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Healthcare Content Strategy

Working on your healthcare content marketing strategy? You’re in the right place. We’ve got a guide with your name on it and a team of healthcare content strategists who can help.

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Healthcare marketers brainstorming about content strategy using sticky notes | Source: Aha Media Group

Expert healthcare content strategists

We’ve been doing this since 2005 (back when Google was a baby). Our content strategy recommendations come from bona fide expertise, industry leadership, and a knack for turning data into actionable next steps.

Our results

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Aha Media Group team meeting led by founder Ahava Leibtag

Our approach to healthcare marketing strategy

Results over vanity metrics.

That feeling of spinning your wheels vigorously and barely moving? Very common among healthcare marketing teams. You need a lot of content and have little time to step back and assess whether it’s delivering results.

We see the pressure you’re under. Our healthcare content strategists offer an objective perspective and evidence-based strategies that you can hand to leadership and implement ASAP.


  • Data-driven strategists

    You don’t have time to dig into Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite, or your other platforms. We do. We’ll pull out what you need to know.


  • Future-looking partners

    This field changes constantly. You can count on us to stay up to date with the latest best practices and share them with your team.


  • Actionable insights (not reports)

    We don’t deliver lists of problems to fix. We define your next steps, help prioritize them, and bring in the right people to implement them.


  • Focused on the right results

    You don’t need more traffic — you need referrals, appointment requests, lead gen, and brand authority. That’s what we aim for.

Aha Media Group is an exceptional strategic partner, and I genuinely value having them as an extension of my team. I trust their perspective completely, and I’m consistently impressed by how seamlessly they collaborate with our other agency partners and us to move our content goals forward.
Virna O'Brien, Director of Digital Services
UMass Memorial Health
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Interested in an audit or strategic support?

Whether you want to upgrade your search strategy for AI, clean up your website content, or just see more return from your efforts, we’ve got you.

Let’s talk

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CONTENT MARKETING TIPS FOR HEALTHCARE

Aha Media’s Guide to Healthcare Content Strategy

What do healthcare content strategies include?

Your healthcare content marketing strategy defines how you reach, engage, and convert your audiences — including patients, families, healthcare professionals, philanthropists, customers, and your community.

It covers:

  • Your brand messaging strategy: Who you are as a healthcare brand, who you serve, what you offer, and how you talk about it
  • Your search strategy: How you bring visibility to your brand, everywhere that people are searching
  • Channel-specific strategies: Your strategies for your website, social media, email, paid media, print marketing, event marketing, and more
  • Platform-specific strategies: For example, how you create content that works on Instagram vs. LinkedIn
  • Audience-specific strategies: For example, how you engage patients vs. referring providers
  • Your content cadence: What you publish, when, and where
  • Your objectives and KPIs: What you’re looking to achieve and how you track results

Why is content strategy important in healthcare?

Random acts of content only take teams so far. Creating content that works across channels and audiences requires proactive planning, data-driven strategy, and governance. It all needs to be documented and followed consistently.

Without a content strategy, you risk:

  • Following the wrong tactics or “best” practices
  • Investing in the wrong content initiatives
  • Losing time to rework (in other words, recreating the wheel each day instead of maximizing what you have)

How to create a healthcare content marketing strategy

This is our specialty as a healthcare content strategy agency. Here’s what you need to know.

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1. Unify your marketing strategy across channels

Many teams view their website, email, and other channels as separate entities with their own best practices. But each channel needs to come together to create a strong and cohesive brand presence. That’s what keeps your brand top of mind — and what lands you at the top of search results.

You might have strategies for specific channels, but they don’t yet work together to build brand authority. Unify your efforts with an omnichannel strategy. Develop and document:

  • Individual channel strategies
  • Messaging pillars
  • Content repurposing strategy
  • Healthcare personas
  • Patient and customer journey maps
  • Brand voice and tone guidelines
  • Writing style guidelines

Reach out for support in building your omnichannel content strategy for healthcare.

2. Audit your healthcare website

Websites aren’t dead — nor endangered. Even in the agentic web landscape we’re moving toward, AI agents need content in order to recommend your brand to healthcare consumers and physicians. And your greatest content repository is your website.

If your website is bogged down with outdated, duplicate, or fragmented content, it’ll be hard to rank and convert users today and land in agentic web experiences in the future.

Audit your website (or priority service lines). Start here:

  • Does the website offer an intuitive and accessible user experience?
  • Do pages align with search intent and answer people’s questions?
  • Is the content optimized for search and supported by schema markup or structured data?
  • Do pages load quickly, without technical issues?
  • Does the data indicate strong engagement and conversion results?
  • Does the data indicate that you’re showing up where people are looking for your brand?

Want an outside perspective? We can help with your healthcare website strategy.

3. Optimize your content for SEO and AI search

Website traffic has dropped since people started using AI. This points to a bigger trend: Search happens in many places now, and brands need to show up across the web to meet people where they are.

What does this mean for your healthcare content strategy? Some recommendations:

  • Prioritize MOFU and BOFU: Shift from top-of-funnel information to middle- and bottom-funnel content that shows your authority, differentiates your content, and helps you avoid competing with AI Overviews for “what is” searches.
  • Be consistent everywhere: Use the same voice, tagline, palette, font, hours, definitions, and names of your hospitals, clinics, and procedures. Be instantly recognizable to humans and machines.
  • Write conversationally: Answer questions about the topic of the page and front-load the important information. It’s better for both humans and machines.
  • Partner with your web dev team: Whether it’s IT or an external vendor, work with your website team to set up and use modular components, tags, schema fields, and core entities.

Check out our CRISP framework for more information and see how we can help.

4. Get ahead of any website content initiatives

Hospital website redesigns and mergers naturally affect your content — and, as a result, your search visibility and ability to convert users. (We’ve seen a thing or two.) That’s why we harp on the importance of defining your strategy for the initiative before anyone touches any URLs.

Here’s how:

  • Audit your website content: Find the overarching patterns across service lines. Is the user journey fragmented across several subpages? Are your patient stories outdated? Are pages set up to compete for the same search terms?
  • Talk to stakeholders: Their satisfaction with the end product matters (and their input is often helpful for understanding how patients interact with the website or search for information).
  • Collaborate with your web team: Learn what your CMS can do for you, as well as its technical limitations. Come in with a wish list. Remember that web developers typically don’t specialize in SEO — so you need to raise issues like schema, modular components, and tags.
  • Create your content plan: Document what’s happening to every URL. Know which ones you’ll rewrite, sunset, and merge with other pages. Figuring this out early helps you build a realistic timeline and understand where you should bring in external content vendors.

Most hospitals do this work every 5-10 years, but we do it every day. We have a lot of advice. Check out our guide to hospital website redesigns and see how we can help with all the above.

5. Audit, optimize, and (maybe) consolidate your socials

Health systems tend to have a lot of satellite social accounts, which be hard to track. You might find some that have been dormant for years, and others you didn’t even know about.

Assess the performance of every account and how they work together to build a clear, positive picture of your brand. Evaluate:

  • Content quality
  • Brand voice consistency
  • Visual brand consistency
  • Engagement metrics
  • Account growth metrics
  • Whether content looks and feels native to each platform

Our healthcare content strategists can help you run a social media audit.

6. Define, research, and document your audiences

Do you market to patients and caregivers? Physicians? Engineers? CFOs? Each audience has unique informational needs. Understand them to create content that resonates and supports personalized experiences.

Research your audiences. (AI is surprisingly good at this.) Document their:

  • Challenges
  • Goals
  • Triggering events
  • Questions and information needs
  • Preferred platforms and content formats
  • Terminology (how they search)
  • Limiting beliefs or objections

Turn what you learn into audience-focused healthcare content strategies. We’re here to help with that, including your patient acquisition and physician referral marketing strategies.

7. Know how you’ll integrate multimedia content

Hospital content strategies aren’t complete without video content. Videos are nonnegotiable on social media and can help you land in search features. But high-quality ones are often pricey and time-intensive to produce. And it’s hard to motivate team members to record off-the-cuff clips.

These barriers make it even more important to know how you’ll use each video to the fullest when you have them in hand. Determine:

  • Which types of videos you need
  • How you’ll invest wisely in video
  • Where you’ll publish videos
  • How you’ll repurpose and distribute them
  • How you’ll manage them and keep them up to date
  • How to optimize videos for search or social media

Want a jump-start? Reach out for help with your video marketing strategy.