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Best Practices for Using Healthcare Blogs as a Marketing Tool

Medical blogs are important when it comes to successful healthcare marketing, but not every practice has the time or skill for it. After all, building a blog takes a huge chunk of time from their already-packed schedule. But if your healthcare brand decides to invest in blogging and other content marketing strategies, it may generate up 3x as many leads as before.

The most successful healthcare blogs don’t just happen overnight – they follow a few strategies to help them stand out among others. If your brand consistently publishes reliable information through blogs, then you’re on your way to becoming an authority and trusted source of information in the industry.

So what are the best practices for creating healthcare blogs as effective marketing tools? Here are some of the best strategies you can apply to take your medical blogs to the next level:

How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy With Healthcare Blogs

If your blog isn’t getting the attention and engagement it needs, here are some of the best practices to improve the quality of your blog and use them as powerful marketing tools:

1) Decide What to Write About

There are lots of topics in the medical industry to write blog posts about. But to capture the attention of your target audience, make sure to publish about topics they actually want to read but are still aligned with your brand. If you can’t choose what kind of content to write, here are some topics that people expect to see in a medical blog:

  • Current health news and issues – People often turn to the internet if they want to know more about the latest health topics and current events in the medical industry. Talking about it in the blog helps raise awareness about these issues, but they must be published with factual information at the right time.
  • All about your healthcare brand – Blogs are meant to educate audiences, but healthcare practices may also use them to promote their latest findings, milestones, and awards in the industry.
  • Patient stories and case studies – Compelling stories about the recovery or treatment journey of patients also attract the attention of readers. It gives them hope that they’ll get through the same circumstances, especially if they relate to the content.
  • Latest medical studies – There are always new advancements in the medical industry, whether it’s a new product, treatment, or scientific evidence that supports a claim. Scientific journals can be too complicated for most readers, so it’s the medical practitioner’s duty to relay information through blog posts.
  • How-to guides – Tutorials are also popular among healthcare blogs. They’re easy to make, but they’re powerful enough to bring a lot of attention and engagement to the site from search engine results.

Choosing the best topics to write about has a lot of benefits for healthcare companies. It allows them to attract organic site traffic and boost audience trust. Blogs are also an effective way for brands to slowly become an authority and a source of credible information in the medical industry.

However, it’s also important to remember that choosing the wrong topics might have a negative impact on the brand’s credibility and overall marketing strategy. Always make sure to write about things that are aligned and related to your brand, so they can contribute to your success.

2) Determine What Categories and Keywords to Use

Creating categories is one of the first things that brands do when setting up a blog. These categories are like indexes that show readers the kind of content that the blog has, allowing them to evaluate what they can learn from the practice. Blog categories should include topics that are important for patients but still in line with your brand.

As for keywords, healthcare companies may use different tools to help them decide on the best ones that attract more audiences. Another way to come up with the best keywords is to write down the categories related to the practice and take note of different phrases and terms that fall under each one.

Specific keywords are for attracting a certain group of people while general keywords are for covering larger patient bases. In addition to finding the right keywords, it’s also crucial to use them appropriately in the blog to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are definitely needed to bring more attention to the brand. But for those who don’t have the time to learn this new skill, it might be better for a brand to hire an SEO team instead.

3) Choose a Format for the Blog

Readers are often busy, so blogs must be written in reader-friendly formats that are easily skimmable. About 49% of published blog posts have lists and around 31% of bloggers found that this approach is successful in engaging audiences.

However, some content can’t be written in a list. In such cases, breaking the ideas into multiple subheadings is a good way to minimize text blocks. There’s no fixed rule about the length of paragraphs in a blog post, but they should only be written in a couple of lines.

To help spice up your medical blog, here are some of the best blog formats to consider:

  • Q&As – Interviews with the staff or industry experts draw interested readers to your blog because it’s the kind of unique content they won’t find in others. These Q&As also work great for educating patients and building good relationships with them.
  • Tutorials – This is another way for healthcare practitioners to impart their knowledge to their patient or audience base. You may include a video version of the tutorial in the blog.
  • News commentary – If there’s a health issue that’s related to your brand or expertise, then a news commentary is a good type of content to boost search rankings. However, it’s important to get to the point immediately and write it in layman’s terms to prevent readers from just skimming through the content.
  • Video blogs – Many people prefer watching short videos instead of reading through a whole blog to get the information they need. The demand for video blogs is clear, so it’s only natural for healthcare brands to conform to this trend if they want to gain more engagement.
  • FAQs – Going through multiple blog pages can be a hassle when patients are just looking for a quick answer to a simple question. FAQs make it easier for readers to find what they need because all questions are compiled on one page and answered concisely.

4) Include Photos and Links

Writing a blog post about a topic that’s interesting and relevant to the patient base is important, but that’s not all there is to blogging. Adding links and images to each post makes it more credible, engaging, and eye-catching.

The more images added to a blog post, the more likely it is to give the brand strong results. Around 42% of bloggers who used more than 10 images on average in their long-form blogs said that it had a significant positive impact on their brand.

Links are another crucial part of an excellent healthcare marketing strategy because they add authority to the content. It also helps patients find out more about a topic that interests them because they eventually get redirected to your sources or other similar pages.

Medical blogs often use 2 types of links on their posts: external links that guide readers out of the site and internal links that take them to another page on the same site. The best use of internal links on health blogs is when the brand redirects readers from an article to one of the brand’s web copies, allowing them to know more about the company or its services.

5) Plan a Schedule to Post the Blogs

Another important key to successful content marketing is consistency – it enhances the patient experience, builds credibility, and boosts brand trust and reputation. Having an editorial calendar helps medical blogs become more consistent in posting different kinds of content. It allows content teams to map out the content and ensure that everything is posted at the right intervals.

6) Share the Blog Post After Publishing

Simply publishing the blog on the site isn’t enough to give it enough traffic – medical brands have to actively share it on social media sites to expand their reach. Being the best-written content might not be enough to give you the engagement you need, but being the best-promoted one does – which is why about 90% of bloggers always share their blogs on their social media accounts.

The same blog can be shared a few times on different platforms, but make sure that it’s packaged in a way that matches the tone, style, and preferred format of the social media site.

Operate the Best Healthcare Blog With Writrly

Healthcare blogs are an integral part of a successful marketing strategy, so it’s time to invest more in content production if you want to get ahead of the game. With Writrly, you can grow your patient base and become an authority in the industry using compelling and meaningful content designed to inform and engage with your audiences.

At Writrly, there’s no need to deal with the headaches and hassles of hiring freelancers to make the content for you. Our all-inclusive packages cover everything from ideation to publication so you can focus more on helping others.

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