Healthcare marketers have faced more challenges than most during the last three months, but many are still prioritising the publication of content marketing materials as time and budgets are shifted to cope with a real-world crisis.
Content marketing was the top priority for healthcare marketers before the outbreak of COVID-19, with 46.2% saying that it was their primary initiative.
This put it ahead of other initiatives, including email marketing (40%), paid advertising (34.1%), managing media channels (32.8%) and crisis communication (32.8%).
It is no surprise that the latter of those initiatives has taken greater precedence since March.
Almost half (48%) said that communications designed to protect and support clients and customers have been the primary focus following the spread of the coronavirus.
These findings are part of Binary Fountain’s latest report on the strategies that healthcare marketers are using and how they expect them to change in the coming months.
While reacting to the crisis is taking up a significant portion of workloads at the moment, content marketing and email marketing remain a top priority for a third of leading healthcare organisations.
The cost-effectiveness of creating blogs and articles is one of the reasons why the initiative continues to be favoured over more costly paid advertising.
One area that has become more of a priority since the pandemic is SEO.
The study found 22.3% of healthcare marketers rated this as a top priority earlier in the year, but this has increased slightly to 23.7%.
Moving forward, marketers in the industry are very much focused on getting new projects up and running.
Interest in telehealth, defined as the distribution of services via digital tech, has also spiked since COVID-19.
Those surveyed said that they expect this interest to remain even when the pandemic subsides.
There is also hope of a return to normality.
More than a third are expecting to pick up where they left off with paid advertising in the future.
