Whether you are a healthcare practitioner that is just starting to dabble with content marketing or you have been using the same healthcare marketing strategies for a while, your content marketing plan needs to be bigger and better than ever for 2017.

Why? Healthcare is the second most searched for service online.

More than ever patients are researching google on health issues or healthcare practitioners. Patients are wanting to connect more with healthcare practitioners and researching information and education on a healthcare practitioner’s expertise, knowledge and put quite simply, human emotional connection.

Patients want their questions answered before they even pick up the phone to dial a healthcare practitioner. They are interested in videos, blogs, articles and simple to read information and education on a health issue.

This blog will provide you with 4 reasons why you need to include a healthcare content marketing strategy into your practice.

Give your patients what they want and need. Start to:

1. Build Awareness and Trust
   As a healthcare practitioner, you have a responsibility to your patient to provide a high level of patient care and service. This starts initially with building awareness and trust before they even become a patient. You need to provide valuable on-site and off-site content that will differentiate you as a thought leader and expert within your field. By including white papers, e-Books, videos or webinars, this provides the healthcare marketing mechanism in increasing patient lead generation and conversion.
2. Drive traffic to your site
   By having on-site and off-site content, this will drive traffic to your website and enhance its overall visibility to search engines as well as reach new patients. This is crucial in terms of becoming a trusted thought leader and generating new patients.
3. Personalise your services to patients
   You may be a healthcare practitioner that provides 3 or 4 different services under your umbrella. The needs of your patients or prospective patients are going to be different and you need to define and segment your patients according to their needs. You can then tailor and personalise your healthcare content specific to each of your patient or prospective patient’s needs, thus allowing you to engage and connect with them.
    
   This process is ideal from an analytical perspective as it allows you to analyse and evaluate which healthcare content your patients or prospective patients are engaging more or less with and readjust your content accordingly.
    
   Patients want to see more of a healthcare practitioner’s human side and connection and content creation is the perfect vehicle to do this.
4. Build your reputation with other healthcare practitioners
   You may be a general practitioner, specialist or surgeon but at some point, you will research another fellow healthcare practitioner to learn about them and the services they provide. So wouldn’t they do the same about you?
    
   To build your referral base and your reputation, healthcare content creation and healthcare marketing allows you to build awareness, trust and your reputation with other healthcare practitioners allowing you to build a strong referrer base.

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The Author

Bernadette Beach

Bernadette Beach is the Director of Indigo Medical Consulting Services; specialising in business solutions, recruitment/HR and healthcare marketing. Bernadette has worked with specialists, surgeons and other healthcare professionals for over 20 years providing business and marketing expertise.