Congratulations. You have this amazing health
company or health practice with a wonderful mission and clear value,
but there's one glaring problem. You're getting very little engagement
online from your digital marketing efforts, your social media,
your email campaigns. So you're not really converting
people online into customers, clients or patients of your
health company or health practice. Why in the world is no one
liking, commenting on sharing, responding to our stuff? The
answer is all about your content. Let's pretend like the
Internet is a neighborhood. There is someone who is driving through
your neighborhood looking for something specific, looking for something to do. Your neighbor to the left of you is
having a cookout. There's music games, there's lots of fun going on. Your neighbor to the right is
having a book club discussion.
Your neighbor across the street
is having a pool party and on your personal plot of land, there are the bare bones
of a house. And that's it. There's nothing going on there.
Nothing to invite people to. They're driving clear past your house
to the one that looks more fun and exciting. To the one that has what
they are looking for. The house? That's your online presence. Those
are your social media channels. That's your email list. That's your
onsite blog, your YouTube channel. That's the excitement that draws
people in. It's your content. If you don't have content at all
or if your content is very boring and dry, even though it's
related to healthcare, people are not going
to want to hang around. There's too much else out
there for them to be drawn to. Those are the people who are going to
get the sales to conversions.
The likes, the shares. Uninteresting or nonexistent health
content is not going to attract people to your brand. It's not going to make them excited
about or loyal to your brand and it's not going to result in sales
or conversions for you. So today I want to dig into
the details of what is keeping you from getting engagement with
your content online-specifically, the three most common red flags I see
when I work with my health clients. Before we dig in, go to the comment section and let me know
what type of digital marketing efforts your company or practice is engaging
in right now. Social media, blog posts, videos, let me know what you all are doing or
if you're not doing anything at all, which is totally okay. We're going
to talk about that. By the way, I'm Megan Nicole.
I'm a
public health pharmacist, turned healthcare copywriter
and content strategist. I help innovative health companies
and practices develop and execute culturally-relevant content strategies
so that they can improve patient health outcomes, increase brand loyalty
and increase the bottom line. If you're looking for more
information about these topics, go ahead and subscribe to this channel
and click the notification bell so that you know when additional healthcare
content marketing tips are available and ready for you.
All right,
so the first red flag, you don't have a content strategy
and by content strategy I mean a written formalized content
strategy. This content strategy, going back to our analogy is like
the blueprint for your house. Without having that blueprint to follow. You're really just creating content
arbitrarily and when you create the wrong content and throw it together
in a very random way, you don't get results from it. If you've read the 7 Habits
of Highly Effective People, you remember that one of those habits
was beginning with the end in mind.
That is the essence of how
you build a content strategy. You think about what your end goal is, what do I want to achieve with this
body of content and then you plot your way to that goal. You use that strategy
to determine what is working well, what's not working so well and how you
can tweak that to improve your content and reach the goals that you have
set for it. Red flag number two, and this one may be a
hard pill to swallow. Your content is not
engaging or entertaining.
This is a tough one for health companies
and health practices because healthcare by nature has the potential
to be very dry and boring, but that does not mean health content
has to be equally dry or boring. Your job is to make that
interesting. Make it sexy. Make someone want to learn more about it. Going back to that neighborhood analogy,
where's the food? Where's the music? Where are the games? Where's
the great conversation? That's what's going to draw people in.
What do I mean when I say engaging? It's not just talking at or
providing information to. It's also soliciting information and
interaction from, so how can you do that? Through self-assessments, through quizzes, through a fun and conversational
tone rather than a very high, strong, uptight, academic,
scientific style and tone. Those are examples of ways that we
can make content much more engaging. Asking questions instead
of just using, you know, declarative sentences over and over. Telling stories that incorporate
things that the reader, your audience, your community will care about.
This also ties into the last, the final red flag, which is that your content is
not specific enough to the person who you want to be your customer, your
client, or your patient.
In other words, it's not relevant. Let's talk about
cultural relevance specifically. It's really important to know
who your target customer is. What is their persona?
What is your avatar? As you'll hear it called in
the digital marketing world, if you had to envision one person
who was the perfect client, customer or patient for
your company, your brand, who would that person be and what is
everything that you know about them? What's their cultural background, their
demographics, their psychographics, the way that they think about the world, the way that they think about
healthcare. In a lot of cases, health content ignores
that specific persona, and that is a mistake. That
is a missed opportunity. You want to tailor your content
to the person in that particular demographic, to the person with
those particular psychographics, because that is going to make
the content resonate with them.
It makes people feel seen and heard. And when people feel seen and
heard over and over and over again, it makes them loyal to your brand
because they, they begin to trust you. And they begin to think that you
really genuinely care about them. Your content reflects that and so they
are willing to continue that engagement and that interaction.
These three points make up a lot
of what may be missing from your online presence, from your health content, and it may be a large part of the reason
why people are not engaging with you as much as you would like online. Now, you shouldn't feel alone
because there are hundreds, maybe thousands of health brands
that struggle with this exact thing. I know because I work with a lot of them. Many clients don't necessarily have the
background knowledge or experience or don't have the time to worry
about healthcare content
marketing and optimizing that content and building out a content
strategy and figuring out ways to engage and entertain through content
and making that content tailored to a specific person. You just
don't have time for that. You're busy running a business and it's
completely understandable for you to not have the time to dedicate to enriching
your content as much as possible. That's where people like me come in. That's why as a healthcare content
strategist, I'm able to go in, get the important
information from clients, and then build these content strategies
and execute on them on their behalf.
So if you'd like to explore what
working together might look like, I would be happy to have a chat with you. Just go to
megannichole.as.me/content to set up, a little meet and greet chat. That link
is also in the description box for you. You can just click on it
and head straight there. I'll see you back here next Thursday. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the
notification bell so that you'll know when new content marketing tips are
available for you.
See you next week..