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What is digital health content marketing?

Connect with patients, clinicians and providers

Digital health content marketing is the use of digital channels – including your website, social media, videos and more – to promote your product, service or solution.

Digital healthcare content marketing is about building a positive perception of your brand among your core customer or user group – including clinicians, healthcare providers, patients and the general public.

42group is one of the UK’s leading healthcare content marketing and digital health content marketing agencies. We’re going to explain what content marketing is and why it’s critical to positioning and promoting your healthcare brand today (and in the future).

What is digital healthcare content marketing?

Before we delve into this, we need to split this into two distinct things: digital healthcare and content marketing

Digital health (or digital healthcare) describes the use of new tools, technologies and solutions to improve patient care. Examples of digital health includes healthcare apps, AI-decision making tools, websites, wearable technologies, intern-of-things enabled tech, point of care testing and more (lots more!). Digital health will play an increasingly important role in the NHS as its reshaped and refocused to deliver for a growing, changing and ageing population.

Content marketing describes the use of content channels, including your website, social media, videos, infographics, animations and podcasts (and more) to engage and inform your audience, while building your brand. Content marketing isn’t about explicit sales, but about providing valuable content at every stage of the customer journey – from interest and awareness to purchase, post-purchase, problem solving and more.

Digital healthcare content marketing is the use of content channels to build a brand. It’s not about sales or promotion (although that can be part of the upsides to content marketing) but about providing value. Everything you do should be focused on your audience.

Get that right, and you’ll build a successful healthcare content marketing strategy.

Common digital content marketing content channels

Content marketing for many brands is all about their blog. This makes sense as content marketing, for many healthcare organisations (and others) is primarily focused on SEO – and improving a search engine ranking position.

Today, blogs are still a core part of content marketing, but there are several other channels you may want to consider. Here’s a list of common healthcare content marketing channels:

  • Social media
  • Email marketing
  • Blogs
  • Article, whitepapers & in-depth content (gated and un-gated)
  • Infographics
  • Paid social ads
  • Podcasts
  • Videos & animations
  • Case studies
  • Knowledge bases
  • Email marketing
  • Influencer marketing

Should you use all these? No. You won’t have the time, budget or need to do that. Instead, as part of your content strategy, you should understand what your audience wants and will engage with and create that.

As an example, a consumer healthcare app will want to use commercial marketing techniques and channels like social media, video and blogs to generate a following. A company promoting a clinical decision making tool will want to focus on healthcare professionals, reaching them through LinkedIn, targeted emails, and detailed and clinically relevant content on a website.

The choice of content channel is up to you, but the purpose is always the same: to boost your brand. How? Let’s look at that.

What impact can digital content marketing have?

Content marketing for digital health (and anything else) only works if you use it strategically. We’ll come on to some tips on how to build a content marketing strategy a little later.

Fundamentally, conent marketing is about creating materials – using the channels outlined above – to improve your relationship with core audiences.

Some of the benefits of successful content marketing include:

  • Building brand awareness
  • Increasing website traffic and conversions
  • Attracting higher-quality leads
  • Enhances brand visibility
  • Boosting SEO
  • Extends and improves social media engagement (including posting, likes and shares)
  • Establishes you as a thought leader

Building a digital healthcare content marketing strategy

Effective digital healthcare content marketing involves more than picking up a pen or striking a key. To be truly successful and impactful, it needs to be underpinned by a clear and well-considered strategy.

Writing a content strategy is a challenging thing but we’re written perhaps the world’s best guide on how to write one here. Read our article on how to write a healthcare content marketing strategy.

The steps to follow include these (don’t worry, we go into detail in that guide, so just read that):

  • Understanding your audience
  • Setting clear objectives
  • Developing a healthcare content plan
  • Content distribution and promotion
  • Engaging with your audience
  • Measuring success and adjusting strategy
  • Ensuring accessibility and compliance

Writing a healthcare content strategy is time consuming and complex, but ultimately highly rewarding and ultimately, it’s massively beneficial to you and your business. If you have the skills in-house, you can do this – but if you don’t it’s better to work with a digital content marketing agency (like 42group).

Why work with a digital content marketing agency?

OK, so 42group is a leading digital healthcare content marketing agency. We want to work with you and hope that you want to work with us.

Why?

Digital healthcare content marketing agencies like 42group (and yes, some of the others out there that we must begrudgingly mention) are experts at building content strategies that are based on intelligence, targeted towards your core audiences, informed by research and packed full of creative content ideas.

A healthcare content agency can take all the hard work from you, accepting the challenge and producing a complete integrated campaign solution to support your product, service or solution.

Sound good? Then get in touch with 42group today.

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