A healthcare press release can be a powerful tool for healthcare practitioners. However, with the current state of most healthcare centers, you might feel that a press release is an unnecessary step in your PR campaigns. In reality, a healthcare press release might be exactly what you need to inspire trust in your services. Remember, the healthcare media professionals who you send your press release to are the same people who publish lists filled with recommendations on the best healthcare services for patients. Too often, the healthcare sector relies on uninspiring marketing content that evokes no response from the target audience.
In our efforts to portray our services as the best, we tend to forget about our target audience. The worst part is that this is happening in the age of the internet and in the wake of a technology boom. The most successful brands in this era are those that can use their content creatively. And the health sector is not exempt to this trend.
If you’re a healthcare practitioner who wants to inspire your audience with informative content, read on. The following guide highlights how to write an engaging healthcare press release in 2023:
What to include
Press releases remain a vital tool when it comes to marketing your business, even in this era of social media. What might have changed slightly is the target audience for your release. Traditionally, businesses would leverage press releases to capture media attention. Today, it targets more audiences, including unconventional opinion leaders who influence the public. With your press release, you can capture the attention of media powerhouses, bloggers, interested partners, and thought leaders. You need to convince all these parties that you’re a credible professional in the industry. As such, your press release should still satisfy the following requirements:
- Be concise
- Follow the typical format
- Include quotes
- Have a strong lede
- Allow easy contact
To get all of this right, you should be open to consulting a PR professional with knowledge and experience in your field. They can help you generate the target results faster and more efficiently than you would while relying on your skills.
The best PR professionals, such as those at Pressfarm, will go beyond writing your press release to identify the best places to publish your press release. Using a targeted media outreach strategy, they will then pitch the news from your healthcare facility to these outlets. They will then make sure your press release is published on platforms that will increase your visibility.
The expert writers and certified designers at Pressfarm can also write guest posts and design a media kit for you. With this content, you can boost your media coverage even further. Finally, the account executive at Pressfarm builds a custom media list to help you connect with respected journalists across different media outlets. By connecting with these media contacts, you can keep doing extended media outreach long after the team at Pressfarm has wrapped up your PR campaign.
While the healthcare industry is advancing at a dizzying pace, most of the media in this sector is still traditional, and that includes social media. They all rely on typical rules of operation. This makes partnering with experts who have insider knowledge and connections crucial.
What to let go of
When you carefully examine several press releases for healthcare facilities, you’ll begin to notice a trend. You’ll realize that most of them leverage an ineffective and blunt announcement strategy. For this reason, we thought it might be helpful to point out a few mistakes that you should avoid making in your own press release. These are common mistakes that we often commit unknowingly:
1) The egocentric headline
In an era where the headline plays a critical role in capturing the audience’s attention, every word counts. After all, your headline determines whether your audience will continue reading the rest of your content or not. Your headline also affects your SEO, so it’s important to learn how to use keywords effectively in the headline.
While experts will urge you to include your company name in a standard press release, please don’t do this for a healthcare press release. This is simply because patients and other medical experts care more about the credibility of the new service you’ve unveiled or the new equipment you’re using. Let’s look at two headlines to illustrate this:
- Medly Clinic Releases their EHR API
- Mid-size health vendor releases their EHR API
Most people looking for an EHR API are more likely to click on the second headline, simply because it offers more details about the origin of the API.
Don’t focus so much on your company and forget about the newsworthy aspects of your press release. It’s important to capture the audience’s attention first. Thereafter, you will have ample opportunity to mention your organization.
There’s only one exception to this approach. If your brand is recognizable and has authority, then including the name in the headline can urge readers to click and read more.
2) The egotistic introduction
Writing a striking headline that captures the audience’s attention is not enough in this field. You still need your audience to read your entire release. Do not jeopardize your chances of engaging them by writing an egotistic introduction. Filling the entire introduction with details about your organization will turn your readers off. Instead, you should focus on the newsworthy aspects of your announcement.
Remember that you’re in the business of treating sick people and they want to know that they can trust you above anything else. They care more about the treatment that they will receive than they do about your name. As we said before, unless you run a well-known healthcare facility, you should refrain from name-dropping too much or stuffing your introduction with adulations for your facility.
Rather than boasting about how great you are, you should answer the 5W (what, who, when, where, and why) questions. Providing these details should engage the audience and increase the time they spend on your press release. Remember the introduction of the press release is a valuable opportunity to capture and retain your reader’s attention. You should not waste this space on the history of your organization. Unless of course, it relates to the main objective of the release.
3) Stick to facts alone
We’re not saying that including technical details, scientific information, and statistics in your press release is wrong. In fact, you need these elements to boost your credibility. However, you can’t write an entire press release based on fact alone. The healthcare sector is one where compassion counts. In fact, a little compassion can go a long way. Think about this for a moment. Would you prefer a doctor who stuck to the facts alone or one who shared the facts with you and found a way to soothe your anxiety and connect with you on a human level?
You need to find a professional way to express some compassion in your press release.This is where having a professional press release writer comes in handy. They know how to balance content and style. They will know where to insert the well-timed quote to connect with readers on an emotional level. A skilled press release writer will also find connections between your press release announcement and a trending ethical issue. By leveraging all these tactics, they can make your press release more relatable.
4) Not leveraging other connections
There’s no concrete reason why your press release shouldn’t link to other content that you’ve developed. Therefore, after creating your release, you can link it to the landing page of your website where there is a description of your services or products. Furthermore, you can share links to your general website, technical documents, scientific studies, and quotes.
By telling your readers where they can go to learn more about you, you can increase the level of interest in your services.
5) Disregarding multimedia
Including visual content can make your release look more striking and readable. This includes elements like slide decks, graphs, and charts. However, keep in mind that many media outlets will only accept one image per press release. If this is the case with the media outlets you’re working with, then you can share links to this content on your press release. Keep in mind that sharing irrelevant content will only hurt your credibility. For this reason, you should only share content that adds value to your press release.
Conclusion
Now that you have all the critical details that you need to write a healthcare press release, you should go ahead and start working on this. To get a glimpse of what readers, investors, and journalists need in a press release, you can read the current press releases in your industry, especially those that rank well on Google. Identify those that capture your attention and use them as references.