Content drives conversations. Conversation engages your customers.
Engaging with people is how your company will survive and thrive in this newly social world. In other words, online content is a powerful envoy for your business, with an ability to stir up interest, further engagement, and invite connections. Why hasn’t the healthcare industry focused more on better content that drives engagement and creates trust?
Creating and sharing relevant, valuable information that attracts people to you and creates trust, credibility, and authority for your brand and that ultimately converts visitors and browsers into patients. The one who has the more engaging content wins, because frequent and regular contact builds a relationship. Yet 99% of most content on drug websites is boring, hard to read and overly promotional. What we have here is a classic example of failure to communicate.
Consumers are hungry for content. Good content is like a good book it draws people in and engages them with the brand. When I launched Cialis.com as a new brand I licensed content from Harvard Medical School and other high credible health portals because it’s what our audience at the time said they wanted to read. These pages were consistently among the top page views. Today however, even with a lot of resources at their fingertips drug companies use copywriters instead of people who can write engaging content.
Content is not the same as copywriting which is meant to sell. Content has users needs in minds and keeps them coming back and believe it or not it can also establish trust with the brand. Today most brands are media but there seems to be a mentality within pharma that puts interactive development on the back burner.
Where can you get great content?
1. Thought leaders. It has been my experience that most thought leaders are honored when you ask them to write content for consumers on your website. However, ensure that you are transparent about your relationship with the thought leader and include her/his credentials.
2. Influencers. Why not reach out to someone who is an online influencer and ask them to write content for you website ? you’d be surprised how far that can go to engage your audience.
3. Credible third parties. Harvard Medical School, John Hopkins Medical, Mayo Clinic are all willing to license content for your website. Some will even allow you to make minor edits to the content to pass MLR requirements.
4. News Feeds. A good news feed, like Reuters Health News, can ensure that visitors come back to your site again and again to catch up on health information.
The inherent tension in marketing is that companies always want to talk about themselves and what their products or services can do. Everyone else, meanwhile, only wants to know what those products or services can do for them. Because it’s both efficient and increasingly imperative that companies create online content as a cornerstone of their marketing excellent content is becoming more and more important.
Richard Meyer is Executive Director/Principal at Online Strategic Solutions and blogs at World of DTC Marketing.com.
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