Maximizing Your Content Strategy for Your Health IT Client: 3 Ways to Find the Right Opportunity

One of the most successful tactics for any healthcare public relations planning is media relations. Building relationships with healthcare and health tech editors not only helps you secure media opportunities with their outlets, but strengthens the interest from editors who are looking to build out a story down the line. When an editor finds value in your expertise, they will ask for insights in the form of interviews, product information or infographics, studies, speaking engagements and/or content generation for a bylined guest post article.

To help find the right bylined opportunity that is valuable to your healthcare organization and worth the time invested to build that relationship, one should do the following:

1. Invest in media monitoring tools

   One of the very first steps in finding a story to pitch is contributing to publications that are reaching the right audience for your healthcare client and that the content you want to provide is substantial and valuable for the editor you are pitching.

   The purpose of using media monitoring tools is to target, engage, measure and integrate your search in finding topic areas of interest. When searching for topics, keep in mind which keywords and dates you want your healthcare client to be affiliated with, along with where their competitors are featured.

   Lastly, unique circulation, or the number of new visitors to a publication each month, is a leading factor in whether the time spent writing a bylined article is worth the time invested. Healthcare PR professionals are trained to depict which publications have a circulation worth pursuing. If there are not many readers tuned into the publication, it’s not worth the time.

2. Be front and center to your target audience

   Once a healthcare PR professional knows which publications are worth pursuing, they must balance which approach will be most effective in reaching their target audience and where they are in the sales funnel. The end goal: How can this person buy into my client’s products or services? Are they regular readers of this publication?

   You can’t guarantee your target audience is subscribed to a publication, but you can anticipate how the material is resonating with them, such as their engagement with a call to action.

3. Quality in sharing PR successes on social media

   Editors understand that to reach and capture new audiences, they must leverage earned content, bylines, guest posts and opinions, to their social media channels. Healthcare PR professionals check the number of followers a news source has on their social channels, as this indicates how well content is performed and if followers are interested in reading future content.

   Additionally, news sources that have a good social media presence heightens the probability of more readers, since articles can be shared across the social feed.

   Do you or someone in your organization need assistance in finding the right opportunity for your PR strategy? Want to learn additional best practices for securing opportunities for your business? We’re here to help. Stay tuned for the next post in this series!