To ensure that your healthcare content performs well on social media, you must be strategic about what you publish and when you publish it.
You can create a winning content strategy by following these 10 steps.
Step #1 Define Your Purpose
Having a clear purpose in mind is the first step to creating great content. What do you hope to achieve with your content?
- Attract more patients to your practice
- Improve the quality of health information online
- Drive traffic to your website
- Run a disease awareness campaign
- Establish online authority and credibility
Take Action: Set SMART goals for your social media marketing. For a goal to become a reality, it needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic, as well as time-specific, these are often called SMART goals.
Step #2 Identify Your Audience’s Needs
Once you have a clear why your next step is to identify exactly who is going to consume the content you create.
Every piece of content that you create should have an intended audience. As you think about creating content focus your strategy around your audience’s needs and interests.
What kind of information is your audience looking for? What problems can you solve for them? Will they be wiser for having read your content?
Focusing more clearly on your audience will help you to create tailored content as well as help you structure your writing for the people you are trying to help. You can then tailor your content more specifically to match their needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to attract and engage different members of your audience. The key here is to really know your audience and their pain points and write content that specifically answers their particular needs.
Take Action: Check out these suggestions for places to help you discover the content your audience is looking for so you can create that content for them.
Step #3 Determine Your Content Format
This is a two-part strategy. Firstly, you need to go where your audience is consuming content (many social media platforms lend themselves more naturally to specific types of content). Identify how, when, and where they like to engage with content, and then start to create content on your audience’s preferred platform and preferred way of consuming content.
Secondly, you need to take stock of your own resources. What internal and external resources will you need to run your content marketing engine? Do you have time to write regularly for a blog? Would it be better for you to create video blogs (vlogs) for your website or communicate through a live stream broadcast? What assets do you already have that you can leverage for your content strategy? For example, do you have access to a graphic designer who can create infographics? Use your in-house talent to create unique content and publish it in a format that will attract and retain your audience’s attention.
Step #4 Keep Content Ideas Flowing
Whether it’s an excel spreadsheet, Google Docs, or another note-taking system, create a place to add links to interesting articles, studies or ideas for content to share.
Take Action: Evernote is my go-to tool to store notes and ideas. You can add tags and create folders for easy retrieval. Evernote’s in-browser Web clipping tool allows you to save the full text of PDFs, Web content, and other materials. It will also alert you if you’ve already clipped an item or show content that’s related to what you’re saving. You can also email notes to your account and the content will be automatically stored and organized for you, allowing you to quickly reference it in the future.
Step #5 Write Captivating Headlines
If content is king, then the headline is queen. Your headline is the first impression you make on a prospective reader. No matter how awesome your content is, few people are going to click through to read it if they’re not immediately captivated by your headline.
According to CoSchedule how-to, list, and question headlines tend to get the most engagement.
- How To {Do Something} That Will {Help You Experience Desired Result}
- {#} Ways To {Do Something} To {Produce Desired Result}
- What Is The Best {Topic} That Will {Do Something Desirable}?
Take Action: Read Write Better Headlines With These 9 Winning Formulas for tips on creating headlines that attract attention.
Step #6 Add Images To Your Content
People connect more emotionally with images than text, and in an increasingly crowded digital landscape, when our minds are attracted more readily to content that draws our eye, images can break through the online content clutter to quickly communicate your marketing messages.
Take Action: Check out this list of tools to help you create professional graphics.
Step #7 Add A Sizzling Call-To-Action
Each time you write a new piece of content, go back to Step#1 to clarify your purpose. Whether that goal is for a reader to share or comment on your latest blog, call your office or buy a product or service, adding a call to action increases the likelihood the reader will take the desired action and engage with you further.
Take Action: Don’t assume that readers will know what to do next. Make it clear and unambiguous what the next step is after reading your content.
Step #8 Use Keywords Strategically
It’s important to include keywords in your content if you want to rank higher for particular search terms.
Take Action: Brainstorm a list of important, relevant topics related to your business. Read How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Website for some more tips.
Step #9 Promote Your Content
Content has no value unless it’s shared. You need to determine how you will connect your content with the right audience at the right time. Instead of treating content amplification as something you only do after the content is created and published, you should incorporate promotion strategies into the content planning and creation process.
Take Action: Leverage hashtags, create high-quality, relevant content that people will want to share, maintain a consistent posting schedule, post when your audience is online, write better headlines, add more images, and boost your best-performing posts with a paid promotion strategy.
Step #10 Measure Results
How do you know if all the time you’re investing in social media marketing is paying off? You don’t know unless you put a system in place to measure and analyze your efforts.
- Traffic. How many blog or website visitors did you receive from social media?
- Engagement. How many likes, clicks, and shares are your posts receiving?
- Conversions. How many blog or website visitors are completing conversion steps?
Take Action: Use built-in tools such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, third-party tools, and measurement of social traffic and conversion with Google Analytics to track and measure your progress.
As always thanks for reading. I hope you learned something new today!
Health Care Social Media 