Last week imgZine went to an event on Successful content marketing initiatives in the health sector, which was hosted by the Dutch Contentclub. During the lecture, guest speaker and author Richard van Berkel spoke about the challenges of content marketing in the health care industry. We would like to share our insights with you.
Why the health sector is different
Creating a content marketing strategy in the health care sector is a lot like designing a content marketing strategy in other sectors. What makes this industry so special is that consumers deal differently with content when it is published by public health organizations:
- It is no commercially oriented story
- The content involves high risk of damage to the company’s image in case of failure
- Consumers take an active interest in content published by health care organizations because:
- In contrast to commercially oriented organizations, they trust doctors, hospitals and other health care institutes.
- The content is related to their own health/life.
In the context of these two latter points, creating a content marketing strategy is extremely promising in the health care industry.
What are the challenges?
The health care industry is not commercially oriented. This brings a few challenges:
- Find a balance between education, communications and marketing
- Convince medical experts of the value to create content for you
- Optimize the resources you already have and integrate your channels to create a cohesive marketing program.
imgZine’s thought leadership application is a good example. Content marketers are able to link (existing) content from different channels together in one application for mobile devices or the web. Click here for an example of our thought leadership apps.
However, as we explained in an earlier post, companies should always distribute content through multiple channels to optimally serve the customer journey.
Which distribution channels do you use? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments!
