By Bryant Brown

A blog can be an effective tool in healthcare advertising to help position your brand as a leader and offer your target audiences information that shapes their decision-making. So you’re marketing a pharmaceutical or biotechnology product, medical device, hospital, or other medical product or service. What are the 5 best ways to use blogging? And how should you proceed?

1. Show you know.
Share knowledge of interest about your brand and market. And make your brand look more modern in the process. Providing information of benefit to your audiences enhances perception of the value of your brand. Doing it with a blog enhances perception of your brand as being technologically up to date.

2. Strengthen your brand identity.
Blogs are now a critical part of the media mix to keep your brand top of mind. If you have a website but no blog, you’re likely not making the most of your branding opportunities.

3. Drive traffic to your website.
A good blog draws links and drives traffic to your site. That increases your exposure to customers and prospects, as well as your ranking results among search engines.

4. Learn what your audience thinks.
A blog provides an excellent forum for feedback. Use it to gauge reaction to your branding instantly, and make changes promptly. Plus, with sites like Technorati, you can see who’s saying what about your brand elsewhere in the blogosphere. There are, however, important considerations about providing a forum for feedback-considerations unique to healthcare marketing. In essence, if you are a medical product or service provider and you establish a forum for dialogue-whether the forum is branded or unbranded-you are responsible for its content. That means you are responsible for its accuracy and, in the case of pharmaceutical products, for the inclusion of fair balance statements. You must not run the risk of promoting indications off label, making unsubstantiated claims, or failing to balance claims of benefits with complete safety information. The FDA has committed to issuing clear direction on the use of social media in promoting regulated products and services. Until then, proceed with caution and remember that you can always control the messages you distribute…but once you invite “outside” contributions, you lose control. Even healthcare professionals or consumers with the best intentions and the most positive perceptions of your brand can inadvertently make off-label claims that violate FDA regulations.

5. Create a closer connection with your customers.
Customers want to connect in a more personal way. Blogs enable you to “humanize” your brand and engage customers in a conversation. That makes your brand more transparent, more communicative, more responsive…and more appealing. Just remember: A conversation involves two or more parties. You can control only what you say, but not what others say, about your brand.

How to think of topics for your blog

How do you keep coming up with something new to say? That’s the most common question that people ask about blogging. The first challenge in the blogosphere is to carve out a unique position. The second is to sustain your blog over time. A blog without updates, or without updates that offer substance and value, is a blog without an audience. So how do you ensure longevity?

Create an “editorial calendar”
An editorial calendar outlines a synopsis and schedule of specific topics that each installment of a blog will cover.

Have a clear agenda
As with all aspects of a good blog, an editorial calendar demonstrates an agenda-in every sense of the word. It shows that the blog has a point of view…clear, prioritized key messages…and a logical, realistic timeline for communicating them to the target audiences. Example: If your blog is about your product, your audience will seek information on its features and benefits elsewhere; use your blog to talk about the unmet need the product was designed to solve…the unseen genius of its design…the people who designed it…success stories of people using it…other unmet needs you’re addressing…questions from customers…and more.

Support the strategic and tactical plan
It’s important to sync the editorial calendar with other activities. A blog is one tactic among many communication vehicles. Each should stand strong on its individual merits. But the real power of your plan comes from the synergy of multiple tactics working in concert. One plus one can equal three. If your blog is about your brand, make sure your blog is on message and also on schedule with the rest of your strategy and tactics-your sales cycle, conference exhibits, advertising, and PR.

Stay flexible
Use the editorial calendar as a helpful outline. Follow it as closely as possible, but never let it constrict. Leave yourself room to be spontaneous and address truly topical issues. Is there an issue that you feel passionate about but isn’t on the editorial calendar? Go for it anyway. That’s what blogs are for.

Sustaining a blog takes diligence. Many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, medical device companies, and hospitals want to engage in blogging but don’t have the time and people required. That’s why they often partner with a healthcare advertising agency.

Most medical marketers find that a good healthcare advertising agency, one with both medical marketing expertise and new media expertise, can help make blogging an important part of branding efforts. Be sure to contact bryantBROWN Healthcare. Visit bryantBROWN.com or call (310) 406-2460, x101.

Bryant Brown provides complete healthcare advertising and medical marketing services: strategic and tactical planning, copywriting, design, programming, and print production. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, medical device manufacturers, hospitals, and other organizations “everywhere in healthcare” rely on Bryant Brown for creative solutions to the most demanding challenges. Visit Bryant Brown at: http://www.bryantbrown.com/bbhomepage.php

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