It’s about time your hospital website got a strategic makeover. A precise and thoughtful strategy produces content that’s organized, on-brand and user-friendly — and it reaps rewards. Patients learn about the care they can access, engage with the hospital brand and continually return to the site. A thoughtful content strategy both makes your content production more efficient and your output more effective. Still not sure your hospital website needs a content strategy? Let us convince you.

What Is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a standardized plan that outlines the ideation, creation, delivery and governance of an organization’s content. It covers everything from blogs, webinars, emails and social media to conferences, press releases and videos. A proper content strategy is goal-oriented and keeps the content brand unified and consistent.

Avoid these common content marketing mistakes by using our 6-step approach to create your hospital website’s content strategy:

1. Conduct a competitive audit.
2. Conduct an internal content audit.
3. Create audience personas.
4. Set goals for your content program.
5. Set a measurement framework for your content.
6. Create your content plan.

A Content Strategy Supports Hospital Website SEO

Effective SEO and smart content strategy go hand-in-hand. There are many ways to write for SEO to drive traffic to your hospital website. Basic SEO practices include defining keywords (and using them within your content) and knowing exactly what it is your audience is searching for online.

But for the best SEO results, web content needs to be planned out with specific ways to promote:

• Key service lines, clinics and multi-specialty programs
• Therapies, treatments and procedures
• New providers
• Routine screenings and assessments

Your content strategy will help you develop a streamlined process for that content creation and organization. It’ll also help you determine the best ways to promote the care you offer — whether through written, visual or audio content (or better yet, a mix of all three).

Content strategy improves overall efficiency by repurposing content to achieve the best SEO results possible — without repetitive or redundant work. Make your content work harder for you by following these five effective steps:

1. Create a holistic content strategy.
2. Host your own content.
3. Break down departmental silos.
4. Create content with a long lifespan and potential for multiuse.
5. Measure your content marketing’s ROI.

A Content Strategy Helps Your Hospital Website Stand Out Among Competitors

It’s always important to know what your peers are up to. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of both your own organization and your competition allows you to identify ways you stick out — both good and bad.

Conducting a competitive audit is the very first step on our content strategy how-to for a reason. Identifying major competitors and researching their products/services and sales and marketing strategies helps define your unique value and provide benchmarks for measuring your own growth. You may also find opportunities to promote different messages or provide better answers with your content.

Ready to do your own competitive content analysis? Click here to download our guide to get started!

Insights From Your Hospital Website Can Optimize Your Content Strategy

Once you create your content strategy, there’s always room for improvement. Website analytic tools, which track things like visitors, clicks and engagement, are extremely helpful when optimizing your content strategy every week or month. Knowing the demographics of your audience, what topics they search for on your site, and what content/content type is most popular should directly influence the content you make in the future. It may even lead you to adopt the cluster topic model and build an entire content hub.

What Is Reverse Publishing and How Can It Boost Engagement?

Quite simply, analytics tell you what content works on your site — and what content is not important to your audience. You’ll be able to see where your visitors are coming from (email, social media, etc.) and what topics and types of content are popular. Use those analytics to make better choices about new content creation.

From there, you might want to consider reverse publishing. Simply put, reverse publishing is flipping the traditional approach of posting magazine content online after printing. Instead, digital content that performs best online is repurposed in print form.

Reverse publishing is a data-backed method for improving engagement with and ROI of your print marketing, especially community newsletters and magazines. See how one hospital system leverages this strategy in our guide The Ultimate Guide to Reverse Publishing. Fill out the form below to claim your copy.