The Ultimate Guide to AI for Healthcare Marketers + Do’s and Don’ts Cheatsheet What You Need to Know
The Ultimate Guide to AI for Healthcare Marketers + Do’s and Don’ts Cheatsheet What You Need to Know

As we begin a new year, I love looking back at what we learned the previous year. Our most popular blogs of 2021 give me a glimpse of the trends that are likely to continue into 2022.

Check out these hot healthcare marketing topics from last year. Each topic is chock-full of tips to inform your strategy for the coming year.

Ungated Content: It’ll Serve Your Brand Better Than Gated Content

Research shows people hate gated content. An astonishing 90% of people won’t download content if it requires an email address. Last year, we decided to give away our resources without asking for an email first.

Thanks to that bold move, we saw increases in 5 key areas:

  • Newsletter engagement
  • Number of content downloads
  • Website traffic
  • Social media audience
  • Brand recognition

Give it a try in 2022 with tactics from our blogs:

  1. Why We’re Ungating All of Our Healthcare Content
  2. How Ungating Our Content Increased Downloads by 102%

Healthcare Consumerism: Because People Want to Shop for Healthcare

Think your healthcare organization doesn’t have much in common with brands like Etsy, Yelp and eBay? Think again. Consumer brands can show healthcare marketers how users choose goods and services. And consumers want to shop around for healthcare just like they shop for couches or airline tickets.

Back in the day, features from popular brands’ websites and apps weren’t likely to appear on a hospital’s website. But that’s not true anymore. Consumer-friendly features (think price comparison tools or online reviews) help patients feel better about the healthcare decisions they’re making.

Three of our most-read blogs can guide you through healthcare consumerism:

3. Consumerism in Healthcare Isn’t So Different After All: 5 Insights
4. 5 Marketing Tips to Demystify Hospital Price Transparency for Consumers
5. Win Over More Patients: 4 Tips for Marketing Healthcare Convenience

Hospital Apps: Step Up the Functionality and Market Them Right

A key element of healthcare convenience is having an easy-to-use, robust hospital app. Hospital-branded apps allow patients to complete specific tasks. They can request prescription refills, make appointments and pay their bills. With the right functionality, apps can generate revenue and enhance patient loyalty.

Learn the functions your hospital app must have — and how to increase downloads.

6. Make a Habit-Forming Hospital-Branded App: 10 Must-Have Functions
7. 4 Steps for Marketing Your Hospital-Branded App – With Examples!

Health Literacy and Numeracy: To Improve It, Take a Look at Your Website Features

Many healthcare marketers think they’re ticking all the consumer health literacy boxes. Plain language? Check. Short sentences? Copy that’s below a 7th-grade level? Check and check.

But that’s often not enough to reach the low health literacy population — the 1 in 4 people who have trouble making sense of basic health information. For instance, third-party vendor sites that your organization may use for scheduling, bill pay or telehealth services can confuse and overwhelm users.

We spell out other sneaky ways hospital websites can prevent consumers from understanding important healthcare content:

8. A Fresh Look at Health Literacy & Numeracy, Plus 5 Tips

Healthcare Newsletter: Increase the Open Rate by Providing Useful Information

We subscribed to many hospital newsletters as research for this highly shared blog post. The best ones had a few elements in common:

  • Segmented newsletter lists that give specific audiences the information they want
  • Inspiring patient stories
  • Helpful, timely content that readers can use in their everyday lives

Read the blog to see 5 excellent healthcare newsletter examples:

9. How to Create Healthcare Newsletters Your Patients Will Actually Read: 5 Tips

COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter: How They Changed Healthcare Communication

I wanted to understand what healthcare communicators and content marketing professionals were dealing with during the pandemic. So I interviewed 52 of them in 2020 and the first half of 2021. We stopped the series when we thought the pandemic was winding down. (Oh, how I wish that were true.) With the Omicron variant upending our “return-to-normal” plans, their tips and strategies are timelier than ever.

Read our blog post recap about some of the episodes or check out our YouTube playlist to see them all:

10. Catch Up on the Latest Episodes of What Did You Learn?

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