Working with a healthcare copywriting agency

42group is one of the UK’s leading healthcare and medical copywriting agencies, working with a huge range of clients in the healthcare, medical and pharmaceutical sectors. We get approached by clients from across the world about new projects and we’ve developed a (near) foolproof process to get the best results. 

Clients have a responsibility when working with a healthcare content agency to provide all the information they need to do the job. It’s our role to help you – and we will. Here’s 42group’s guide on how to work with a healthcare copywriting agency, including everything you should prepare and provide to kick off your project and ensure it’s a success. 

Making first contact with a medical copywriting agency

So, you’ve got a healthcare copywriting project you want to discuss.

Are we interested? Absolutely!

Before you contact us, here are a few of the things you should provide in the initial email.

• Outline of the project
• Name of the lead person
• Short description of deliverables
• Any key dates (conference next week? Stick it in!)
• Links to your business
• Contact name, number and email address

This sounds like a lot, but you can achieve it all in a few sentences. The purpose of being as clear as possible in the initial email is that we can then identify who the best person for you to speak to would be.

You may want to speak to our MD, digital lead, content strategist and designer. (They’re not all the same people!)

This information also enables us to prepare for the initial call or email. We can provide context about our experience, previous projects and successes.

It also enables us to quickly assess whether we can do it. Delivering a complete website rewrite in a week for £1000 is unlikely to be a project we’ll take on, and we’ll let you know quickly. 

Let’s imagine you’ve sent us this email, we’ve arranged a meeting and are ready to go. Here are some of the things we’ll need to have from you to work on the project. You can prepare them in advance, or we can develop them together. Experience tells us that these are the building blocks of the best relationships and the most successful healthcare copywriting projects.

#1. Audience profile

Who do you want to communicate with? What do you want to say to them, and critically, what do you want them to do? What are their pain points? What are their preferred communication channels? What communication strategies and approaches have been successful in the past? What have failed? Do they like cats or dogs? (We prefer cats.)

OK, you can ignore the last one, but every question before that is relevant – and answering them honestly is integral to the success of your project. 

Even before we get to the brief and the deliverables we need to know who your audience is (or are ,if you’ve got more than one).

Why do we ask for this first? 

We need to understand who your audience is so that we can critically appraise everything that follows (brief, TOV and KPIs). We need to ensure that the people on the call, conference or involved in the project team understand who your audience is and how to connect with them. 

We also need to have the confidence that we can create content that’s going to work for that audience. 

New clinical guidelines for diabetes treatment? Not us. 

Copywriting and content for a diabetes app? That’s us.

At 42group, the audience is at the forefront of everything we do and guides every decision – including whether to take on a project or not.

#2. Copywriting and content brief (including timelines, dates & deliverables)

Now we get into the good stuff!

The copywriting and content brief is everything about the project in one place. (If you’ve never written one before or want a free template, check out our guide on how to write a content marketing brief.)

The brief contains as much information as you can provide us on the project, including:

• The people we need to connect with (audience),
• Deliverables
• Timelines and timeframes
• Project stakeholders
• Project sign-off
• Project partners (including other agencies)
• Interdependencies
• Compliance information
• Corporate approach (including TOV – which we follow up in the next section)
• Keywords
• Expected outcomes
• Budget and payment schedule
• Terms and conditions

It sounds like a lot, but the brief provides the context, controls and constraints that enable us to get creative and ultimately deliver a better product for you.

You can create the brief yourself (using your template or ours), or we can work through it together. 

We have established that the better the brief, the better the project outcome. 

3. Tone of voice guidelines

We know what you want to say and who you want to say it to, but how are we going to say it?

That’s a convoluted way of introducing the importance of tone of voice guidelines. If you’ve for them, send them. (If they’re part of a larger corporate toolkit, do us a favour and isolate the pages for us.)

But what if you don’t have TOV guidelines? (First thing, we can write them for you – so ask us.)

We’ll ask you to send us a selection of content that exemplifies the tone of voice you want for your content. That could be existing content on your website, that from close competitors, or from the best in the marketplace. 

Tone of voice is critical in healthcare copywriting, and we’ll spend lots of time finding that balance between conversational relatability and clinical clarity. We work through several iterations of core pieces of content to build a consensus and then apply the same tone of voice across all content. 

#4. KPIs and targets – measures for success

 What does success look like? You can tell us you want to be on page 1 of Google for a specific search term or something vague like “sell more stuff” – but try and be as specific as possible. 

If you’re finding it hard, read our guide on healthcare content marketing KPIs to get started.

Marketing has moved on and is a sector that’s defined by data. We want out content and copywriting to contribute to your broader strategic goals, so find a way to incorporate them. 

As well as performance measures of success (page ranking, etc.), consider project measures of success, too. Set deadlines and timescales and assess your agency’s performance against them. Are they delivering high-quality work on time? Setting expectations early is crucial to establishing a productive and effective relationship.

Project started? Stay in touch

Once your healthcare copywriting and content project has started, it’s time to sit back and wait for delivery, right?

Wrong. 

The best results come only from collaboration. You’ll need to stay in contact with your copywriting agency at all stages, ensuring content is ready for delivery and at the quality level required. 

At 42group, we work 100% openly. Our clients and customers can access everything at any time, including all copywriting and content drafts, project documents, briefs, guidelines and terms and conditions.

We schedule regular meetings to provide feedback on progress, raise any issues and deal with any problems. In the end, the deadlines are yours – not ours – so it’s up to you to drive the project forward, but at 42group, we’re with you every step of the way.