* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf
Hello everybody I'm Stewart. Welcome to our webinar about health care marketing or health care content marketing best Practices. Today as you may know, I can tell I'm traveling. So, the good news is Melanie is going to be doing most of the talking. I'll be muting myself in the background noise in just a moment, but I did want us to go ahead and get started here.

Stewart Gandolf
Melanie, can you advance to the first slide? Yes. So, first of all, some housekeeping issues. number one, we are recording the webinar and we'll be sending out to everybody who's registered. So if, you're happy to leave early or you have a colleague that wants to see the webinar, not to fret. We will be sending you the recording.

Stewart Gandolf
Number two, we will be doing Q&A. So, we'll be handling that at the end. So feel free to ask questions in the Q and A as opposed to the chat. And we'll be looking at that when we get to the end. also number three, in terms of audience, we have a really well attended webinar again today and it's pretty broad audience as is typical.

Stewart Gandolf
So we have people that are professional marketers, VP level. We have people that are actually doing the work. And so director level and, and team members, we also have CEOs and people on the executive side. So we always recognize that, when we do these things, we have people from, you know, hospitals from other location businesses, from pharma, different places.

Stewart Gandolf
So we try to make this relevant to everybody. And so we will do that as well today. keep in mind that today we can't teach you everything. Melanie has learned in 20 years of doing this. so we're going to focus in on what we think are the most important issues with health care, content marketing. And Melanie is fantastic.

Stewart Gandolf
She's a wealth of knowledge, as you shall soon see. So the, you can see the agenda here. Melanie, why don't you advance the slide and introduce.

Melanie Saxe
Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I'm super excited to be here. I am Melanie Satz, director of content here at Healthcare Success. I can share a little bit about my background and sort of how I got started and what brought me here, and then I can share a little bit about what I do here at HS. So, the reason why I'm excited in particular today is because, I mean, 2024 marks 20 years that I've been in content marketing.

Melanie Saxe
That is a long time. I don't even think content marketing was, a phrase back in the day, but it just sort of gives me, you know, two decades of a history with, an industry that has evolved a lot. So I'm very excited today, essentially, I went to journalism journalism school excited, but quickly learned that I did not want to do journalism.

Melanie Saxe
while I was still in college, I started working at a nonprofit organization, and, really early on started getting experience writing for websites. when I graduated college, I knew that, you know, every writer knows the number one rule. How do you become a better writer? You have to write a lot. So I knew that I had a pretty good freelance career, but I knew that a full time job was what was going to get me at my desk, writing eight hours a day.

Melanie Saxe
So that's what I did. Basically, I got hired at a Asean content marketing agency. We served small businesses, small to medium sized, so essentially the next seven years of my life was writing eight hours a day, for small to medium sized businesses that were underdeveloped, no branding, barely, you know, mom and pop type places. So during that time is where I gained a lot of my experience, obviously writing, but also branding and helping these businesses bring their brands to life, small budgets and all of that.

Melanie Saxe
So and I was introduced to the SEO industry early on. after that time, though, you know, my sights were set on bigger fish. I essentially wanted to work at Bruce Clay because they served enterprise, large companies, bigger budgets, their established brands. I wanted to know what it was like to work with brands that are already established, but really come to you for the expertise to win over the, you know, beat the competition.

Melanie Saxe
obviously the stakes are higher and you're working with established brands very different, you know, as you guys know. So essentially I got that experience there. I got the opportunity to be trained by Bruce Clay. I'm not an SEO analyst, but just the methodologies. And he's considered the father of SEO. So that sort of gives you a background of how I was part of the SEO industry early on, part of content early on.

Melanie Saxe
But again, my heart was always set on health care. And that's what brings me here today. at a jazz right now, I manage a team of copywriters. I lead the branding, brand messaging projects, and essentially really work with the rest of our teams to bring that integrated marketing approach when it comes to content. So excited to be here.

Stewart Gandolf
Very good morning. Welcome. And I'm Stewart CEO of Healthcare Success. Next slide I want to just do this for a second. And for those of you that are new to us, we are an integrated agency. Nothing but health care marketing. we like to say that, there's a lot of agencies that are awesome at branding and creative.

Stewart Gandolf
Others are great at digital. We really pride ourselves in working in both worlds. So enough about us. Let's just jump straight into it. Melanie.

Melanie Saxe
Thank you. So the power of health care content marketing, I know that if you're here watching this, you know the value of it. So essentially I thought we could start with a definition. Mainly because honestly content marketing is a lot of things to a lot of people. So just getting that straight from the beginning, what is it? as it relates to health care.

Melanie Saxe
So health care content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and accurate health and medical information to attract and retain cust consumers and HCP with the ultimate goal of growing your business. Essentially, when done right, content is part of the marketing process and not separate from it.

Melanie Saxe
So why content marketing? again, probably if you're on this webinar, you know why. But it is important to lay out the value. And content marketing does support your bottom line and the consumer needs. So imagine the ultimate scenario. This is what we all want from content marketing. Our customers eagerly, eagerly await the content. They devour it regardless of format.

Melanie Saxe
Email, social media, blog, website. They actively engage. They share it with friends and family and become enthusiastic advocates. Essentially, that's what we all want. But what is the secret to get there? So from our approach, it is strategic content. Unlike generic marketing, which prioritizes sales over value, strategic content marketing focuses on being relevant and valuable. So, kind of before we like dive in, I'm probably going to go relatively quickly the first half, the meat and potatoes of the webinar or toward the end.

Melanie Saxe
So I want to make sure we have time for that and as well as your questions. But I did want to set the stage for content can mean a lot of things. Right. So for the sake of our webinar, we're going to focus on website content. And the reason why is because from my understanding is if you have a really good website and you have really good content and you took that time to develop the pages as they should be developed with everything involved.

Melanie Saxe
So whether you're talking about video, infographics, everything is in the right place and your website is stacked, in my opinion, that will fuel your content marketing efforts. So but for the sake of today, we're talking about website content. So we're going to just move forward next. So again staying on why content marketing. So it's obvious that you know content is required for every type of marketing.

Melanie Saxe
So again I'm going back to it isn't really siloed. Whether you're doing email, whether you're doing inbound marketing, whether you're doing public relations, all of these marketing disciplines are traditionally siloed, but they all require content. So again, if you look at it that way, content is king. Obviously, and you need it for everything. But most importantly, it serves as the foundation for a cohesive, integrated digital marketing strategy, ensuring all of your marketing efforts align and work together.

Melanie Saxe
So in my opinion, that's why it's valuable to set that stage. and then we know from studies that it pays off and it really does, both in B2B space, B2C space. So we have a ton, a ton of data here that we can share. but essentially, for example, boosted sales. 76% of B2B marketers say content marketing helped generate demand's leads in the last 12 months.

Melanie Saxe
Same thing for B2C 63%. going to reduce costs. It does help us reduce costs. content marketing can generate three times as many leads as outbound marketing, and costs 62% less than traditional marketing. when it comes to stronger customer loyalty, 50% of B2B marketers say content marketing helps build loyalty and existing customers and clients. Again, same thing for B to C.

Melanie Saxe
so, you know, moving on to direct revenue from content, 58% of B2B marketers say content marketing helped generate sales revenue, up from 42% the previous year. In the last 12 months, moving down for brand awareness, we need content for brand awareness. 84% of B2B marketers say content marketing created brand awareness in the last 12 months. Same thing for B2C and then finally customer engagement.

Melanie Saxe
So 70% of consumers feel closer to a company as a result of content marketing. So that is huge. And, going on to the next thing. So essentially I just set the stage here. I think, again, if you're here, you do know the value of it, but how do we get in leadership? Buy in. And that's huge. Why content marketing, said every CEO.

Melanie Saxe
Pretty much. except Stewart. So I do feel very lucky. I feel like everywhere I've worked, essentially, it's been very difficult to prove the value of content, obviously where I work here, and that is not been the case. one of my favorite, case studies for this is a case study that's, featured on, content marketing Institute, but it's essentially Cleveland Clinic's case study.

Melanie Saxe
And if you haven't checked it out, I really recommend it. Amanda, Twitter, which she was the clinic's executive director for content marketing. And in that presentation, she did a presentation in 2021. She says executives love the word marketing. Content, however, is a mystery. They struggled to grasp its significance and the impact, say, a blog post can have on the organization.

Melanie Saxe
But as we know, effective communication hinges on clear language. But securing buy in requires showcasing concrete successes to executives. So I sort of want to give this time to Stewart, and he is our CEO. It'd be nice to really hear your perspective here.

Stewart Gandolf
Well, first of all, it's off to Cleveland Clinic on their marketing team. They're led by Paul Mattson, whom I know. He's their CMO, and they're very sophisticated at what they do. And they do a great job with content and SEO. And from our standpoint, we build our agency with content marketing. Again, before that term was even a common thing, because we wanted to demonstrate our knowledge and to share our, information, our knowledge with our peers and with our clients.

Stewart Gandolf
And so it's just been a fundamental part of everything we do. I might note that you guys are on our webinar today, which is just yet more content. And we're known for creating thought leading content. And everything Melanie is talking about is stuff that we do for our own self. And that's why I love this topic. And I'm so happy that someone like Melanie leads our team in this category back to you, I.

Melanie Saxe
Think is Dr.. So you know there's a lot of ways to get leadership buy in. again, if you're in this scenario I feel for you I know it's really hard. it's easier said than done. what I'm going to share today is hopefully gives you some tips on how to do that. And, you can always start with the metaphor where writers were storytellers.

Melanie Saxe
So, you know, luckily, metaphors truly do speak to everyone. And, I think especially with the C-suite, it's a good way to go. So here's one that I came up with. But essentially, you know, whatever metaphor you can come up with, you know, you should, next show them how it works, essentially case studies. I think are more common.

Melanie Saxe
Now. You can find them online again, Content Marketing Institute, you'll hear me reference them a lot because they do have a lot of valuable information. They are the OG in everything content marketing and they've done a great job. I would suggest going there, looking at the case studies, but being selective and making sure that you pick the ones that you know that your boss, or the stakeholder will resonate and will gain from them.

Melanie Saxe
So. And then next, of course, we've gotten numbers. Not my favorite part, but why they should care. the good thing about content marketing these days is you really can predict and the ROI you can and you can prove it, you know, after the fact. But so these formulas, we didn't not come up with this. This is again Content Marketing Institute.

Melanie Saxe
But I again recommend going through this step process, which is learning how to quantify conversions as it relates to potential sales, to estimate the eventual ROI from investment. So this is what we really need to get that leadership buy in. The formulas are here. I'm not going to read through it and do the math right now, honestly. But basically I would say take heart.

Melanie Saxe
There is a way to quantify it. There is a way to explain it. And, come back to this slide to do this internally. And I think you will definitely see the results there. So. The idea is you have buy in, you know the value and you're ready to create your content. But what is high quality health care website content.

Melanie Saxe
So I want to introduce something again not a new concept, but when you think of content again as not siloed and not separate from your marketing, but sort of this broad umbrella that brings everything together, I want you to imagine the same thing for an audience first approach to your content marketing. So this is a buzzword again, just like storytelling and all the buzzwords we have in content marketing.

Melanie Saxe
But it doesn't mean it's not true. And I firmly believe in an audience first approach. So what is it? And what is the value? I think specifically when it comes to health care, traditionally we have not been doing audience first and health care marketing usually focuses on what the company wants to say about its services. But an audience first approach flips the script.

Melanie Saxe
Essentially, it prioritizes creating content that directly addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. And it starts with research. Surprisingly, many people admit that they do not do customer research, but those who do. For example, this cost schedule survey of 1500 marketers found that 65% do not conduct customer research, but those who do are 300 times more successful.

Melanie Saxe
So that is huge. it is where we start here. But health care, as you know, has a unique challenge when it comes to the target audience. We have a lot of them. depending on your business, a big chunk is your patients, the consumers. So whether in your wealth, wellness, health care, you've got the caregivers, the decision makers who are, the caregivers, essentially, you've got your health care professionals.

Melanie Saxe
That spans a lot of people there. a lot of different people, different stages. There's the prospective employees. So recruitment and, those people, you've got your donors and you also have Google. as you know, if you have a website you are considering Google every day. So that is our challenge. You know this, we know this, it does make health care very challenging.

Melanie Saxe
So how do we get deep into truly understanding what our audience wants? I think here again, we're not saying anything new. there's a lot of traditional ways that you can do research and understand your audience. I do want to I, you know, the the point of it is using tools and techniques to gather that information and truly dive in to your demographics, the pain points and their information needs.

Melanie Saxe
So traditional, you know, surveys, interviews, social media, listening, all these things we've heard of. I wanted to highlight organic search data and search intent. And obviously I'm going to, give a lot of time to SEO. But in doing so, I hope that I can sort of clear up some myths and misunderstanding in the SEO industry and how it's related to content.

Melanie Saxe
one good example is search data. Organic search data and search intent. So if we want to truly understand our audience, organic search data helps us do that with the keywords. It's essentially we know that these are the keywords people are using to search online and find the information that they need. and you can find the questions that they're asking, you can find.

Melanie Saxe
And in those questions you can understand where they're coming from, what their pain points are. You know, what is most important to them. keywords now are tagged with search intent. And as content marketers, that's a big part of how we craft the content that we're working with for a website page. So when you look up a keyword and you find out that keyword is tagged with an informational search intent or a transactional search intent, you understand that, okay, this person is looking for information on this topic.

Melanie Saxe
They might not necessarily be ready to buy, but they really need that information to satisfy them before they can go to the next step. So again, looking at this organic search data is key. It helps you truly focus your page and give the audience what they want on that page and satisfy them. So moving forward with this approach, there's a lot of wins.

Melanie Saxe
Obviously for us it's a win win for consumers and your bottom line. So increases engagement, improves SEO or gets lead generation enhances your brand reputation. All the things that we talked about of why content marketing is important. The audience first approach allows you to nail all of that. So you have planned, you know, your target audience, let's say, and you're ready to create that.

Melanie Saxe
So what's next building your content strategy. So I think that it's important to talk about strategy because again, it's very surprising that many people do not actually document their content strategy. They don't have one. They don't documented. And this is why it's sort of important to understand the value of it, and to start documenting your content strategy in a way where you can go back to it, refine it, understand what you did, and, and learn from it.

Melanie Saxe
Right? So, at our agency, we have sort of a three phased approach to content strategy. you've got your discovery phase, your planning phase in the creative phase. So I'm going to go through each one relatively quickly, but sort of call out the important areas in each section that, again, we're not just learning content marketing, but we're learning how to do it efficiently so that we are, reaping those results.

Melanie Saxe
And we're not wasting time and money. We don't have the, luxury to do that, especially right now in this economy, in this market, as content marketers, there is more pressure on us than ever before. And so what I'm teaching today, apart from just the philosophy of content marketing, is truly the areas that that we believe, you can save time and money in.

Melanie Saxe
So that's why understanding the phase is important. discovery phase here is the building your foundation, understanding your brand messaging, understanding your target audience, as we just said, and your competitors, the stage includes the content audit and, you know, if it was up to me, SEO is a big part of that. So as I as I warned you, here's my little SEO focus.

Melanie Saxe
SEO done right for content. So laying the foundation. Why would you need a SEO to help you with your content audit? Why is SEO brought in at at that stage? Well, I want to kind of go over a few very important aspect.

Melanie Saxe
SEO done right truly helps you create a website that has clear site structure. So search engines rely on website structure to understand the hierarchy and relationship between pages. An SEO expert can craft a clear and logical architecture using categories and subcategories that mimics how users would navigate this information, so this makes it easier for search engines to crawl the site, and also just for people to go from page to page and understand.

Melanie Saxe
I can't tell you how many websites come to us in chaos. I mean, pages are not where they should be not connected properly. Missing pages. so essentially, an SEO expert can help you do that by meeting your business needs, but also, in, addressing, sorry, incorporating the competition and the competitive analysis required. So, again, content relevance by organizing content by theme and user intent and SEO expert ensures relevant content is grouped together properly.

Melanie Saxe
This topical relevance, sends strong signals to search engines about a page's focus, improving its ranking potential for relevant search queries. So, you know, this is why I send things back to SEO before it comes to us. And a lot of people say, well, what does SEO have to do with this? Everything. And this is why, when it comes to a content audit, which is the place you want to start when you are thinking about your content marketing strategy, I also say it is important to incorporate your SEO expert into this step.

Melanie Saxe
the reason why there's a lot of them. So I think obviously it's a strategic way to kick off the process for several reasons. So your SEO identifying SEO strengths and weaknesses during the audit, they can identify content that's already doing well. It's already ranking. They can pinpoint areas where they might need optimization, were data driven decisions. And SEO experts can identify pages with low traffic, high bounce rates, or irrelevant keywords.

Melanie Saxe
This data helps prioritize content updates and guides decisions on what content to keep, refresh, or remove. So essentially, you're reviewing your content by its performance. There's many ways to review your content, right? You can review it by does it reflect today's our most updated products and services. Does it reflect our brand? and but in other ways, how does it perform in search, which is where websites are.

Melanie Saxe
And it's really important to understand from a brand perspective. You might want to kill a page, but from an SEO perspective, that page is bringing in a lot of data. sorry, a lot of traffic. So I'm not saying keep low, you know, bad pages on your site just because it's bringing content. But I'm saying, if it's bringing in traffic, you can improve that page and you can polish it with the right messaging, brand messaging and, essentially have the perfect page that's not only bringing traffic but also represents your brand.

Melanie Saxe
So that's just an example of why it is important. and then again, SEO can help with content gaps and opportunities. So in SEOs understanding of search trends and audience intent can help you uncover gaps in your content strategy. it is a type of content gap analysis that is valuable. They can identify topics your target audience is searching for but still needs to address.

Melanie Saxe
This allows you to create new content that fills these gaps and attracts your organic traffic. So that's essentially my, my speech on SEO and why it is important, why? I think, again, this shouldn't be siloed if you're doing it right, it should be smooth and, integrated. but then, of course, you want to complete your audit by reviewing your pages through other lenses outside of SEO, right?

Melanie Saxe
So as I mentioned, we've got brand, where is your brand and how developed is it? And does your website represent it? you want to get a collection of pages and review them through this lens. And you want to do the same for essentially create buckets, your categories. Some are brand the talent. That's the recruitment and career, content.

Melanie Saxe
You've got editorial, you've got products. So products and service pages and then the performance pages that we just talked about. So when you review your, your do your audit within these categories, this is when you also review the same categories for your competitors. You review the same essentially do the same audit same to your with your competitors.

Melanie Saxe
And then you compare and see where your gaps are and where, you can improve. So now is essentially again the planning phase focuses. So that was the discovery phase. Moving on to the planning phase, focusing on setting goals, identifying your primary target audiences. Again, you learned about your audiences. But then when it's time to plan, as I said, we have a lot of different audiences and you want to target them for the pages that you're writing.

Melanie Saxe
Your career page is going to be different than your home page. the service page is going to be different than an About Us page. So so planning that. And the planning phase also includes distributing your content. This is where we can get nerdy with content. And this is when you need your content calendar determining which channels you will use to reach your audience.

Melanie Saxe
And the more organized you are, the better then we have. The creative phase focus focuses on brainstorming content ideas, and creating content includes, developing your work flow and distributing your content. So. The content calendar I kind of want to go back to sort of highlight a few very important aspects of content marketing that if you work on these areas and have them organized, this is where you can save a lot of money and one of them is with your marketing calendar, your editorial calendar.

Melanie Saxe
So traditionally when we talk about content, as I said, it's siloed. You've got your email marketing team doing what they're doing. You've got social media doing what they're doing. you have paid search, you've got SEO. It's just sort of, again, siloed. But when you have a single marketing calendar where it's clear what content you're going to produce, when and what, it's for, you understand how it's integrated.

Melanie Saxe
you get everyone on the same page. This does save you a lot of time and money. So I really recommend doing that. I recommend bringing it under one umbrella and having a single content marketing calendar. you know, even if that means bringing a lot of departments together and having that meeting where regularly we're all on the same page and we know what we're producing as a company.

Melanie Saxe
And it also raises the stakes for ensuring that just because you're sending out a social media post doesn't mean you you can, do that without considering brand or just because you are popping up a website page that might be for SEO again, doesn't mean you can do that without considering brand. So having a single calendar where everything is out in the open and transparent to everyone sort of keeps everyone, responsible for touching, for ensuring that the brand is represented essentially, I think depending on the size of your team, you might have a small team, you might have a large team.

Stewart Gandolf
I mean, large even enterprise self care organizations sometimes have very small teams. But that's why you might be considering an agency to help you out. So depending on the size of your team, always know that who you bring on your team truly matters. You don't need a lot of people, but you need the right people. And this is another area where you can save money.

Melanie Saxe
a lot of people try to save money by, outsourcing content or getting a very junior copywriter in health care. We cannot we can't, we can't waste time and money on that because unfortunately, the amount of revisions and work required to bring it to the quality that we need for our industry ends up wasting more time and money.

Melanie Saxe
So when it comes to your team, always have that SEO expert that you can rely on. Again, partnering with an agency that has that on hand, that's why it's crucial. There's not a page we produce that we don't doesn't go through that process. Here at HealthCare Success. medical expert reviews. So there's a lot of misunderstanding, when it comes to how a health care organization communicates with their medical professionals, the stakeholders, as it relates to content.

Melanie Saxe
And a lot of times the medical professionals lead the topics in the content, and that is not the right way to do it. We respectfully love the experts because they're the ones who know the topics. We're not the experts, and we certainly need to rely on them. But when and where and why we rely on them matters. And that's again how we save money.

Melanie Saxe
Consider the salaries of your medical professionals. The amount of time it takes for them to either write, copy or review. Copy the many fingers in the pie and the many revisions that things go through for, we all know that horrible feeling. I mean, whether you're a copywriter and you know that your little piece of content is going to go through 12 different people, it's going to come back red.

Melanie Saxe
It's going to be all arbitrary edits. There's no rhyme or reason for why things are being revised, only, again, to have fingers in the pie. but when you do things right, we are actually going to. We have a upcoming blog post on how to incorporate your medical experts into the editorial workflow. So I would say we're going to go deep into that.

Melanie Saxe
But really quickly, the idea is we don't need to rely on them for the topics that we need to rely on them as reviewers of the copy for medical accuracy. So ensuring that they after everything is said and done, they get a final review and don't let them change a comma. Whether they like the Oxford comma or not, they're there to review for medical accuracy and nothing else that will save you time and money.

Melanie Saxe
You also want an editor. Again, the editor is the one who understands the purpose. The different areas that we are reviewing the content for. So we've got brand, we've got style, we've got SEO, we've got subject matter. There's a lot of areas and health care content has to test to nail all of them. So as an editor, you you should have all of those guidelines out in the open and essentially, that's what you're editing for, again.

Melanie Saxe
Then you also want the right kind of writer on your team. So and Healthcare Success. When we say senior health care content writer, we are talking about a writer that has seven or more years of experience, professional experience, writing website copy in the health care space. it's asking a lot, but let me tell you, it means that we are not reviewing there.

Melanie Saxe
We're not going through a billion drafts, you know, first, second draft, send it through medical review. They tweak for subject matter and off you go. So it's, it is worth investing in good quality. sorry. Experienced writers in your industry. and of course, there are a lot of other people involved in creating content. You've got your designers, developers, a lot of other people.

Melanie Saxe
But I decided to sort of focus on that editorial team that you might need and who you need to save that time in money. So, we have two last sections that I want to go through quickly. Again, giving you guys time for Q&A. I really appreciate you guys, hanging in there this amount of time. So we're going to go through the two last sections.

Melanie Saxe
One is the common mistakes that we see here in all the time. Again, learning from mistakes is huge in marketing. It's what we do right. We cannot learn if we don't make mistakes. But if I can share with you some of the biggest mistakes we see, hopefully you can prevent them again. Saving you time and money. And then we're going to talk about what, our best practices are finally.

Melanie Saxe
So the meat and potatoes here, the most common mistakes and costly ones. So inaccurate or outdated medical health information. Ooh. We cannot there's no way that this could happen. But it does all the time. And the, I've seen many, many, many clients come to us. And the first thing they say is don't trust the information on our site.

Melanie Saxe
Don't rely on it for writing other information. It's wrong. We unfortunately went to and this is where this is why SEO and content marketing really did have a bad reputation if you go to the wrong agency. Unfortunately, the churn and burns, the content that's written just for search engines, you better believe that's going to be wrong because, you know, it was affordable, it was quick, and it didn't go through the layers that it needed to go through.

Melanie Saxe
So we see it all the time. no medical review process. Again, doctors have not you know, there's a lot of websites that the doctor and, you know, or medical professional didn't even have a chance to review. that's definitely not okay, because it might not properly represent what you what your business does. a good example of this is, you know, we've had clients in the same industry who are, let's say, doing the same treatment.

Melanie Saxe
not going to mention, but essentially you've got two different surgeons who are doing sorry. they are treating a same condition, but with two different types of surgeries because they each believe it very much believe that the surgery that they're doing is the right one for a particular reason. If a content writer doesn't work with the medical, work with that surgeon to write that page, they're going to write a generic version of it and will not nail the unique selling proposition of your company and why your surgeon is choosing that particular, surgery to do their experience in it.

Melanie Saxe
So again, it's a missed opportunity like, not allowing. So moving on to the next, allowing healthcare experts or the business to drive content topics instead of the audience needs. So again, all due respect for the professionals, but we want to ensure that we are really knowing what your audience wants and ensuring that you give that to them.

Melanie Saxe
So another issue that we see all the time is duplicate content or thin content. So duplicate content means you've got multiple pages on your website that are pretty much about the same topic, saying the same thing in a different way. There's no value to it. there's no strategy behind it. And at the end of the day, it doesn't help your SEO.

Melanie Saxe
So and another aspect is thin content. So you've got pages that might be created for a certain purpose, but it's certainly not clear. There's not enough information on that page to satisfy what a user would want. Again, that does get flagged. And it's not good for SEO or for the audience. moving forward, not considering readability. So sometimes we're obviously in the health care industry.

Melanie Saxe
There's medical information that goes way over our heads. But for our audience, it's super important to write in a way that they can understand removing that jargon, removing the, you know, word length, single sentence lengths you want. Short words, short sentences, easy to understand, all that matters. moving quickly here. Dry technical information again, not written for the target audience.

Melanie Saxe
No emotional connection. Content created just for search engines with no value for the audience. I can't believe how many times we see that. and again, not understanding how SEO is part of the equation. So those are some of the most the biggest mistakes we see all the time. I would say, the worst of them though is just inaccurate information.

Melanie Saxe
all right. our secrets to success. So going back to what I shared website, our information architecture. Does your website make sense? you know, when it comes to the information, how it's presented, how it's organized, laying a solid foundation, by the way, if you if you do have a good SEO, they. Can we structure it for you?

Melanie Saxe
It's not. That is what the special, you know, specialty, that's their specialty to essentially restructure your navigation and restructure the website, laying a solid foundation with brand messaging. So I actually didn't talk about this enough, but, you know, branding is a big part of what you want already established before you create your content. I don't like to use the word storytelling a lot, because we know that it's just used to death in our industry.

Melanie Saxe
But obviously a good story is how we connect to people. And if your brand isn't established properly, if you're brand messaging is an established, it really is an uphill battle for content marketing for any marketing. So laying that solid foundation is what we do for our clients. you know, we work with you if you have the budget to, let's say, okay, be honest and be like, our brand is a mess.

Melanie Saxe
We might have done some brand work, visual, you know, for the visual identity. We know our colors. We know our logo. We, we've got rules for how to use all that. But when it comes to messaging, we don't we didn't do that work. So there's a lot of ways we can work with you. Of course, we can build that foundation and we can do that as an agency, but there are a lot of other creative ways we can, sort of work with you until you get there.

Melanie Saxe
But it's important. and then once you have those, the next secret to success is adhering to the brand messaging guidelines and writing style guide. I can't tell you enough. brands will do the work, pay a lot of money, build their brand, have actual brand messaging guidelines. But then when the marketing team is ready to do their work and stuff is not communicated to them, and or the marketing team isn't relying on that for as guidelines.

Melanie Saxe
So guidelines are there for a reason. And of course, I'm super nerdy about it. I'm a writer, I'm an editor. And, that those are the those are the areas that you have to crack down on, not arbitrary areas like, whether you, you know, whether, the writing is in your, voice or tone, it essentially has to meet certain guidelines.

Melanie Saxe
And, I really, really can't stress that enough, that not having a content strategy or, sorry, having a content strategy with audience first topics and content, that's another secret to success. I love when our clients come to us with topics because it means they understand their business. They know they're they're telling us, hey, this is what we think is important.

Melanie Saxe
But again, as an agency, we do our due diligence and we make sure we align it with what, audiences really do want. Okay. So then high quality writing. So I'm going to get again gets really, nerdy here. about high quality writing. it always starts with providing your writer with the topic, the URL. So if you don't know where you that page is going to fit in your website, you're already not doing it right.

Melanie Saxe
It's important to, from the beginning, understand where this page is going to fit with your overall website. How it connects. It really does help the writer understand how to craft that page properly. You've got your keyword, target, and your internal linking strategy. All this comes from SEO, and it's essentially the, the behind the scenes way of telling the search engines and helping people understand how everything works together.

Melanie Saxe
adhering to Google's Eat and quality guidelines. So you've been getting the emails, you know, that there was Google's helpful content update. it's rattled a lot of people and it's still going on. it's a lot of businesses. Sorry, it's not a joke. And essentially, when it comes to health care, Google considers health care a your money or your life topic.

Melanie Saxe
So law falls into this category finance, health care. And what that means is we have a larger we have a bigger lens, a magnifying glass on our content. We can't compromise by people who rely on this information, and we can't compromise for it. It must demonstrate expertise, experience, authoritative, authoritative ness, and trustworthiness. All of these are areas that we, work on internally to ensure that the copy meets all of these.

Melanie Saxe
And next credible sources, again, linking to credible sources, writing from credible sources. All of that matters. The medical expert interviews. again, we'll have a blog post about this. But interviewing them, incorporating them properly, the proper editorial review process, that I just kind of went over. so the idea is that you want everyone to know to kind of be working off the same guideline.

Melanie Saxe
So again, we're not doing arbitrary edits and we're not wasting time, and having that final as a medical review. So, sure, we interview the experts and we write that information, but allowing them to review it. And then the final SEO review, finally modifying your messages to fit the distribution channel. So I strongly believe that if your website is packed and properly done right, then you can from there, modify your content to fit everything else.

Melanie Saxe
So you have a social media campaign. You already have the strong landing pages set. You already have the information in your website that you can use to then create more snackable content for social. So and just modifying it properly. So essentially those are all of our, tips. And I'm going to now move into some of our questions.

Stewart Gandolf
Actually Melanie I don't have a I want to get past that a couple of them really quickly. And then yeah I'd love to get your further insights. So sorry. It's a little lighter here than we anticipated would been at this location before, but it is what it is. At any rate, the first question was some examples of really good social media.

Stewart Gandolf
And I would say that two, leading to the leading institutions in health care are Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic. Both of those institutions have really good marketing people. And so I would take a look at what they are doing. I mentioned, the team at the Cleveland Clinic a little while ago. Lee is, I think, retired now, but he created the program at Mayo Clinic for social media and was truly a pioneer in that category.

Stewart Gandolf
So both of those, institutions have marketing or social media and content in their bones. one fun thing that what we've taught clients before about Cleveland, for example, Cleveland Clinic, for example, one of my favorite blog posts they had is what? What is the color of my pee main? Meaning that they didn't say, what is my urine color mean?

Stewart Gandolf
They bought it. And, consumer loved words. And that's what gets read that book that posters fantastically. So it's again, going back to what Melanie said, talk and think in the terms of the way the consumer does, even if it's not something we would normally say. the word pee versus urine is not my company, but it's what people are actually searching for.

Stewart Gandolf
It's a realistic, pragmatic and one of my favorite examples. And then the second question was about convincing your bosses to, for leadership to give you resources. And we've written an article very, very specifically on that I included in a chat. if you're not live, you can check out and send us an email. but that is an ongoing thing.

Stewart Gandolf
But I'd love to get Melanie's and put on these two questions as well. Plus, I know we had some other, questions that were texted to you offline.

Melanie Saxe
Okay. Yeah. sorry. What was the second one that you wanted to get my input on? I'm actually going to,

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah. The one was about the institutions that I mentioned. Male. Cleveland.

Melanie Saxe
Yes.

Stewart Gandolf
Clinic. But the second question was about, how do you help commit your leadership to, you know, get a graphic designer or get a content team? Basically, how do I get resources, which again, is a topic of the blog post I just sent in very much detail because it's such a common problem. But I'm curious if you have any.

Melanie Saxe
Yeah. I think, you know, going back to sort of what I said, where we do have to prove that ROI and, you know, unfortunately, you might have to go back to that slide and do the math. I think that, you know, luckily and also just another thing is, though, tracking and measuring the performance of your content currently and in a way that your leadership can understand.

Melanie Saxe
So, you know, luckily with content we can track things like brand awareness, engagement, lead generation. So whatever your goals are, you can track the there's common metrics for content now to track improve all of that. And I think yes that is very important. So having that, you know personally as a writer, the the data analysis and tracking and measuring was not my strength.

Melanie Saxe
And so having those data analysts on your team I think is key, whether they're in the SEO team or I do think that that that's a place to start. But but as a content writer or a content marketer, it is important. I think it's a valuable skill that I wish I had learned that my advice is to learn how to measure and track the performance of your content, because the more you can do that, the more you can get that leadership by saying, hey, this worked.

Melanie Saxe
This is how we got the leads. you know, so that's my answer. any other questions that we have? Let's see here.

Stewart Gandolf
The next question was basically about Instagram. Melanie. So, we we love Instagram. I'm curious, you have any comments on that?

Melanie Saxe
do I have a favorite right now? No, I, I, I consume all of that just very in a hungry manner. So I'm consuming it all. I know what my favorite is to engage with as a consumer. And I love I love the disruptors. I love anything that stands out. I think if you can take that risk and do something new and different, while also being on brand, I know there's it's hard, but, you know, the disruptors are what catches my attention and gets me excited.

Melanie Saxe
So.

Stewart Gandolf
Okay. I think you had a couple other questions that were off line.

Melanie Saxe
Okay. So I'm reading here. If you are a new marketing lead at a company, what would your first steps be? What are your must haves or nice to haves? The company has done only patchy content on the new section before. Well, I think if you're a new marketing lead at a company. So your first step is that audit, right?

Melanie Saxe
So it's also you want to balance, you know, obviously understanding what the immediate needs are. So understanding the immediate needs and whatever that you your role requires right away. But incorporating that audit that you need to do and take it up with the competitors and understand what you're missing and starting with what you're missing, is really important, you know, and also what is going well so that you can, you can understand, what is going well, essentially, I think that's underrated.

Melanie Saxe
You know, why is it performing well? And, can we capitalize on that? So those would that would be my advice. Stewart, did you have any advice for that one for a new marketing lead? You're such a wonderful mentor.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, health care marketing can be challenging because oftentimes that depending on the kind of organization you're at, it could be led by either, executives of done much of the marketing or clinicians or scientists. So it can be challenging. It's actually, you know, marketing is, Can be undervalued, underappreciated. And I think a lot of times people that are close to a understand just how smart people can be in the field.

Stewart Gandolf
So I think it's all about credibility, building credibility for yourself, especially in those early days, to make sure that everything we do is together, confidence building. I think your idea of an audit is great, Melanie, to create an audit, site you're when you come in with to make an argument, a rational, logical argument, look for data to support it.

Stewart Gandolf
Look for examples like we talked to a minute ago about, you know, Cleveland Clinic or now just some independent ones. I don't want to talk about our own stuff because we don't to brag about what we're doing. But the, there's lots of examples out there of our clients as well and just show, examples of really good, examples of successful campaigns, respectable, organizations.

Stewart Gandolf
And again, just it's all about building credibility, especially in those early days if you don't build credibility. And, I heard this line once from somebody at a conference I love. If you find yourself being kicked to the kids table, that's a problem. You want to be at the adult table. The adult table meaning that when you get to be part of decisions.

Stewart Gandolf
And as really, I think marketing departments often have a harder time at that. So credibility, credibility, anything you could do, every moment counts. Every argument counts. Data, case studies backing it up will really help you. And I think an audit is great because you can take them through. Okay, here's where we are. Here's what we are should be doing.

Stewart Gandolf
Here's what we're not doing. Another quick example. This is find some pain points. Like for example, if there were views, that you're inheriting a horrible there's a good chance that leadership doesn't know that and that nothing gets attention like something like that. So hopefully that's helpful to you. There's a lot there. But you're right, it's really important.

Stewart Gandolf
And this is you know, when we speak at conferences, this topic is often the the topic of an entire breakout. So anyway, I hope that's thank you.

Melanie Saxe
And if you are watching in your, copywriter, just keep writing. we get so many inquiries. So I do my best to reply. it's really, really exciting how many people want to work with us and write for us. And right in the health care space, I try to reply to all of you. I definitely look at portfolios.

Melanie Saxe
Just keep doing what you're doing. and thank you so much for always reaching out.

Stewart Gandolf
We will be providing a, a webinar recording since you're registered, if you're interested in our actually helping you. We're glad to talk about that as well. Best wishes. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you.

Melanie Saxe
Thank you so much for watching. Thank you Stewart.