As a healthcare professional recruiter, you understand the importance of connecting with potential candidates. With an increasing number of job seekers researching online before applying for jobs, your website can be a powerful tool for recruiting top talent in the healthcare industry.
Content marketing is an effective way to engage these candidates and draw them to your site. By creating engaging content that appeals to healthcare professionals, you can increase traffic to your website, engage prospects, and recruit more effectively. In this article, we’ll discuss how content marketing can help boost recruitment efforts in the healthcare field.
What is Healthcare Content Marketing?
Content marketing can be used in various applications throughout the healthcare industry. For example, health facilities can use content marketing to answer common medical questions for patients, thus becoming a trusted resource. This type of digital marketing isn’t limited to attracting patients, as it can become an effective tool to recruit qualified candidates for healthcare positions.
For recruiters, healthcare content marketing is creating and sharing content designed to attract, engage, and convert potential healthcare professionals. Content can include blog posts, videos, eBooks, webinars, infographics, and more. The goal is to provide timely and relevant information about your organization that resonates with the target audience: job seekers in the healthcare industry.
By providing interesting and useful content on topics related to the healthcare field, you can establish yourself as a reliable source of information for healthcare professionals. Here are some of the other benefits of content marketing.
Benefits of Healthcare Content Marketing
The benefits of content marketing cannot be overstated. Here’s how they apply to recruiters in the healthcare industry:
Improved Website Visibility
Content marketing helps boost organic search rankings by providing valuable information for people searching online. This increases traffic to your website from potential candidates interested in the content you’ve created.
The equation is simple. The more web content that you post, the more pages you have. More relevant pages = more opportunities for healthcare professionals to visit your website.
Establish Credibility
By creating compelling, informative content that resonates with healthcare professionals, you can establish yourself as an authoritative source of information in the field. This helps to build trust and credibility for your organization as a whole.
Not only will you become credible with your readers, but you can also become more authoritative in Google’s eyes. Your website’s domain authority is one of the significant ranking factors that Google uses when determining where your website will rank in search results. As you create authoritative content, more websites will link to yours, and your domain authority will grow over time.
Higher Conversion Rates
Content marketing can help to increase the number of leads you receive by attracting healthcare professionals to your website who may be looking for a new job. In a study by Aberdeen Group, companies prioritizing content marketing saw a 5x increase in conversion rates. By providing information that resonates with candidates, you can convert more prospects into qualified applicants who fit your organization well.
Creating Content for Healthcare Professionals
Before you start writing, remember that you can’t just write a random blog post and expect loads of organic traffic. Creating compelling content that appeals to healthcare professionals requires research, strategy, and understanding of the target audience. Here are some tips for how you can create the right content for your website:
Understanding Your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is one of the most critical elements of any content marketing strategy. As a healthcare recruiter, it’s fundamental to understand the needs and motivations of healthcare professionals. Maybe you are targeting locum tenens physicians in New York or pursuing phlebotomists in Pennsylvania. Both audiences expect different types of content, so take the time to research your desired audience before diving into content creation.
One way to better understand your audience is by creating buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal candidates based on data and research about their demographics, behaviors, and motivations. Creating these personas allows you to tailor your content to specific needs and preferences.
Another way to understand your audience is by conducting surveys or focus groups. This allows you to gather direct feedback from potential candidates about what they are looking for in a healthcare employer and what educational content would be most helpful.
Identifying your desired audience is step #1 in content marketing; however, this is useless without understanding what your audience wants from your content.
Conducting Keyword Research
You can identify keywords and phrases related to health services and the types of healthcare professionals you seek. Furthermore, these keywords can be used in blog posts, websites, social media channels and accounts, and other online materials to attract more traffic from relevant search queries.
Additionally, when using keywords on websites or blogs, include them naturally within the text rather than crowding pages with repetitive phrases. This will make the content more user-friendly and help ensure it ranks higher in search engine results.
There are plenty of keyword research tools out there to help determine what keywords have the traffic, intent, and difficulty you are looking for. For example, Semrush has various keyword tools to help guide the process.
When conducting keyword research, start with broad-general terms with more significant traffic. These terms likely have massive competition and would be nearly impossible to rank for.
Next, add modifiers to your general keywords to make them more specific to your audience. Check with a keyword tool to see if these long-tail phrases could work well for your content marketing. While these terms will naturally have lower organic traffic, you have a much better chance to rank for them.
Once you have a list of keywords that match your audience, you’ll have everything you need to begin conceptualizing a content strategy.
Develop a Content Strategy
Content is the cornerstone of content marketing, and a well-defined strategy is essential for success. A successful plan will include the previous steps (target audience and keyword research).
In addition, you’ll need to determine what content formats you want to develop. Likely, you’ll need a mix of blog, social media posts, and video content to reach your desired audience. Take some time to research what your competitors are doing well. You wouldn’t want to waste hours developing content that gets no attention.
Next, you should create a content calendar to determine the timeline of when to execute your content creation. You’ll want to plan out topics, post dates, and what content will be developed for each date. Be sure to consider holidays, special events, and even the days of the week when selecting post dates to create content. Doing this may help you increase readership and engagement with your content.
Once you have a plan, it’s time to start creating content for the healthcare professionals you wish to reach.
Create High-Quality Content
Now that all your planning is out of the way, it’s time to start creating. You must consider the following elements to create high-quality content that outshines your competitors.
Optimized Headlines
Your headlines should be short, descriptive, and eye-catching. They should summarize the article or content you are creating in a few words. This can help ensure that search engines like Google recognize your content and rank it higher in search results.
You already have a comprehensive list of keywords to use throughout your content. Pull the best keywords to insert organically throughout your titles, headings, and subheadings. Be wary of including too many of the same keywords, as Google may flag your content for keyword stuffing.
Valuable Content
The content must provide value to healthcare professionals who read it. Medical information should be comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date with the latest industry insights. Doing so will display your expertise and increase credibility with readers.
As you pull information from relevant sources, give credit where credit is due. Citing your sources protects you from plagiarism claims. Linking to the authoritative websites that provide this information can also assist your external linking strategy.
Readers should also be able to take away something from each content you create. You can use the opportunity to offer advice, share industry trends, or answer questions that healthcare professionals commonly ask.
Remember: If your blog post does not have a clear audience and purpose, then it’s doubtful that anyone will read it.
Language and Tone
The language used in your content should be easy to understand and follow. Your readers do not want to feel overwhelmed by complex terms or jargon. You should also pay attention to the tone of your writing, as speech patterns can set the overall mood of your content. For example, if you choose a more formal style, you may appeal to a different group of readers.
While medical professionals may tolerate technical terms and healthcare jargon, you must do some research to determine which terms are common knowledge. This becomes especially important when writing to multiple professions, as a pediatric physician may use different terminology than a geriatric physical therapist.
It’s always important to remember that you are writing for your audience, not yourself. You should strive to connect by using language that resonates with the reader personally. This will increase engagement and help to build trust between you and your target audience.
Scannability
Designing content for the web brings a whole new set of considerations. With so many content ideas and options available to readers, there is only a tiny window of opportunity to capture their attention and keep them engaged. Therefore, your online content must be easy to read, with short paragraphs, bullet points, and plenty of subheadings.
Use a content hierarchy for SEO that will make sense to the reader and Google. This will typically include a title (h1), some headings to divide up your content (h2), and some subheadings to further elaborate points within your headings (h3). You can go as deep and specific as you need to with your subheadings; however, make sure the headings follow a logical order.
You should also use bolding and italicizing to help guide the reader through your content. This will keep readers engaged and make it easier for them to scan your content without reading everything.
As you create your content, find areas that could turn into featured snippets. For example, a bulleted list that answers a specific question could become featured on the top page of Google. This will lead to more website traffic and increased visibility for your content.
Visuals and Linkable Assets
Adding visuals to your content can keep readers engaged and break up the text. When you use visuals, ensure they are appropriate for the topic and optimized for web viewing. Many options are available, including photos, infographics, videos, and more.
You could also include linkable assets, such as downloadable PDFs or presentations. These can further drive traffic to your website and provide additional value for readers. Additionally, you can use these assets to collect emails for prospecting. It’s a win-win for both you and the reader.
Personal stories and Anecdotes
People are drawn to stories. Healthcare professionals can relate to experiences. Adding personal anecdotes, inspiring stories, or case studies can be a great way to engage your audience and add more depth to your content. Use these stories as an opportunity to highlight other healthcare professionals’ successes while providing helpful advice.
Adding personal stories can create an emotional connection with the reader, keeping them engaged and interested. This is especially useful if you target a specific group of healthcare professionals, as they can relate to the story meaningfully.
For example, if you provide a personal story of a traveling nurse finding success and happiness through their experience working with you, the nurses that read your content may feel driven to pursue a similar experience.
Editing and Optimizing Your Content
Once you’ve written your content, you must go back and edit it. This is the time to refine your message and ensure all the points are crystal clear. Additionally, this is an excellent opportunity to optimize for SEO and ensure your content meets the guidelines set out by search engines.
Use tools like SurferSEO and Grammarly to ensure that your content contains the right keywords, use the proper titles and headings, include internal and external links to other valuable resources, and double-check for grammar and spelling errors. Doing this will help ensure you provide your readers with quality content and a better overall experience.
Now that you have finished writing and editing, here are some next steps to get the most out of your content.
Promote Your Content
Creating content is only the first step. You need to make sure that your target audience knows about it! Share it on all your social media platforms and channels, as well as other relevant social channels, healthcare forums, and groups. Additionally, reach out to influencers in the industry and ask them to share it with their networks.
Each social media platform has its own unique content promotion tactics. A promotional post on LinkedIn should look different than a post on Twitter. Experiment with these tactics and research what is working well for your competitors.
By promoting your content, you can get more eyes on it and increase the chances of getting new leads. Make sure to track the performance of your content and look for ways to improve it over time. With some trial and error, you’ll determine what works best for your target audience.
Measure and Analyze Results
Once you’ve implemented your content marketing strategy and started to promote your content, begin to track the performance of your efforts. You should track metrics like website traffic, user engagement, return visits, lead conversions, etc. While plenty of resources exist to find and track this information, most of your needs can be found within Google Analytics.
Analyzing your data will give you insights into what works and isn’t. Use this information to adjust and optimize your content marketing strategy for maximum results. Doing this consistently will help you continually improve your results and ensure success in the long run.
Find Candidates Where They Are
Finally, don’t forget to contact the candidates you are trying to recruit. Use the content you have created as a tool to start a conversation and show them what makes your organization unique. Find out where they hang out online and join in on the discussions. This will make it easier for you to build relationships with potential leads.
Content marketing can be a great supplementary tool to source new healthcare candidates passively. Like most organic strategies, results will take some time to see. In the meantime, you can use online job boards like LocumJobsOnline, TravelNurseSource, or AlliedTravelCareers to help source quality candidates today.
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