Actionable content provides value, establishes trust and encourages potential patients to take action. To provide the best care, health professionals need “actionable content,” namely, information that can automatically prompt the best decisions about care at the point in time when clinical decisions need to be made. Implicit in this definition is integration of the information into a comprehensive workflow, as well as the ability to utilize information from many different sources. “Content as a service” is a term we use to refer to the delivery method for providing actionable, rules-based information at any point of care.
For healthcare providers, high-value, actionable content advances the art and science of care delivery by ensuring that they have access to the best, most current, and most relevant clinical knowledge at the point of patient interaction. Where possible, offloading operational tasks can free clinicians to focus on the delivery of care rather than on the administrative processes that support it.
For patients, actionable content can transform a complicated, disjointed and impersonal healthcare system into one that “knows” their individual clinical needs in context and provides a personalized “healthcare global positioning system” to help patients manage their own care.
This puts healthcare companies in a good position to offer valuable and actionable advice through content marketing.
Healthcare content marketing has the following key benefits. It allows your organization to:
- Build trust in your business by showing the expertise and people behind your company
- Reduce patient anxiety by showing people what to expect, and answering their questions and doubts in a straightforward way
- Catch the attention of local search traffic, generating more long-term leads and knocks on the front door
- Differentiate from the competition and establish an audience that keeps coming back for more
Once the relevant and validated content is identified, the next step is to ensure its availability at the right points in the care continuum, as well as to seamlessly deliver this information into workflows in a way that does not require users to access other systems. These points of care include:
- The practitioner at the various points where well-informed decisions must be made
- The patient when appropriate
- Additional care providers as needed
- The facilities where procedures will be performed, prescriptions will be filled, and more
- The insurance companies that will be covering the cost of procedures and treatments
- The internal departments that handle billing and scheduling.
Below mentioned ways would guide you to create appropriate for healthcare setup:
– Develop compelling calls-to-action.
Perhaps the first tip sounds obvious, but you might be surprised at how challenging it can be to craft worthy results in real action. To inspire action, convey the benefits of taking action to your reader in a concise way. For example, flu season is the perfect time to direct patients to walk-in clinics. In an article mention flu tool to determine whether a health care visit is necessary, and a clickable “find a location” button for walk-in clinics.
– Clarify your audience personas.
Want results? You have to understand your audience. Although you may have a good sense of your broader audience demographic, personas can help you hone in on specific types of people within it. Consider their age, location, income, education level, conditions, etc. Then, ask yourself, how does this persona access content? Does he or she get healthcare information during work hours or at home? How much content might this persona want to receive, and how frequently? What influences his healthcare content searches and consumption? From there, you’ll be able to map a clearer path for your content.
– Offer examples that complement your advice.
This is particularly true when developing how-to articles that guide your readers on making healthy decisions. Work screenshots, videos, illustrations or other images into your blog posts, or list the best resources for achieving various health goals within your organization or community. For example (see what we did there?), if offering advice on how to manage chronic depression, you might also include links, phone numbers or other directives to connect the reader with someone on your mental wellness team.
Thus, content marketing offers healthcare providers the opportunity to capture local and international search traffic and differentiate themselves from the competition. Content marketing in healthcare is a way for brands to connect with a large and interested target audience of patients and healthcare organizations, through sharing valuable and relevant multimedia content. A content strategy is important to hospitals, healthcare providers, and healthcare foundations in order to help with brand awareness, build loyalty, and provide reliable and helpful information. This puts healthcare companies in a good position to offer valuable and actionable advice.
