One of the most common problems healthcare practitioners have with content is getting ideas. This is especially true with practices that have relied on just a few individuals for things like blogging and social promotions. Eventually, people will run out of their own ideas. It is inevitable and a certainty in most cases.

The solution for creating unique content is to be connected to the interests, goals and journey of your patients. By knowing the patient journey throughout your care and practice, content can be planned for each step in their care plan according to the information needs of patients as they discover, consume and act on content.

Besides the patient centric approach to content planning, there are a variety of opportunities to get ideas in order to be more creative or to surface concepts and stories that are unique. Here are a few sources that can give you useful and practical ideas for serving your patients’ and the community’s content needs:

Visualize

Get together in a team (meeting) and brainstorm health topics, patient questions and other ideas to come up with at least 10 new topics.

Front Desk Staff

Gaining insights from team members constantly in conversation with your patients can reveal priceless ideas for effective content marketing. Tapping into front desk employees is particularly useful.

Become a Publisher

Tap into what successful publications in and out of your industry are doing to approach topics and content, then leverage those models for your own content marketing. Some publications to consider include magazines, journals, newspapers, television, etc.

Map the Patient Journey

By understanding and analysing the patient journey from awareness to interest to consideration to book an appointment, you can gain valuable insights on social topics, search keywords and media types that can guide your content planning.

Map the Patient Journey

Ask your patients – in daily conversation, by simply listening to their concerns or you could even run a brief internal or online survey with a handful of straight forward questions to determine what your patients are interested in when it comes to their health. You could even link this to a small internal promotion, whereby all answers will go into a draw to win a gift hamper, sponsored by a local supplier.

There are many ways to come up with new ideas for more effective content marketing. Hopefully you’ve found these to be useful.