiser Permanente’s Maternity Program” or “Why Should You Choose CPMC’s Maternity Program?”

83% of adult internet users search online for health-related information. Your target audience is likely typing their health questions into a Google search bar. Is your content popping up in their search results? Anticipating their questions and writing content to answer them can help your organization get found, in turn increasing your chances of driving more leads and, ultimately, patients or customers.

Deliver the Right Content at the Right Time

Once you’ve defined your target audience and have started to create content that answers their questions and addresses their pain points, you’ll want to consider which pieces of content fit into each stage of the buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, and decision.

A potential patient in the awareness stage may have just realized that she needs to find a maternity program, in anticipation of her due date in 8 months. This patient is probably seeking educational information and would benefit from reading one of your organization’s related blog posts. A potential patient in the decision stage, however, is looking to choose the specific maternity department at the hospital best for her. This patient might want to see a piece of content that compares your hospital’s maternity department to that of the hospital 15 miles away.

Learn how to create an effective blog for healthcare organizations

Serving the right content, to the right people at the right time, creates a lead nurturing environment that allows you to provide helpful, educational content to your potential patients or customers in the awareness stage, followed by more focused content in the consideration stage, and finally content that will help them make a decision. Ultimately, this will keep your organization top of mind and turn your leads into patients or customers.

Contact Pyxl

Pyxl has experience creating a variety of content for organizations across the healthcare industry, and we’d love to work with your organization, too. Contact us today and let us know how we can help.

Updated: Apr 27, 2022