At Hedy & Hopp, pediatrics is one of our passions, and in this week’s episode, Jenny talks about developing a pediatric content strategy. One thing that makes pediatric content so different from other types of healthcare content is that, instead of talking directly to a patient, often pediatric content is aimed at the parents of a patient.
With that in mind, Jenny offers five pillars for pediatric content marketing:
- Understanding a Diagnosis
Develop content that helps parents understand their child’s diagnosis through describing symptoms, treatments, and what to expect. This type of content should help parents who may be in research mode and should offer an avenue for them to seek care. - Preparing for a Child’s Surgery
Content like this can help ease parents’ worries about having their child undergo a surgery. It could be a step-by-step guide on the surgical process and should address what parents and their children can expect throughout the surgery process and how best to prepare. - Hospital and Facilities Tour
It is so simple, yet so effective. Walking through your space and showing parents where to park, where to check in, and where the exam rooms can help calm anxious parents and children. Plus, it is an opportunity to show off the accommodations and benefits of your space. - Emotional Support and Counseling
Create content that offers support to parents who may be going through a very challenging and overwhelming time. This type of content can highlight resources, communities, and support networks for a variety of situations and diagnoses. - Care and Follow-Up Post Procedure
Develop content that highlights what to expect after a child’s procedure. Discuss the recovery process, what’s normal, and when should parents seek additional help. - Interactive Q&As
This could be a live Q&A on a particular topic, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Make sure to brainstorm a few questions beforehand in case interaction is low, and remember to save any live videos to post later!
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
WAMH58 video
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host today, and I’m also the CEO and Founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we love producing this show to share some industry insight and nuggets with our listeners.
Today, I’m really excited to create an episode specifically to help out those of you that are focusing on pediatric marketing. So at Hedy and Hopp, we have five areas of passion. They are regional healthcare providers, regional payers or insurance companies, oncology, women’s health, and peds. So we’re going to be weaving in specific content for each of those five areas of passion.
If you have specific content questions or things that you’d like to see, shoot me a note. This episode was actually inspired by a note sent in by a listener. They are in the middle of [00:01:00] creating a content strategy for a new video series they’re doing for pediatric hospital, and they were interested in getting our insights into different ways to approach a content strategy.
So let’s get let’s dig in. Let’s get started. First, I will say that we are longtime fans of doing content marketing in the pediatric space. One of our very first customers was St. Louis Children’s Hospital and we did a really phenomenal content marketing program for them where we took an old dormant blog that had been sitting unused for quite some time and repurposed it into a dynamic video based content platform.
It was a really great place for them to be able to showcase new physicians as they entered the organization to help fill their schedules, but it also allowed them to create kind of have a hub for all of their content. And then, of course, that content would be distributed out across whatever social media platform they were leveraging at the time, which, as you can imagine, [00:02:00] it’s changed a lot in eight years. Started out, we would do some Facebook lives series and then things moved over YouTube has been continuously popular throughout that time.
But we’re not going to talk necessarily about platforms today. I just want to share five specific content pillars that are really important in the pediatric space as you’re beginning to think about a content strategy. So again, as we’re thinking about the pediatric space, you aren’t necessarily talking specifically to the patient.
Sometimes you are, if it’s an older patient, but most of the time you’re going to be talking to the patient’s parent or caregiver. And so a lot of these content themes you’ll see directly are speaking and providing reassurance to that caregiver. And so that audience pivot whenever you’re working in pediatrics is really a really important thing to keep in mind.
So first pillar, we’re going to walk through five pillars. If you’re doing a content strategy, these are five pillars in pediatric content that you [00:03:00] absolutely have to include. The first understanding the diagnosis. One of the main reasons people will end up landing on your website is because they’ve Googled a really scary diagnosis they’ve recently received.
Perhaps it’s symptoms that will lead to a diagnosis, but it also may be the diagnosis itself. We have found in a lot of the work that we’ve done over the last eight years, that having a content strategy specifically focused on specific diagnoses that you are able to actually address within service lines within your organization is really important.
So, for example, having a video specifically about type 1 diabetes in pediatrics. Walking through here are the symptoms. Here’s how it’s frequently diagnosed. And then, oh, yeah, here’s how you can schedule an appointment within this team within our hospital to be able to begin working with us to have additional care or a second opinion.
If it’s early in the [00:04:00] diagnosis. So it really helps guide that parent’s fact finding journey all the way through from answering a preliminary question to allowing them to seek care. So that’s number one, understand the diagnosis. Number two, a trend that we’ve seen work really, really well is preparing for surgery.
That is a very scary thing, especially for parents that have never had to put their child under, as people say. They are very afraid about having their child leave them and go back behind with the doctors and nurses, not have their child in their sight, they don’t know what to expect the day of. So a very popular and useful YouTube or content series that you can create would actually be one that is categorically.
Preparing for surgery, and then within that actually creating a video for all of the common surgeries that you do within your organization. This video can be [00:05:00] referenced within your specific service lines on your pages within your hospital to reference what to expect before or during this kind of surgery.
It also could be shared with the by the care team to the patients at the appointment before the surgery as an asset for them to review at home to prepare to feel more comfortable for it. But we’ve seen tremendous success. And really easing parents’ concerns and giving them reassurance that they’re going to the right place with a preparing for surgery content pillar.
The third content pillar and this is one that feels so obvious, but whenever you work somewhere and you’re so familiar with the way it’s laid out, it isn’t something that always comes to mind: hospital and facilities tours. This is so popular on all of the content series we’ve produced over the years, a simple tour where you’re walking people through here’s where you park, here’s admissions, here’s [00:06:00] the hallway to the bathroom, here’s the hallway to the exam rooms.
It seems so basic, right? Always some of the most popular videos. Many times there’s a lot of anxiety around accessing care or actually physically going to a new location for parents, especially if their child isn’t in a great place health wise. And so being able to watch a video about a particular location they have not been yet and helping them understand what signage to look for and where it is and what color it is ahead of time can be really, really helpful.
So again, hospital tour and facilities tour. Super easy but very, very helpful to be able to have. One thing for this one to keep in mind is that you want to flag with your internal processes whenever you do update signage or do any sort of like opening of a new location. You’ll want to be able to produce additional content to cover that to add it to that library.
Number four is emotional support and counseling. And this is actually one that I can speak to personally. [00:07:00] My first son was born at 27 weeks. So he was very, very early. He was a whole trimester early. And we spent 77 days in the NICU. There was a wonderful support system for NICU parents. But in many pediatric hospitals have wonderful support networks and resources for parents of a variety types of situations and diagnoses.
So actually creating content around that, perhaps interviewing somebody who is very passionate about it, who’s organized the meetups or the resources and getting them to share additional information with links online can be really helpful. Often it’s very overwhelming when you’re a parent in that moment.
So for example, with the NICU support group, they met on like Thursdays at 1 PM. I was very rarely able to actually go because I was also running a business at the same time, but there was information online I was able to access that was really helpful to support me through that journey. So, think about a specific parent, specific diagnoses or [00:08:00] resources you have available.
And then think about if you’re sitting at home, scared on the couch, what kind of content can we deliver them to make them a little bit less scared in that moment. And then the fifth one, something that also is, you know, that scared parent sitting on the couch, trying to Google something at 1am figuring out, do I need to go to the emergency room right now or not is post procedure care and follow up.
So, go through and look at all of your procedures, identify and prioritize them. And then create some videos around post procedure care and follow up. What should you expect when you go home from a bone break surgery or whatever. It is clearly as specific as you can within each of your different service lines and prioritize things appropriately, but creating content to help them understand when to reach out for help and what is normal and what is to be expected.
And if they do need to reach out for help post procedure, how to do that is extremely helpful for parents to have very popular content. And then the sixth bonus content pillar. I, I only [00:09:00] said there was going to be five cause this one for me feels more like a content format versus a pillar, but we have found that interactive Q and A’s around specific service lines or areas of focus are extremely popular.
So we’ve done everything from back in the day, we’d do Facebook Live and have hundreds of people tune in, but there’s ways now that you can do it on Almost every social media platform, you can go live, promote that you’re going to go live in advance with a doctor or somebody within your organization that could speak to the particular topic that that theme is for that event.
And then say you’ll be online for 30 minutes answering questions. Of course, you always want to have prepopulated questions in case attendance is slow, but that information or that session can actually be recorded. And stored for long tail value for people to then view many, many days, months, and years after the live event itself has ended.
So hopefully if you are in peds and you’re in the middle of thinking about [00:10:00] content pillars, these five slash one bonus will help you start putting a little bit of framework around the low hanging fruit and the highest value content that you can create. We have gone through and created a content for our clients for many, many platforms, everything from static blog posts to you know, Facebook and Instagram to TikTok to YouTube, everything, the core emotions and questions that parents of pediatric patients, our experience are going to be the same, regardless of what platform you’re on.
So we really challenge you to focus and spend a lot more time on this part of the process. And then figure out your channels and promotion strategy as a second step. So as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Please follow, like, and rate this podcast. We have received so much great feedback around the content.
It’s honestly humbling how many people [00:11:00] have reached out to me to say that it sparked ideas or challenged assumptions or educated them on something technical that we feel just really lucky to be able to produce this content every single week. We’ve received lots of great user feedback. Submissions around different content ideas.
If you have something you want us to cover, shoot me an email, Jenny at headyandhop. com. I’d love to hear from you. Otherwise have a fabulous rest of your day and we’ll see you on another episode next week on We Are Marketing Happy. Cheers.
