Back in 2013, the Pew Research Center released the results of their study about Americans and their use of the Internet to research health-related questions. Think about your use of the Internet five years ago, versus today. Back then, Pew’s research showed that 72 percent of US Internet users had gone online in the last year to look for health information.
Where did they start their online search? The study shows that 77 percent began by going to a search engine. To put that into perspective, only 13 percent started their search for information by going to a health portal like WebMD. What does that mean if you’re a healthcare provider? Start blogging. You’ve got the advantage of search engines hungry for your content.
The Pew Research Center’s study determined that 63 percent of people went online to search for information about a medical problem. That’s an important distinction, and it’s in alignment with what Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School teaches.
He tells marketers not to focus on customers. “Instead,” he says, “focus on the job that customers are trying to get done when they use your product or service.” Or, to put it in your health-related perspective, customers aren’t going online and using search engines to find doctors. They’re not even – at least not initially – searching for treatment suggestions.
They are looking for information and perspective about their symptoms. They’re first looking for confirmation and validation. “Am I the only person who sneezes when I look at a bright light?”
Your priority as a health professional when blogging is to educate.
Most online experiences begin with a search engine. A five-year-old Pew study shows that 77 percent of people with health questions started the experience with a search engine. Those search engines are looking for content matching search queries.
The searchers aren’t doctors. They don’t know the answers, just the questions. Or, more precisely, the symptoms. They would have no idea to search for photic sneeze reflex (PSR) or to ask Google about autosomal dominant compulsive helio-ophthalmic outbursts (ACHOO). And so, they type – or maybe they just ask Alexa or Siri, “Why do I sneeze at the sun?”
Educating people and giving them perspective about their problem is helping people, as Harvard’s Clayton Christensen said, “focus on the job that customers are trying to get done when they use your product or service.”
If you’re a healthcare professional, you live and breathe HIPAA every day. It’s your job to maintain ethical and professional standards that protect the privacy of your patients. It doesn’t absolve you from being an approachable human being – and now that you’ve used your blog to help people understand their problem by educating them about the potential causes of their symptoms, they need to connect with the person behind the stethoscope.
Whether it’s a new lawnmower or erectile dysfunction, people need to fit the product or service into their worldview. They’re looking for examples of how you as a healthcare professional have helped others. Anecdotes providing your personal perspective helps prospective new clients put your services and solutions into their worldview. What do you have in common with them? What might they discover they have in common with other patients you’ve treated?
Blogging is content marketing. Content marketing is the stuff that fuels your inbound marketing strategy. Establishing yourself as someone who educates about symptoms makes you a thought leader, and thought leaders find themselves at the top of search results.
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