Start your company’s medical blog today

We repeatedly suggest to medical companies we work with to start a medical blog even if they are years away from market. There are quite a few reasons for this:

Having a medical blog helps with search engine ranking – the site’s age and its size (meaning the number of relevant pages) and how frequently new content is updated with fresh content are key factors in the site’s ability to rank well. This takes time, sometimes years. The earlier you start doing these things the better.
Having a blog increases credibility – blogging helps establish your expertise in a certain medical specialty. The more quality content, the more credible your company appears. And this is so important in the medical field.
Blogging enables building and leveraging relationships with patients – patients might even be early adaptors for your medical device or could be potential participants in clinical studies. Furthermore, they may recommend the device to their physicians.
Blogging makes you easier to find – your medical device blog posts are focused on a certain topic and will include keywords that are relevant to your medical field. You will be indexed by search engines and ranked not only for your “main” words but also for others in the field. This is called “inbound marketing.”
Starting early costs less – the earlier you start, the lower the accumulated cost to gain the attention you would like.
Things to write about in your company’s blog

One of the questions medical device marketers ask me is what topics they should be blogging on. So here are eight ideas for future medical blog posts. Remember, however, that the purpose of creating a blog is for business reasons and that every single post should strengthen the business and clinical case of your product.

1. Company updates

This is the obvious one. Write about medical exhibitions and meetings you participate in, key milestones you have met (that are not confidential of course), and clinical studies you are about to commence or have completed successfully. Additional topics might be rounds of financing, agreements signed, and so forth. This is the one companies regularly update in the “News” section.

2. Reviews of your industry and market

Has any research firm released an industry or segment analysis? Write about it in your medical blog and link it to the original article. Highlight information that is supportive of your device. If for instance a research firm publishes a study about the growth in point-of-care testing and this is what your device does, then write about that to strengthen your case. You can receive regular updates on market research by using Google Alerts or subscribing to relevant newsletters and news feeds.

3. Updates about latest studies and research

You must be receiving updated studies in your areas of interest from PubMed. The body of research and know-how is growing exponentially. New clinical evidence is frequently being published that can support your product claims and highlight the market limitations.

4. Simplified versions of medical guidelines

Guidelines are extremely complicated to follow, especially for patients. And if patients are your target audience and you would like them to know about you, why not help them learn the ropes and better understand the flow of treatments? This is especially important due to the high rate of patient illiteracy today. Patients will appreciate it. If you can do this graphically via a flow chart or infograph, they will thank you even more.

5. How-tos posts

Patients really like easy-to-follow steps that improve their quality of life and increase mobility. If your medical device will be used for treating insomnia, why not write posts such as, “Food to eat to help you sleep better” or “A five-step guide for getting a good night’s sleep”? If the article targets hospital administrators, you can write about “How to evaluate the real cost of a respirator for your hospital”.

6. Answers to everyday questions

Find out what patients and doctors are asking and write an answer in your medical blog. How can you find out what patients and doctors are asking? Patient questions and discussions are easy to find. You can usehealth-care hashtags on Twitter to sort these out to find your relevant target audience. Conversely, you can regularly visit LinkedIn groups and look at what your target audience is asking and the way people answer.

7. Resource pages

One of the ways to make your site easier to find is to have a resource page. A resource page is an aggregated source from which your target audience can search for and find relevant information on the Internet. Having many external, well-researched links contributes to your credibility in the eyes of search engines.

8. Patient stories

Patient stories are a great way to show how your device works, especially if it worked or helped a patient overcome an illness or hardship. This is obviously more relevant for medical device companies with proven clinical data. You should of course put the appropriate disclaimers if your device is still in the clinical study stage.

Invest in a blog now. Just start.

Blogging is time consuming, but it doesn’t cost much when compared with your other expenses. Its results are not measurable immediately but over the long run. Over time, a medical device blog may be the marketing expense that has the greatest ROI. With the extensive list of ideas mentioned above, I hope that you have a great deal to start writing on.

What other topics can you think about writing on for a medical device blog?