Why Pay to Spread Your Messages?

posted by Pivotal Health Solutions on Friday, August 28, 2015

In health care, organizations may advertise their services, but more often, they are focused on educating people about how to stay healthy.

So is this advertising or communication? 

If you define advertising as the overt attempt to sell a product or service, no, it isn't. But hospitals or health care practices don't have to pay for TV commercials or print ads to spread this message (although many do). You can accomplish the same thing with content marketing. 

Organizations may not need to advertise, but they all need to communicate, and content marketing does this--with the added value of not appearing like a paid ad. Content marketing uses non-paid content to connect with audiences via a website, blog post, white paper, social media post or other medium and is designed to attract audiences and encourage a positive viewpoint of a company's products or services. 

Today, 92 percent of marketers are using content marketing and about 60 percent are planning to increase their content budgets. No, content marketing isn't 100 percent "non-paid" as you must hire content specialists to manage it, but because it's designed to inform and educate and appears to be "third-party" content, it doesn't carry the stigma that traditional advertising can. As such, it gives health care marketers a unique opportunity to share key messages to consumers in ways that aren't overly promotional.

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Do all organizations need to advertise? No. Do all organizations need to communicate? Yes. And they need to do so in such a way that what they have to say: reaches their desired audiences; stands out from the masses of other communications from all channels; and educates, informs and sometimes persuades recipients to hold some belief or take some action.

Today’s online communication channels have opened up new, and increasingly effective, means for organizations and individuals to get their messages in front of their audiences. These channels have given rise to a not-necessarily-new, but increasingly effective, means of doing that — content marketing.

Content marketing has become a trendy new term to refer to the use of non-paid (e.g. non-advertising) content to connect with various audiences. It can involve any combination of websites, blog posts, white papers, social media posts, etc., designed to engage an audience and generate positive feelings about the communicator’s products and services.

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This article excerpt, by Linda Pophal, originally appeared here: http://chippewa.com/business/businessreport/columns/marketing-why-health-care-organizations-and-others-pay-to-spread/article_95c8c0fd-aadb-5b35-803f-d092f13c2fa6.html.