Is your hospital website an online destination? It’s important that your website help patients who already know you and just want to check your address or phone number. But if you care about brand awareness, your website needs to be so much more than that: It should be a place where people return again and again because they know they’ll always find something of value.
As a healthcare marketer, you can take a few key actions to build your website into a destination. You can find the full list of them in our eBook on developing a healthcare marketing strategy, but one of the most important items to tackle is creating foundational content, an essential component of effective healthcare marketing.
Understanding Foundational Health
Foundational health refers to the underlying systems and processes that support an individual’s overall health and well-being. It encompasses physical, mental, and emotional health, as well as the social and environmental factors that influence health outcomes. A strong foundation of health is essential for maintaining optimal health, preventing chronic diseases, and promoting overall well-being. By focusing on foundational health, individuals can build resilience against health challenges and improve their quality of life at any given moment.
The Importance of Foundational Health in Healthcare
Foundational health is a critical component of healthcare, as it provides the basis for effective care delivery and positive health outcomes. By addressing the underlying systems and processes that support health, healthcare providers can help individuals prevent chronic diseases, manage existing conditions, and improve their overall quality of life. Furthermore, a focus on foundational health can help reduce healthcare costs, improve patient satisfaction, and enhance the overall effectiveness of healthcare services. This holistic approach ensures that patients receive comprehensive care that addresses all aspects of their health, leading to better long-term outcomes.
What is Foundational Health Content?
While all of the content you create should be high quality, foundational healthcare content needs to go beyond—be extra valuable, extra informative, extra something. It needs to meet Jay Baer’s youtility principle of content so good people would pay for it. But really, what visitors will be doing is offering their personal information (name, email, location, etc.) for the problem-solving content, converting them into leads for your marketing team to pursue.
Foundational content can take on any number of forms. One of the most common options is to create a long-form piece of content, like Maine Health’s guide to Improving Cardiovascular Health. Health systems benefit greatly from such comprehensive content as it helps in managing patient relationships and improving overall health outcomes. You can find tons of tips and articles online related to cardiovascular health, but bringing much of that information into one download makes it easier for patients to take in everything they need at once.
You can also create foundational content in more visual formats, which can come in especially handy if you need to provide information of value to an audience that can’t necessarily read yet. Texas Children’s Hospital created an animated video series on different heart problems children encounter so their kids and their patients could get the information in a format that made sense for everyone.
Another option that’s gaining traction in inbound marketing is interactive content. St. David’s offers a few interactive assessments on its website that can provide a personalized report on your heart health, back and neck pain and breast cancer risk. Interactive content like this has serious potential for healthcare, since people’s health needs are specific enough they benefit more from content tailored to their own situation rather than generalized recommendations.
The format of foundational content can vary, but it’s crucial it be something that offers considerable value to your audience. You can use it either as a way to build goodwill and help your patients, like the Texas Children’s Hospital video series, or you can use it as a way to generate leads by making it gated content like St. David’s.
How to Create Content That Offers Something Extra
Foundational content takes a serious investment in time, resources and yes, budget. Incorporating lab values ensures that the content is accurate and personalized, especially in healthcare contexts. You don’t want to rush it and end up with something that’s not good enough for people to take interest in, or that simply doesn’t land with your audience.
Step 1: Identify the information your customers need for better health outcomes
A thorough, well-researched guide to cardiac procedures wouldn’t have hit the mark with the audience Texas Children’s Hospital wanted to reach with their video series. You have to take the time to figure out who your audience is and what they want to know.
That means before you do anything else, you have to put the time in to do thorough research on the types of patients your hospital attracts and those you want to reach. Your physicians should be able to help, talk to them about what questions they get most often and what information patients regularly need that they can’t seem to find answers for elsewhere. If you have an email list, send out a survey to see what topics your patients are most interested in learning more about, especially regarding various medical conditions.
Be careful not to assume you know what your audience is thinking already. Make sure you’re basing your knowledge on real information about their habits, questions and concerns.
Step 2: Brainstorm topic ideas based on your audience research
After you’ve done the research, you should have some good, solid notes on the types of questions and topics that interest your audience. Consider including topics related to mental health, as it plays a critical role in overall well-being and intersects with various chronic conditions. Get together with the rest of your marketing team and brainstorm ideas for content that will provide your customers the information they most need and want in a way that they’ll find (extra) useful.
Step 3: Research what’s out there to identify a need for health equity
Once you’ve got your list of awesome ideas but before you start creating, do a little Googling to make sure you’re not about to invest a lot of time and money into creating something that’s been done 100 times before—unless most of those other examples are low quality and the world could do for a better version. This step may help you identify gaps in the content that’s out there that you didn’t expect and lead you to a new idea for something your patients need, along with other benefits such as improved coping skills and overall patient satisfaction.
At this point, it’s time to narrow your ideas down to those you’re ready to move forward with. You can hang on to those other ideas for later, but pick the top three topics that should go on your content calendar now.
Step 4: Build out an extremely useful, comprehensive piece of foundational content
If your marketing team has all the knowledge it needs to create the foundational content you’ve chosen, then you need to make sure everyone has enough time to work on their part of the process for a strong, useful and effective piece of healthcare content. Emphasize the importance of a healthy diet as part of foundational health support protocols. Get your doctors involved to ensure you’re providing the most authoritative information possible on the subject.
Step 5: Promote and highlight other benefits
Do not let this step slide! If you’re going to do the work of creating extra-valuable foundational content (that takes extra time, work and cost), you want to make sure people see it. Don’t just release it and hope for the best, work to get it in front of people. Promoting content that encourages healthy habits, such as regular physical activity, is essential for maintaining physical health and preventing chronic diseases.
Creating truly valuable foundational content isn’t easy, but it’s an important step in turning your website into a place patients appreciate and want to come back to—and not just when they need a reminder of your address. When treated as part of a larger healthcare marketing strategy, foundational content can help turn site visitors into leads more likely to become long-term patients of your hospital.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Healthcare Content
Measuring the effectiveness of healthcare content is crucial for ensuring that it meets its intended goals and provides value to patients. Key metrics for evaluating healthcare content include engagement metrics (e.g., page views, time on site), lead generation metrics (e.g., form submissions, phone calls), and conversion metrics (e.g., appointments scheduled, procedures performed). Additionally, healthcare providers can use patient satisfaction surveys and feedback forms to assess the quality and relevance of their content. By regularly analyzing these metrics, healthcare organizations can refine their content strategies to better meet the needs of their audience and drive improved health outcomes.
Best Practices for Healthcare Content Creation
Creating effective healthcare content requires a deep understanding of the target audience, their needs, and their preferences. Best practices for healthcare content creation include:
- Conducting thorough research and analysis to identify gaps in existing content and opportunities for improvement.
- Developing a clear and concise writing style that is accessible to a broad range of audiences.
- Incorporating visual elements, such as images and videos, to enhance engagement and comprehension.
- Ensuring that content is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with relevant regulations and guidelines.
- Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve visibility and reach.
By following these best practices, healthcare providers can create content that not only educates and informs but also engages and empowers patients to take control of their health.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Healthcare Content
Common mistakes to avoid in healthcare content include:
- Using overly technical or complex language that may confuse or intimidate patients.
- Failing to provide clear and concise instructions or guidance.
- Neglecting to address the emotional and social aspects of health and wellness.
- Failing to keep content up-to-date and relevant.
- Ignoring the importance of SEO and online visibility.
By avoiding these common mistakes and following best practices for healthcare content creation, healthcare providers can develop effective content that engages, educates, and empowers patients to take control of their health. This approach ensures that healthcare content remains a valuable resource for patients, helping them make informed decisions and achieve better health outcomes.
