Content strategy:
a comprehensive guide for healthcare marketers
If you’re a healthcare marketer, you have a tall task. You’re constantly cutting through noise and clutter to find ways to engage patients, grow business and recruit and retain top talent.
Crafting content that resonates with your audiences — and delivering it where, when and how your audience expects it — is key.
There’s a word for this work. It’s called content strategy. And doing it right can feel like a mix of art and science.
This guide explores the fundamentals of content strategy, the pre-work to set you up for success, unique challenges and three essential areas of content strategy focus for healthcare marketers.
What is content strategy?
Content strategy, simply put, is a plan for your content. It’s a thought-out approach to content creation, management, distribution and governance.
It isn’t just about writing blog posts or making sure your website looks nice. It’s about delivering the right content to the right place at the right time to the right audience.
In healthcare marketing, that means crafting useful, engaging and trustworthy content that speaks to patients and their families, providers and potential employees. Then, making sure it shows up where people expect to find it.
Types of content strategy
There are many types of content, so naturally, there’s the potential for many content strategies. But healthcare marketers can get the most traction when they focus their strategic thinking on three key areas:
- Web content strategy: Making online healthcare information easier for patients to find, access and understand
- Content marketing strategy: Reaching audiences across a variety of platforms with content that turns them into patients
- Recruitment and employee experience content strategy: Crafting and sharing content that helps you stand out so you win (and keep) top talent
Journey mapping
Before tackling content strategy, it’s important to understand the content encountered along the consumer journey.
In healthcare, “consumer” and “patient” are often used interchangeably — and we put a lot of emphasis on the patient journey and journey mapping. But “patient” could easily be swapped out for “prospective employee,” “provider” or “new hire.”
The point is, no matter your audience, it’s important to understand the following:
- Where and how is your target audience first learning about and accessing your organization or a specific service?
- What are the key points along their journey where content could help with decision-making?
- What are the gaps in their experience where the right content could provide reassurance?
Journey mapping can be complex and detailed — sometimes requiring the support of an agency partner. Even if your organization has limited marketing resources, you can still gain valuable insight by creating simplified journey maps. Healthcare marketers can ask patients or employees about their experiences or step into their shoes and walk through the process.
Everyone’s journey through your system or organization is different, so the content strategy approaches you develop may need to be varied and personalized.
Web content strategy
When asked about your organization’s footprint, you’re probably quick to name the number of hospitals and care sites. But what about your website?
Have you considered it among your locations? If not, you should. Your organization’s website is its digital front door and so much more. It’s a first touchpoint, an introduction to your brand, a source for more information and even an appointment location for digital care.
Just like you might shine the floors at your physical locations, your website deserves the same care and attention. And a web content strategy is a good place to start.
What is web content strategy?
Web content strategy involves planning, creating, delivering and governing your digital content. In healthcare marketing, this means creating service line, provider and location content to educate, engage and convert website visitors from browsers to patients.
How top approach web content strategy
Healthcare marketers can approach web content strategy in many ways, but our experience at WG Content tells us that setting goals is a good next step after the journey-mapping pre-work.
Goals may include:
- Better wayfinding
- Improved search engine rankings
- Increased brand awareness
- Lead generation for new service offerings
- Patient acquisition
If you’re facing a complete web overhaul, you may need a full web content audit. A content audit can help if:
- Your content is redundant and competing with itself
- You don’t know what content exists on your site, or specific information is hard to find
- Your website has outdated information, instances of “coming soon,” or pages that haven’t been archived in years
A web content audit focuses on your overall content quality and search engine optimization (SEO). The results should include recommendations for:
- What to keep
- What to edit or remove
- What to add to address content gaps
- How to optimize existing content for your specific audiences and search engines
With all that work out of the way, it’s important that you keep content current and fresh. A sustainable content governance plan is critical to a successful web content strategy.
Make an impact with less
A full content audit isn’t always doable or even necessary. Healthcare marketers can make an impact by focusing content strategy efforts on specific website sections. Read how to get the most out of your service line, provider profile and location content.
Web content strategy in action
New hospital, new site — now what?
UT Health San Antonio turned to WG Content to make it all work.
Content marketing strategy
As more and more people turn to the web or social media for health education and decision-making, healthcare organizations need to provide engaging content.
In healthcare, content marketing strategy goes beyond the expected service, provider and location information. And it can completely transform your digital presence.
What is content marketing strategy?
Content marketing strategy is about planning, creating and sharing valuable and relevant content that entertains, builds reputation and trust, and drives engagement.
Content marketing strategy includes everything from email newsletters and social posts to white papers and blogs. For many healthcare organizations, a successful blog content strategy is critical for standing out from the competition.
How healthcare marketers can approach content marketing strategy
Goal setting is just as important in content marketing strategy as it is with other types of content strategy planning.
Content marketing goals may include:
- Improved search engine rankings
- Increased brand awareness
- Lead generation for new service offerings
- Patient acquisition
- Patient education
- Thought leadership positioning
Editorial calendars
With your goals in mind, an editorial calendar is a necessary next step for your content strategy planning. This big-picture workflow helps you track content themes, types and creators for the coming months, quarters or year.
An editorial calendar can help you determine the following:
- What topics you should cover in your blog
- How you can be more proactive about content publication
- What channels to use to publish your content marketing assets
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) must be a significant part of your content marketing strategy. A keyword gap analysis can help you understand if your keywords are performing well, what keywords you lack and where you have SEO gaps.
You can use the findings of a keyword gap analysis to plan new content for your editorial calendar or update existing content so that it performs better for you. A blog keyword gap analysis is a great place to start.
Content distribution
With an editorial calendar in place and a strong SEO plan in hand, it’s time to turn your attention to distribution. Make sure your content reaches your audiences where they are with a winning distribution strategy.
Content marketing strategy in action
Atlantic Health System needed fresh, lifestyle content to keep their marketing moving.
WG Content delivered consumer-focused stories that connect.
Recruitment and retention content strategy
Content isn’t just for patients. It’s also essential to attract and retain the best and brightest talent.
In healthcare, where workforce shortages and burnout remain ongoing challenges, a strong content strategy can help recruit people who share your values — and help you keep them.
What is recruitment and retention marketing content strategy?
Recruitment and retention content strategy ensures your content supports prospects as they browse for positions, prepare for interviews and move through your hiring journey. And it keeps hired employees feeling engaged, supported and appreciated.
How healthcare marketers can approach recruitment and retention content strategy
Like other good content strategy plans, goal setting is a good place to start with recruitment and retention content strategy. Goals may include:
- Attracting talent for highly specialized roles
- Improved search engine rankings
- Improved support for job seekers
- Raising employee engagement scores, especially on survey questions focused on brand and communication
Win more hires with better careers content
Review your organization’s careers pages to help you level up your recruitment content strategy efforts.
A competitive analysis can help you understand how your pages stack up to your competitors. Further review of your pages can tell you if:
- Your pages communicate your organization’s value to applicants
- Your brand and messaging show up consistently in job postings
- You are leveraging key differentiators to keep your organization top of mind with job candidates
- You are offering all the resources a job seeker may need throughout the application, hiring and onboarding process
I enjoy thinking about how we use content to support team members, keep them engaged, show appreciation for them and help them feel like they’re part of the organization. All the things that make a difference in someone’s day-to-day.
— Stella Hart, Content strategist, WG Content
Build loyalty with retention content that connects
Consider your employee-focused content, how it’s delivered and how it’s working for you. Retention content strategy approaches to consider include:
- Authentic messages from leaders to keep team members informed and engaged
- Employee communications (like newsletters) that showcase real people and highlight successes and achievements.
- Storytelling across multiple channels — including newsletters, video and social media — that detail the real-world impact your employees have on patients, each other and their communities
Recruitment content strategy in action
AdventHealth Tampa wanted to boost physician pride and engagement.
WG Content created a newsletter that brought their stories to life.
Tools of the trade
Healthcare marketers focused on content strategy need trusty tools during the strategy development phase and beyond.
Tools to consider include:
- Analytics and performance platforms: These tools — think Google Analytics — help marketers understand audience behaviors and measure content performance.
- Content planning and collaboration platforms: Tools like Basecamp, Trello or Asana help teams collaborate on projects and track and manage content changes.
- Distribution and brand management platforms: Content management systems (CMS) and off-the-shelf tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social help you manage and distribute all types of content. For recruitment content strategy, consider tools like Glassdoor, Indeed and LinkedIn, where you can monitor reviews and work to improve brand perception.
- SEO and keyword research platforms: Many free tools help you identify keywords and search trends. Subscription-based platforms like Semrush offer even more insight into search volumes and how your competitors are performing.
AI and content strategy
There’s no getting around it. Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, and that includes healthcare marketing and content strategy.
AI tools help us analyze audience behaviors, search patterns and demographic data to deliver personalized, automated messages to the right people at the right time. Generative AI technologies can also help healthcare marketers create personas and brainstorm and outline content that speaks directly to their audiences’ needs.
At WG Content, we’ve approached generative AI with curiosity, exploring how we can use it to springboard our own creativity.
Despite its benefits, AI comes with challenges for healthcare marketers. We must stay updated on the following:
- Compliance concerns
- Ongoing copyright discussions
- Potential misinformation or bias in AI-generated content
- The potential for “hallucinations”
SEO is one area where AI may have the most impact. AI-driven keyword research, predictive analytics and real-time performance tracking offer healthcare marketers the information they need to create content that ranks higher in search results and reaches more people.
AI can also identify trending health topics before they become widely discussed, which gives marketers an edge in content planning.
Are you worried about protecting your website’s ranking in the age of AI?
Boost your SEO strategy for generative search.
Measuring your success
Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) across your various content strategy plans is important. Align these to your original goals to see if your strategy works as planned or has room for improvement.
Here is a helpful list of key metrics to tract for each type of effort:
Web:
- Appointments scheduled
- Bounce rates
- Document downloads
- Event registrations
- Page views
- Service inquiries
- Time on page
- Video views and comments
Content marketing:
- Keyword performance
- Lead generation
- Most-read blogs
- Organic traffic
- Search rankings
- Social media engagement
- Trending topics
Recruitment and employee experience:
- Application volume
- Employee engagement scores
- Traffic to recruitment and employee-focused pages
- Retention rates
Find the right partner
When it comes to healthcare content strategy, there are some things you can do on your own — no matter the size of your team. But a strong partner can bring expertise, tools and a savvy perspective to your project. We customize content strategy support at WG Content to meet your unique needs and goals.
Ready for a smarter content strategy?