The top four content elements to help best represent your brand.
Summer is finally here, and I don’t know about you, but this means the kickoff to vacation plans season. Whether a beach lounge-a-thon or European multi-city railway rendezvous, the next Summer escape needs to check the right boxes to become the next perfect trip.
Creating content for your brand takes the same level of planning and attention to detail to ensure it is developing an authentic relationship with consumers. Let’s look at the top four content elements that can help your content marketing strategy is ready to set sail on its perfect voyage and best represent your brand.
Know you audience
Ultimately, this is what good content is all about. Appreciating your audience for the individuals they are and the problems you are hoping to solve for them is the fastest way to demonstrate your value. Considering where they are from, what they care about, what they do, and why your brand matters to them are all super important to establish even before a single word or image lands on a page. Mapping out a health consumer profile is a great place to start.
Health consumer and patient profiles identify passions, pain points, and brand affinities that create a holistic understanding of who your consumer truly is – this is especially important when developing a successful health content campaign1. Health consumers have their own distinct makeup that is ever-evolving throughout their care journeys. When creating a health consumer profile, ask yourself the following:
- What are their specific short- and long-term health needs and goals?
- What is their current relationship with health and healthcare?
- How and where are they currently gathering health information?
- How do they prefer to receive your message? Is it too difficult to understand? (Find Out Some Quick Tips To Simplifying Content)
Hit the Perfect Tone
The tone is more than just something our elementary school music teacher told us to think about during rehearsal. Tone can make or break how our content is perceived or received by a reader. It is carefully constructed by the words you choose and their syntax or the expressions you choose. You can quickly see immediately how tone could have a huge impact in health and wellness.
For example, using trite phrases or colloquialisms can lower the level or significance of the content, which may result in health consumers or patients seeing you as someone who lacks expertise or, even worse, trivializes topics that are important. On the other hand, speaking with too much authority, using jargon, and not clarifying your meaning, or making assumptions that your audience fully understands a topic, could cause your brand to seem detached or disinterested in making a connection4. Neither are what you want to project in health content. Instead, ask yourself the following questions about tone:
- What is the “right” tone? Are you formal, factual, conversational, or something else?
- Why are you specifically using that word or wording rather than another?
- Phrases uttered on social media may be hugely popular but are they right for this type of content?
- How can adjectives or descriptors help you find the right mood to match your purpose?
Select The Right Type
Choosing the best content type is like selecting the right attire for the occasion – you want to make an impression but still fit the occasion (so no sporting a tux to a beach barbecue). A great place to start is with your audience. Understanding why health consumers need this content and how they will use it can determine the type and content avenue you choose. Highlight the inherent takeaways and call-to-actions that you are looking to share and then bring them to the surface. Is there a series of facts you want to share, then maybe a listicle is ideal? Is there a fundamental hypothesis you want to share that can be uncovered in a deep data story? Then consider an engaging infographic, which can help simplify complex ideas through carefully crafted illustrations.5
With the inherent themes and possible stakes in one’s health journey, the content type is incredibly important. We don’t want to waste a patient’s time or provide them with extraneous information that may muddy their understanding and ability to make the best health decisions for them. The information must be presented quickly, easily, and actionably. When selecting a content type, think about the following:
- Where is this content going to live? Maybe it’s a newsletter (Learn the Foundry 360 Top 5 Newsletter Tactics) or it’s a social-first campaign.
- What type of information are you trying to convey?
- What is the goal? Is it simplifying a complex topic or outlining a process?
- Can imagery or video help support or better express the content?
Value Relevance
Ok, so this probably goes without saying, but timely, accurate content is paramount in healthcare. Starting with the most obvious, the first factor to consider is confirming the accuracy and validity of your data as an absolute must.7 From patients to HCPs, data is only as good as the decisions that come from it, and presenting numbers today that were pulled from a survey or resource from 2015 is just not a good practice. If possible, try to keep your numbers from the past 2 years to make sure they stay fresh and pertinent. The second thing to think about is the introduction of new information. Nothing bothers me more than the concept of “evergreen” as an excuse to not update your content portfolio. Everything has a shelf life, and conducting a periodic audit of your content is necessary. This extends to treatments, side effects, and drug information, but also the latest scientific advancements. It’s never “bad” or negative to your brand when you need to be transparent with patients and update them with new information.
It’s also important to consider how your content is written and presented. Information evolves—and so does language. Something that was commonplace or popular in the 2010s might not be as well received or even appropriate in 2022. Do you remember when everything used to be “epic” and you couldn’t click on any social media link without someone saying “YOLO”? Glad that’s (mostly) over. In all seriousness, health care continues to evolve and the way we discuss a topic is s critically important. Using the latest vernacular, most accurate, and culturally sensitive phrasing is hypercritical to ensuring that your content is empowering every patient to have the best possible doctor conversation6. Think about the following questions on content timeliness:
- Does the content you published years ago still need to be live? Is it adding the same value it once did? Is the content still appropriate, but maybe the wording needs sprucing up?
- When was the last time you refreshed your current content? Did you make sure to properly annotate changes?
- Do we still use that word(s) today? Do they mean the same thing?
- Do you have “too much” evergreen content? Consider a mix of lasting and timely to maximize engagement and demonstrate that your brand is at the edge of important information.
Source:
- https://www.oraclestudio.com.au/the-best-practices-in-content-marketing/
- https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/types-of-content-marketing/
- https://review.content-science.com/content-relevance-and-usefulness-why-you-need-it-and-4-ways-to-achieve-it/
- https://harappa.education/harappa-diaries/tone-of-voice-types-and-examples-in-communication/
- https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/7-most-popular-types-of-content-and-how-to-use-them
- https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/tle/career-focus/TLE_02HealthCare.pdf
- https://www.clearpointstrategy.com/importance-of-data/
