For health care brands, cre­at­ing pow­er­ful con­tent that res­onates with your audi­ence may seem extreme­ly dif­fi­cult. We must abide by cer­tain rules and reg­u­la­tions. We must be extreme­ly care­ful that our con­tent is accu­rate and uses the prop­er tone. And we also have to make sure we do our best to bal­ance edu­ca­tion­al con­tent with fun and engag­ing types of con­tent – some­times, they blend togeth­er. So what types of con­tent are most pow­er­ful in the health care indus­try?

Pow­er­ful con­tent can help dri­ve traf­fic to your site, have a pos­i­tive effect on your social media and search mar­ket­ing efforts, and improve con­sumer engage­ment. Here are five types of pow­er­ful con­tent for health care brands.

1. Health Care Infographics

Health care info­graph­ics can be great and are rel­a­tive­ly easy to pro­duce, pro­vid­ed you have a cre­ative on staff to help you devel­op these graph­ics. Even if you don’t, using tools like Can­va can help you devel­op fun and edu­ca­tion­al con­tent for your audi­ence.

While info­graph­ics tend to dis­play data or sta­tis­tics in a visu­al­ly pleas­ing way, you can always devel­op ever­green-based info­graph­ic con­tent. Doing this will let you repur­pose the info­graph­ics on a sea­son­al basis, giv­ing it more legs and giv­ing you more oppor­tu­ni­ty to have con­tent you can always pro­mote.

For exam­ple, you could devel­op con­tent on flu vac­cines, pre­vent­ing the com­mon cold, or fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions about health care or health insur­ance. Regard­less of your top­ic, make sure your infor­ma­tion has been fact checked by your review team before mov­ing for­ward with visu­al devel­op­ment.

2. Health & Wellness Guides

Doing any lead gen­er­a­tion? Health and well­ness guides could be your gold­en tick­et to get the traf­fic and leads you’re crav­ing. While this takes time, it can have a big pay­off in the end.

For exam­ple, you could devel­op guides on food or weight man­age­ment. Then you could share these around New Year’s or before sum­mer, as those are times when peo­ple are more like­ly to respond to that con­tent.

Look into your ana­lyt­ics and see what con­tent is get­ting the most traf­fic. Repur­pos­ing exist­ing con­tent (blog posts, arti­cles) into guides by repack­ag­ing your con­tent could save you time and mon­ey.

One thing to keep in mind for these health and well­ness guides is that their goal shouldn’t be to dri­ve sales or con­ver­sions, but rather to place your poten­tial con­sumer into the sales fun­nel. This content’s val­ue comes from the edu­ca­tion it brings, and with the hopes of bring­ing peo­ple into the sales fun­nel.

3. Health Care 101

Health care 101 con­tent will always and for­ev­er be an easy win with peo­ple, whether you’re in the health care or health insur­ance world. While it may seem over­done, it def­i­nite­ly isn’t.

Even if you think you sound like a bro­ken record, it is help­ful con­tent for con­sumers, mem­bers, and patients. This con­tent can be con­stant­ly devel­oped, recy­cled, and updat­ed. Devel­op­ing cat­e­gories like “Health Insur­ance Explained” or “Health Care Reform” will aide in the user expe­ri­ence, so your audi­ence will be able to find this con­tent more eas­i­ly.

In addi­tion, devel­op­ing con­tent on health care 101 top­ics can aid your SEO efforts. As algo­rithms in search have changed to move toward a more seman­tic type search, con­tent built out on fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions could tap into your long-tail key­word strat­e­gy, which can improve your organ­ic search vis­i­bil­i­ty.

4. The Health Care Podcast

Your audi­ence doesn’t con­sume and retain con­tent all the same way, which means you have to be diverse in your con­tent devel­op­ment. Pod­cast­ing is one of many ways you can get your mes­sage across.

At Flori­da Blue, we have a pod­cast on ICD-10, which essen­tial­ly the cod­ing sys­tem used by the world health orga­ni­za­tion. While the sys­tem was mov­ing from ICD‑9 to ICD-10, it was impor­tant to edu­cate our audi­ence on the prepa­ra­tion of the tran­si­tion in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing updates through­out the tran­si­tion.

Var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als would devel­op the pod­casts, by inter­view­ing sev­er­al inter­nal and exter­nal sub­ject mat­ter experts. We then would edit the con­tent and devel­op a blog post sum­ma­riz­ing the pod­cast. Final­ly, we would embed the pod­cast, along with a deck into the blog post, and share it to our social net­works. This makes it con­ve­nient for the user, as they have options with how and where they con­sume con­tent.

5. The Testimonial

A tes­ti­mo­ni­al is the most pow­er­ful, but trick­i­est, type of con­tent for health care brands. It’s the best type of con­tent as you aren’t telling the sto­ry of your brand or the expe­ri­ence of your brand – the con­sumer is.

One way you could turn a tes­ti­mo­ni­al into con­tent is by ask­ing the per­son who left the review if you could inter­view him or her for a blog post, or if you could turn their tes­ti­mo­ni­al into an image. You could even col­lect a group of tes­ti­mo­ni­als and turn that into a piece of con­tent for your blog or web­site.

You should always ask the peo­ple who left a review per­mis­sion to use their con­tent. While tech­ni­cal­ly reviews and tes­ti­mo­ni­als left on social media or review sites are pub­lic, it is always a nice ges­ture to ask the indi­vid­ual, just to be on the cau­tion­ary side.

Devel­op­ing pow­er­ful health care con­tent for your audi­ence doesn’t have to be chal­leng­ing. With some cre­ativ­i­ty and plan­ning, you will be well on your way to deliv­er­ing con­tent that can increase traf­fic, SEO effec­tive­ness, and audi­ence engage­ment.