Creating Shareable Content in Healthcare

The idea of shareable content seems to be shrouded in mystery. What secret elements must you include to ensure people see your content and spread it far and wide? For the highly competitive healthcare industry, shareable content is even more important, as it will help build brand awareness and bring in patients and/or customers.

So just what are those secret elements that will help you write content your potential patients and/or customers will love? Let’s break down the key ingredients to what makes content interesting, useful and, ultimately, shareable.

Write with your audience in mind.

Write for people first, Google second. Before you create a content calendar, think about who your audience is. Then, map content to your target personas, meaning, decide what types of content and topics will be of most interest to each persona. If you’re writing for a particular persona, your writing will be more natural and thus more likely to be shared. Once you’ve mapped content to personas, then think about keywords and SEO best practices. You definitely don’t want to leave out those search-engine-ranking considerations, but don’t overstuff your content with them – it’s important to focus on your audience first and foremost and write so it’s easy for them to understand.

Answer common questions.

The best way to write shareable content for your personas is to think about what questions they are asking themselves. What are they searching for online? If you can answer a pressing question clearly and satisfactorily, your reader is more likely to share that content with their friends and family. If you’re a podiatry office, think about what common foot and ankle ailments your audience might be suffering from. For example, they might search for “diabetes foot care for my parents.” If you have a blog post called “7 Tips for Diabetes Foot Care for Caregivers,” you’ve just answered their question, giving them a positive view of your medical practice before they’ve even stepped in the door.

Keep up with current industry trends.

Create content around the latest medical research or public health concerns. These topics will be in the news, meaning people will be searching for expert advice and opinions. If you’re tapping into these trends, your content is more likely to be shared. You might even find yourself with that rare Holy Grail of shareable content—viral content.

Make it easy to share.

Your content should be written for humans, more specifically, for your audience. Next though, you need to ensure that your content is shareable from a visual perspective. If someone copies and pastes the link to your article, your blog post or your premium content into Facebook or Twitter, what shows up? Is the description compelling? What image does it pull up? To make sure your content is shareable on social media, be sure to include meta descriptions, tags and images on all content. No matter how magnificent your words are, your content’s only shareable if the images are just as great.

Now, as you start to create more content, you’ll also start noticing content in more places. Watch what your friends and colleagues post on social media. You can get a lot of great ideas from paying attention to what others are sharing.

If you have questions about how content should fit into your overall digital marketing strategy, download our free white paper, Inbound Marketing for Healthcare.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022