30 Jan Navigating the Challenges of Telehealth: Strengthening Your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
In today’s healthcare landscape, telehealth companies face new obstacles, from reimbursement hurdles and shifting patient preferences to market oversupply. Standing out in this environment requires a carefully crafted marketing approach to drive demand and resonate with healthcare decision-makers.
Telehealth gained tremendous traction during COVID-19, with utilization soaring as patients and providers adapted to remote care. But while the initial boom sparked major investment and countless new entrants, the market has settled into a more complex phase. Consumer interest remains steady, yet patient preference leans toward in-person visits when possible. With reimbursement rates for telehealth often trailing behind in-person services, some providers pulled back on virtual care, creating a supply that now outpaces demand.
To thrive in this increasingly competitive environment, telehealth companies need to stand out — not just by innovating in care delivery but by strategically crafting marketing messages that reach and resonate with decision-makers. Your task is to cut through the noise with a telehealth marketing approach that is both impactful and data driven.
While it’s not as simple as just nailing your messaging, it is entirely possible if you have a solid healthcare content marketing strategy. Here’s a look at how the most successful telehealth brands succeed.
1. Establish Thought Leadership with Educational Content
To succeed, your company has to do more than just bring a great telemedicine product or service to market. You have to educate and convince healthcare decision-makers, care providers, payers, and regulators that what you offer is superior to anything else that’s available.
The key to accomplishing all that today is to establish your company as a thought leader, showing your target audience the benefits in patient outcome and access, efficiency, integration and consolidation, streamlined workflows, and other areas that have proven to be pain points (as well as big wins) for telehealth in healthcare organizations.
That’s why content marketing is crucial in most successful telehealth marketing initiatives. Delivering quality content to the right audiences builds trust in your product or service, engages current and potential stakeholders (especially those critical to what is usually a long decision-making process), establishes your company as a thought leader, and builds brand awareness around your business.
Every good healthcare content marketing effort starts with a thoughtful strategy and plan that’s unique to your business. Some of the most effective content formats include:
-
- Blog Posts: Regular blogging improves SEO, builds brand awareness, and offers long-term benefits as evergreen articles continue driving traffic and revenue for years after their initial publication.
- Whitepapers: In-depth whitepapers are crucial for telehealth, where buying decisions are complex. Offering well-researched documents behind a form can generate leads while educating buyers on critical considerations. While that download doesn’t necessarily indicate readiness to purchase, it does usually indicate that the user is moving down your buying funnel. A well-crafted email campaign can further guide prospects along in that buyer journey.
- Case Studies: In the healthcare tech market, where buying decisions are lengthy and complex, case studies are essential. They help prospects visualize using your product, with 62% of B2B buyers relying on them during research. To stand out in a competitive field, consider non-traditional formats like videos or interactive pages.
- Video: Video marketing should be a key part of your telehealth strategy, as 87% of marketers report it directly boosts sales. Modern platforms make creating various video types easy—webinars, interviews, short graphics, or social media videos can all enhance your marketing efforts when distributed on the right platform.
- News Updates: Regular news updates keep customers and stakeholders informed about your telehealth company’s innovations, research, and product improvements. While traditional press releases work, consider using videos, social media posts, or graphics to share your news more dynamically.
While establishing thought leadership helps build trust and credibility, it’s equally important to maintain ongoing engagement with your audience. This is where targeted email campaigns come into play, enabling you to nurture those relationships and keep your brand top of mind.
2. Drive Engagement with Targeted Email Campaigns
With an impressive $36 ROI per $1 spent — which comes out to a 3,600% ROI — email remains one of the most cost-effective tools in telehealth marketing.
Of course, sending an email doesn’t necessarily mean someone will open it, much less engage with it. But there are proven tactics you can use in healthcare content writing to improve your odds of success. With personalization, for example, you can send messages that appeal to each individual prospect — without actually drafting separate emails for each contact. The customizations can be simple, like writing personalized subject lines or including the prospect’s first name, or complex, such as adding dynamic content based on the recipient’s interests.
It’s also important to remember that emails shouldn’t be pure sales pitches for your product. To keep your audience engaged (and your emails out of spam folders), your email campaigns need to educate by providing relevant, helpful content that addresses your prospects’ pain points. Use your emails to generate connections and point your audience to helpful content, like blog posts and whitepapers. When your emails provide value, recipients are much more likely to open them and refrain from hitting the unsubscribe button.
At the end of the day, how do you know if your emails are actually effective? Test, test, test. Compare different subject lines, calls to action, images, layouts, greetings, and send dates. As you learn what performs best, you can adjust your emails to be as appealing and effective as possible.
3. Build Connections with Organic Social Media
With more than 4 billion people using social media worldwide, a robust organic social media strategy is a must. Social media enables your company to interact with potential and current customers and provides another platform to communicate your brand voice and personality.
Define your target audience and then research which social platforms your audience is using. Focus your efforts there. While maintaining brand consistency across platforms is crucial, remember that not all content formats or post types will resonate equally. Tailor your approach to each platform to maximize impact.
More industry-specific platforms, such as Doximity, Sermo, and MomMD, can also be great choices. Ultimately, it comes down to what platforms your audience is engaging with and producing content that they will find interesting, valuable, and worth sharing. That will undoubtedly vary for each company, but some content ideas include:
-
- Links to your company’s blog posts
- Industry news
- Videos showcasing your product/service
- Tips and advice for using your product/service
- Links to relevant podcast episodes
- Curated content from trusted sources
Social media is about engaging with your audience, so have a strategy for listening and responding. Use tools like HubSpot, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite to monitor and optimize your content. These tools help you understand how your audience interacts with your posts, allowing you to identify and share more of what resonates most.
4. Amplify Reach with Paid Media
You can build on the power, reach, and targeting capabilities of social media by leveraging paid media. Once you understand who your target audience is, the social media platforms they frequent, and the kind of content they engage with, you can use paid media to expand your reach and even retarget people who have visited your site.
Paid media has become infinitely more complex in the past several years, which can be daunting but also hugely advantageous. You’re now able to target an audience with your message or content with more specificity and success than ever before.
Paid ads, like any content, need to be well-planned and well-written to stand out and deliver your message effectively. Only top-quality content will drive the desired action through PPC. Achieving ROI on paid media requires patience, resources, and budget for creating compelling campaigns. However, the effort often pays off, as paid media is a powerful way to expand reach, generate leads, and drive tangible results.
5. Personalize Outreach with Account-Based Marketing
While some of the strategies mentioned above can generate leads, the truth is those leads won’t all become customers. Account-based marketing (ABM) allows you to focus on high-value accounts by creating a highly personalized approach. By defining an ideal customer profile (e.g., business objectives, revenue model), you can craft targeted content that aligns with your audience’s specific needs.
ABM isn’t only limited to outbound marketing efforts like emails or direct mail. It can also include inbound marketing tactics, like blog posts, newsletters, and ads to attract contacts associated with target accounts. And the content shouldn’t stop once a prospect moves through the buying process; aim to provide relevant messaging all the way down the funnel.
Ready to Build Your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy?
With these strategies in place, you’re well on your way to a comprehensive telehealth content marketing plan. Need help putting your strategy and plan together? Get in touch.
