Digital marketing is important in every modern field—including healthcare. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The online healthcare industry can be brutal. Competition is fierce, and major healthcare providers like the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, or government organizations like the CDC typically win that coveted #1 spot in the SERPs.
So what can you do to stand out in such a tough space? As with most things in life, I think one of the best ways to find the answer is from the experience of others.
To succeed in digitally marketing themselves, small and mid-size brands in the healthcare industry must build credibility through consistent, strong content marketing. They must invest in high-quality, targeted educational libraries that align with their core mission and that use SEO strategies to help show up in search engine results.
How do I know this works? Because I’ve seen it up close and personal over a 5-year span.
Here are four takeaways on how critical that content and SEO marketing strategy is in healthcare marketing. They come from a case study where we helped a telehealth company rank better for key commercial terms.
I’m going to assume you operate in the healthcare industry. Picture this with me for a second. Imagine a patient comes in, and you a healthcare provider hand them a prescription without even looking at them or saying a word.
Crazy, right? If you don’t skip the diagnosis stage for your patients, you shouldn’t do so with your SEO strategy or content marketing, either.
That’s why, when we started working with the telehealth brand, we performed an SEO audit, did keyword research, crawled their site, and observed their existing paid campaigns and social media marketing. We wanted to understand where they stood, their strengths and weaknesses, and their technical foundation.
We always do this because you have to know where you currently stand if you want to set goals and strategies that will work — and trust me when I say that this is a very important part of the process. Too often, we’ve seen brands balk at paying for strategy. They want to jump to the visible, measurable stuff. The problem is, if you don’t research and strategize, your action plan will inherently be weak, uninspired, and possibly even flawed. If you want to know where you should place the most value in the process, it’s here, in your strategy.
In this case, we found the brand had a solid foundation for building topical authority in the health space, but it wasn’t perfect. For instance, they had a robust FAQ library, but it was on ZenDesk, not their site, which meant they were missing out on SEO and traffic benefits. Their content was also limited in scope, they lacked internal linking, and they weren’t maximizing the impact of their existing content.
The Takeaway: Always start with a thorough analysis of where you are if you want to maximize your chances of getting to where you want to go. You will miss key optimization opportunities on a site if you don’t first review your current state.
Marketing used to be a fairly limited activity. In the digital marketing age, you have limitless opportunities. From SEO and back-end optimization to email, social, on-site, and digital PR, there is an endless list of owned, earned, and paid ways to promote your brand.
The question is, where should you direct your limited resources?
In the case of our telehealth client, we looked at the site by service line to see where traffic was coming from. We pulled in keyword research to identify targets based on these service lines, too. At the same time, we studied other areas of existing healthcare marketing to see what was working and what wasn’t.
Our goal was to tie in all of this information to ensure we were reinforcing and building on what was already working in their digital marketing strategy. If you silo your marketing effort, you’ll end up wasting resources and, at times, even working against yourself. Instead, use a holistic, knowledgeable approach to figure out the best places where you can put fresh emphasis and focus.
With our client, we found their core service line was actually capturing a decent amount of bottom-of-funnel (or BoFu) traffic. That was great news, and we were able to use it to direct our attention to improving middle- and top-of-funnel marketing in that area.
We applied a similar approach to auxiliary service lines and found plenty of opportunities for additional improvement. We evaluated each one’s ROI, such as average cart value, one-time vs repeat purchases, and lifetime value, and set our priorities based on that information.
The Takeaway: Don't put your efforts into something that won't have a chance of performing well. Always invest in improving and complementing the marketing that is already working. But make sure you’ve reviewed core information to create a strong, data-backed strategy.
All of this leads you to your starting point. (I know, it’s easy to feel exhausted just getting here, but hear me out. It’s worth it!)
Once you’ve studied your current situation and invested in finding and prioritizing opportunities, you’ve set the stage. Now, it’s time to pick your starting point. Some primary factors to consider when choosing include:
Use your assessments from sections one and two to guide how you choose from this list.
With our telehealth brand work, we found, along with a healthy content library, the brand already had a solid foundation for SEO. They were also using pay-per-click, internal and external PR functions, and a conversion rate optimization agency and social media team.
In other words, all of the pieces for success were there, and we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just needed to orchestrate everything so that it produced the synergy and results they were looking for.
The Takeaway: When shaping digital healthcare marketing strategy, don’t reinvent what’s working. Perfect it. And ensure all areas of marketing are supporting each other so any one area isn’t working in a silo.
So far, my advice has been about technical elements, gauging metrics, and observing marketing activities. My final thought is to focus on the end user throughout your detailed planning. Everything else is important, but you always want the user in mind while you’re considering them.
SEO is the best example of where this can go astray. It’s tempting to focus on search engine results when using SEO. But that isn’t the goal. SEO works with content marketing to improve the user experience. The goal should always be to use search engine optimization to get your healthcare services and content in front of the right people.
That means you want to create a comprehensive library of robust SEO content that meets user needs at all stages of the funnel. You can use it to secure backlinks from external outlets, create social media content, and boost your credibility—but always keep that end user in mind.
By doing that, we were able to not just provide our telehealth client with genuinely good, optimized content but also ensure that it spoke to customer needs and pain points, serving their audience at every step.
The Takeaway: Always keep the end-user in mind. Write for the reader instead of a search engine if you want to actually create useful content that will engage and help people.
Okay, so if you do all of these things I’m recommending, what does it look like? What does it accomplish? After three years spent creating 146 online pieces and seeing 700 assets and links for our telehealth client, here are a few of the biggest takeaways:
I also noticed that over the course of the partnership, new services ranked quicker for important terms as they benefited from the synergy of the site’s overall success. This is key to show that if you focus and put the effort in one topical authority area at a time, you’ll be rewarded when it comes time to move to the next.
As we look back, there are also a few things I’ve learned from the telehealth case study that I think we could have done better.
For instance, I wish we could have created more content in those three years to match their expanding service lines. I also wish we could have added more first-person perspectives from healthcare providers, clinicians, and patients.
These aren’t shortcomings. Every marketing strategy requires some sacrifice. As the marketing world evolves, though, it’s always important to have these in mind as we form each new plan moving forward.
As you look over the four lessons above, what stands out to you? Where are you already killing it with your healthcare digital marketing strategy? Where can you use some help? If you find you’re looking for a partner as you sort through things, reach out for a free strategy session with our team at Relevance. We can shed light on your current situation and orient you toward future success, even in an industry as crowded as healthcare.
