Just like any other business or profession, different medical practices attract different audiences when they create blog content (and any other kind of content, for that matter). There are several things to consider when developing copy for medical practices. Is your practice family or special medicine? Do you work with people suffering from a spectrum of illnesses and conditions, or is your practice based on more elective medicine?
Preventive Health Management
Purpose: Promote wellness visits and emphasize the importance of regular attention to health care needs
Delivery Styles: list articles, how-to articles, content related to relevant medicines, technologies, and procedures
Prevention is a great topic for patients who have specific wellness needs or those with family histories of various illnesses and conditions. They offer a sense of comfort and also promote a sense of self-duty. Be careful not to promote self-diagnosis with preventive care. Prevention subjects can center on avoiding illness as well as minimizing the effects of various illnesses and conditions.
Always frame content of this type within the context of information, not diagnosis. The last thing you want your blog to do is dissuade people from going to the doctor or scare them into thinking they might be ill. If you frame your content well, it will attract the right audience. Instead of “7 Signs You Should Talk to Your Doctor About Crohn’s,” try, “7 Superfoods That Help Manage Crohn’s.”
Informational Articles
Purpose: educate, inform, build trust and relationships
Delivery Style: long-form content (1,500-plus-word articles with links to relevant sources)
When you bring your car in for a repair, you want to know that your mechanic has the competence to fix your car and make sure it’s safe. When choosing a doctor, you want to know precisely how much he or she knows about his or her area of specialty. Your blog is a great place to establish trust and show potential patients that they would be in good hands working with you.
Again, steer clear of topics that could encourage self-diagnosis, but do offer comprehensive information on conditions, treatments, alternative therapies, and more.
Narrative-Based Persuasive Content
Purpose: persuasion, defining points of relatability, demonstrating understanding
Delivery Style: conversational, short paragraphs — long-form is better
Story-based content can be a powerful way to make your medical blog stand out. You already know a good bit about what your patients go through treating or attempting to prevent illness. Use that knowledge to create unique points of relatability that can motivate people to consider doing something positive with their health … including contacting you for an initial visit.
You can even take it a step further and develop an ideal avatar — a virtual person who represents the most targeted type of patient your practice needs to attract. You can get help with this through various marketing channels, and we can even help steer you in the right direction for developing one.
Telling stories in first person has particularly strong appeal, but please do not fabricate. Does your practice have any inspiring success stories? How about reaching out to those patients and asking if you can tell them to your readers? The worst that will happen is that they’ll balk at the idea, but most would relish the idea of being in the spotlight.
Curated Content and Commentary
Purpose: demonstrate understanding of current trends, provide commentary on relevant products, treatments, etc.
Delivery Style: reblog and editorialize
A number of techniques are used in curating content, but how you do it will, once again, have mostly to do with your audience and how they are most likely to respond. The easiest way to use curated content is to focus your post on a specific article and write some of your own commentary on the key points. You can do this in several ways:
1. Introduce the content and provide a call to action to read it at the beginning, then summarize it at the end.
2. Write an original article seeding liberally with quotes from the source article.
3. Introduce the topic and source article and write a detailed summary with relevant details and examples for your specific audience.
Using about 500 words of your own content is the best way to balance the SEO scales with curation. That means that you’re basically writing your own post around the one you curated. If you properly credit and cite your source material, it will not have an adverse effect on SEO.
However, it will help your SEO efforts more if you limit content curation to one piece of source material. Find the most comprehensive article you can and write around it. You can always fill in missing details. In fact, it looks good if you think of something the author didn’t.
Hopefully, that gives you some inspiration and gets the creative juices flowing. Know how you want to proceed but don’t know how to get the content produced? That’s where we come in. At Beez, we work closely with medical clients to develop medical marketing content that reflects the quality and integrity of your practice.
We know medical copywriting and work with dedicated, vetted, professional writers to deliver a high level of quality for your readers and potential patients. We can help you develop a strategy that gets your practice ranking high when people search for your services. Contact us today to find out how.
