Second in an occasional series
Content marketing is a great fit for businesses like home care. And based on my research for this post, many home care providers know it.
Nearly every home care provider website I found had a blog — and most had active, informative blogs. I wasn’t surprised. I assume their ideal customers are adults with older parents. That’s a group that performs a lot of research before choosing health care options. After all, these are big decisions concerning Mom or Dad.
In my research, I found two blog posts that provide useful examples for the “What Good Content Marketing Looks Like” series. The posts have something in common, too — they both demonstrate the importance of picking a good topic.
I’ll dig into these posts in one moment. But first, some background: This is the latest installment in a series. The series focuses on a different industry or niche each time — in the last post, it was business and executive coaching. I’m not sure which industry I will address next, so if you have a suggestion or request, leave it in the comments.
Here we go …
Example 1: Video Gaming as a Non-Pharmacological Intervention for Parkinson’s, MS, and COVID
Source: SeniorBridge
What This Post Does Well
It has focused on a topic that seems sure to connect with SeniorBridge’s desired audience.
Home health care services like SeniorBridge want to reach middle-aged adults with elderly parents who might need home health care soon. Those middle-aged adults are from the generation that grew up playing Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Zelda. They are likely to be excited by the idea that they can help their parents by getting them to play video games.
So a well-researched post that explains how experts believe that video games can help seniors deal with Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis and COVID-19 is a brilliant idea.
How This Post Could Be Improved
I would make changes at the very top and bottom of this post.
First the headline: “Video Gaming as a Non-Pharmacological Intervention for Parkinson’s, MS, and COVID.”
Sadly, thanks to the pandemic, a lot of us recognize the term “non-pharmacological intervention” (or “non-pharmaceutical intervention”) and its acronym, NPI.
But it’s not a great term to use in a headline if you’re trying to get consumers to read your post, or Google to surface it in search.
I would suggest something simpler, like “How Video Games Can Help Aging Parents Deal With Parkinson’s, MS and COVID.”
An added benefit of this simpler alternative: It gets the words “aging parents” into the headline, making it clear exactly who the post is about.
The post concludes with a subheading and two bullet points explaining SeniorBridge’s “integrated care practice model.” It’s not clear to the average reader how that relates to the blog post on video games; I would worry that this section will cause some visitors to stop reading at this point.
And that’s important, because the post concludes with a call to action (or CTA): “For more information on home care for Parkinson’s disease, MS, ALS, and other neurological diseases, contact SeniorBridge.”
I highly recommend ending with a call to action. But the text above the CTA could be undermining the CTA. Additionally, the CTA does not include a link that would make it easy for readers to contact SeniorBridge — also reducing effectiveness.
Example 2: How Home Care Helps after a Total Hip and Total Knee Replacements
Source: Attentive Home Care
What This Post Does Well
Attentive Home Care has chosen a topic with significant appeal to qualified prospects in the consideration stage.
When a prospect is in the consideration stage, they are checking out their options. Good content for these users helps them identify the option that best suits their needs.
It makes sense that a segment of adults whose parents are facing knee or hip surgery — or who are facing it themselves — would be online researching post-operative care. It’s a significant procedure with lengthy recovery time, and it’s planned well ahead of time.
The people who find this post during their research learn three benefits that home care provides after a knee or hip replacement. What’s more, the post explains that home care not only makes life easier for the patient, it also reduces the chance the patient will need to be readmitted to the hospital. That’s not a small benefit.
How This Post Could Be Improved
The most important part of this blog post — the ways home care helps after knee and hip replacements — is buried in the second half of the piece.
Instead of leading with the benefits of home care, this post begins with a definition of home care, and then compares it to home health. Readers who came to learn how home care helps knee and hip replacement patients will wonder where the information they were promised is. They may just give up and look elsewhere.
In any medium, you only have a few seconds to grab the audience’s attention and convince them the rest of the content will be worth their time. So start strong, and start on point.
Also …
There’s a chance that this could be two posts: “How Home Care Helps after a Total Hip Replacement” and “How Home Care Helps after a Total Knee Replacement.”
If there are notable differences between the help home care provides after these two surgeries, I’d suggest writing one post for hips, another for knees.
Why? There’s search-engine optimization (SEO) value in being laser-focused, and that focus also signals to the reader, “This post is definitely for you.” (If your father is getting a knee replacement, you probably don’t care how home care helps hip replacement patients.)
And, to be practical, ideas aren’t always easy to come by. Why use up two in one blog post, when you can publish one now and save another for later, when you might be struggling to come up with a new idea?
(And finally, if you’re curious, I checked Google Trends, and the search terms “hip replacement” and “knee replacement” attract very similar amounts of traffic from U.S. searchers. “Knee replacement” is about 4% more popular, Google says.)