Effective content marketing starts with brilliantly written content, but that’s only half the battle. Content is the fuel that keeps your marketing engine going. How you market this content is just as important. In this post, I will share healthtech content marketing ideas we use to help our clients boost the effectiveness of their content strategy.
We have broken these content marketing ideas into two categories:
- Ways to increase views and engagement
- Ways to improve conversion
Healthtech Content Marketing Ideas To Increase Views and Engagement
1. SEO – Selecting Keywords and key phrases you can dominate
There is no more effective way to increase traffic to your posts in a low-cost and sustainable way than Search Engine Optimization. In this video, we dive deep into how we do this.
One of the fundamental decisions is to select 20-30 keywords and key phrases that you can dominate so that your content appears on the first page of a Google search result. This is a laborious process where you develop a long list of keywords and key phrases relevant to your business and what your buyers may search for. We use SEMRush for this.
You then need to narrow that down to a priority list of 20-30 keywords and key phrases with high enough volume to drive traffic to your content AND a low enough competitive intensity that you have some chance of being on the first page of search results for. It’s a trade-off process to determine your most effective terms.
2. SEO – Primary and Secondary Key phrase Optimization
Once you have selected your short list of 20-30 keywords ad key phrases, you need to factor this into your content calendar by ensuring that your future content is optimized for these. Specifically, pick primary and secondary keywords and key phrases, and ensure that the post is optimized for this as you compose new content. Yoast Premium makes this a cinch.
This is a long game! Don’t expect results for at least 90-days, but a deliberate SEO and content strategy can be incredibly effective. Two-thirds of traffic to healthlaunchpad.com comes from SEO; nearly all of this is through posts and pages that have been effectively optimized.
3. SEO – Refurbing Old Posts
Once you have an SEO program going, it’s time to optimize older posts. Each month take a look at older posts that could be optimized. We call this “refurbing.” This includes editing posts to optimize them more effectively for your primary key phrase. You should also look for ways to optimize older posts for secondary key phrases.
4. Weekly Single Post Emails
The eNewsletter is a necessary evil. For many, this is a monthly chore and involves curating new content, tips, articles worth sharing, and other information into a single email
The problem is that very few people on your email list will read it. According to Campaign Monitor typical, open rates are 15%, but clickthrough rates range from 2-5%. This means you can only reliably count on 2-5% of your subscribers reading your email.
So sending one email per month won’t cut it. In our view, rather than send one monthly long email newsletter, send a weekly email featuring one topic. This will potentially increase your readership fourfold.
Our weekly emails feature one post. Overall we have clickthrough rates in an acceptable range and very low unsubscribe rates.
Clearly, this will mean creating a lot of content (one post per month won’t cut it). You can recycle old posts. Given that 95% of your recipients won’t have read the post sent to the by email the first time, it’s unlikely that readers will see a previously emailed blog post.
5. Effective Case Study Emails
So you have spent hours writing a detailed case study, and your client has been kind enough to let you feature their story; now, how do you get prospects to read your case study?
Here is a tip.
Given the low email open rates, you will be lucky if 5% of your email recipients click through and read the case study. However, if you summarize the case study in the email (in less than 100 words), there is some change that the 10-13% who recipients who opened an email but did not click through may read the summary in the email.
Here is a great example from Drift.
6. LinkedIn All Text Posts
It goes without saying that you should share your new content and relevant older post on LinkedIn. And you should actively encourage the extended sales and marketing team t do the same.
Most people do this by sharing the link with a summary in the LinkedIn post. This always looks nice in the LinkedIn newsfeed, and the vast majority of the LinkedIn post in your newsfeed looks like this. The problem is that they get lower viewership.
Why? LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t like it when you direct viewers away from LinkedIn, and your LinkedIn posts get lower viewership than those that keep people on LinkedIn.
All-text post works best. We create LinkedIn posts that summarize the blog post in the LinkedIn post (100-150 words) with three hashtags and multiple people or companies tagged. We put a link to the post in the comments section.
Significant increase in viewership results from this approach.
7. LinkedIn Engagement Boosters
One of the more controversial ways to increase viewership of your content on LinkedIn are engagement pods. This post explains why. The basic principle is that if the LinkedIn algorithm sees people engaging with a post, the post gets up-ranked and appears in more people’s newsfeeds.
Whether you join or create a formal engagement pod, one thing you can do is ensure that when your company post on LinkedIn, your colleagues know it’s coming so they can look out for it, comment and like the post. You should send out an alert with a link to the post within a few minutes of posting.
8. LinkedIn Newsletters (The Most Underutilized Healthtech Content Marketing Tactic)
This is my new favorite tool. This underutilized feature allows you to broadcast a newsletter to all your personal and your company’s followers on LinkedIn. This article explains how.
The basic idea is that the “creator” publishes articles via the newsletter feature. Articles can be repurposed blog posts or new content. LinkedIn articles have many more publishing features than LinkedIn posts and are more like blog posts than typical LinkedIn posts.
When you publish your first article via the Newsletter, all your contacts and followers are invited to subscribe. Getting a 10-20% subscription rate immediately is not unusual.
Subscribers receive future editions via LinkedIn as a notification or as an email. The newsletters are maintained in a library.
Here is one we created for a client recently
Healthtech Content Marketing Ideas To Improve Conversion
9. Stronger Calls to Action
Part of ongoing content optimization is to look for new ways to boost conversion of your blog posts. A good practice is to look at the performance of your blog posts. Take a close look at posts with the highest readership. How can you increase conversion rates?
- Can you add calls to action (CTAs) to increase newsletter subscriptions, such as page takeovers?
- Is there gated content that would be a natural next step after reading the post?
- How are you encouraging the reader to contact you?
One tactic we are experimenting with is video CTAs, like this one:
10. Partial Gating
We all know that gated content does not work like it used to. Buyers are concerned that the second they complete a registration form, they will be bombarded with emails and calls to have a meeting.
Prospects need a lot of persuading to complete the registration. Most gated content requires registration too early. One way to mitigate this is to allow a prospect t read or view some of the content without registration and then have a registration gate for the rest of the content.
For example, with a buyer’s guide, split the guide into two sections. Part 1 could be general advice but specific best practice tips or “how to’s” are gated.
If you create a video series, make the first de freely available, but the subsequent videos require registration.
11. Landing page vs. Blog Post A/B Test for Gated Content
Typically when promoting gated content or a webinar, most marketers will do this through a simple landing page, with explanatory copy enticing the prospect to register and a registration form.
It may be more persuasive to convenience a prospect to register for the gated content or webinar by embedding the registration and CTA into a blog post.
Blogs can be more effective in storytelling and convincing a prospect that they need to buyer’s guide to further their knowledge of the subject. Embedding part 1 of a video series into a post may be a more effective way to get a prospect t register for the whole series.
This tactic can be A/B tested versus a landing page to see which works best.
We hope these ideas give you new inspiration. I am always looking for new ways to improve healthtech content marketing effectiveness. Let me know if you have any ideas I have missed.
Photo by Jonathan Sebastiao on Unsplash
Originally posted on LinkedIn.