Content Marketing

Inbound strategies engage information-hungry patients

When you’re in the market for a new car, do you wait to see a flashy ad or receive a direct mail piece with rates and sale prices before you begin the buying process? Or do you go on the internet and start searching for information on cars and local dealers? We’d guess the latter, and healthcare consumers act the same way.

More and more, patients are tuning out interruptive marketing and actively seeking relevant information through search engines and social networks. If you don’t have content on your website, such as blog posts, videos, or newsletters, the patients who are out there searching won’t be able to find you. It’s no longer enough to have SEO-optimized webpages. You need a library of content on topics relevant to your patient base, such as diseases, treatments, physicians, hospitals and wellness information.

The reason inbound marketing is so effective is simple: instead of trying to “sell” patients through interruptive messaging, content marketing puts control into the hands of the patient. They can find you on their own terms and the information is perceived as more credible. Lastly, hospital inbound marketing provides a depth of content that traditional marketing doesn’t allow. You can’t share the same amount of information in a thirty-second TV spot as you can in a 500-word blog post.

Smith & Jones has been leveraging and perfecting content marketing from the time we launched our first healthcare website. We help marketers develop content strategies that will position them as thought leaders, promote community wellness and drive volume through risk assessment and self-referrals.

The key to a successful inbound marketing program is content strategy and consistent execution. It’s valuable to keep up with current trends and apply best practices to your hospital or practice. It’s also important to work with qualified content creators, people who understand healthcare and can write intelligently on topics of interest to prospective patients, while maximizing use of keywords and SEO so your content ranks for your chosen keywords.

Of course, in order for content marketing to work, adequate time and resources need to be dedicated for development and maintenance. It requires a realistic budget to fund overhead costs and manpower, and a commitment to keep content creation a priority even when other issues compete for resources. If your organization could benefit from content marketing but lacks publishing expertise, contact Smith & Jones.