Mental health content marketing is an effective way to capture and hold your audience’s attention. Of course, with so many ways to use content, and best practices for success changing frequently, keeping up with these two goals can be a challenge! Even so, content is too powerful a tool to ignore.

Recommendations for writing a fantastic blog article aren’t the same today as five years ago. Nor are the best practices for blog writing the same as social media posts, email marketing, or white papers. And mental health content marketing doesn’t even stop there. A truly attention-grabbing strategy also needs visual elements—images, infographics, and videos.

Content marketing is only worth the effort if your content connects with your prospective patients and motivates them to explore your website and convert. Without the proper guidance, your content will be adding to the internet’s bottomless pit, and no one wants that.

How Mental Health Treatment Content Marketing Can Grab Attention

So the real question is, how can you use content marketing to hold your audience’s attention? Today we’re taking a look at four tips to create engaging, interesting content your target market will want to read and watch.

Tip #1: Create Captivating Captions

You’ve probably heard this before, but this tip is worth repeating! Your content has to be helpful while entertaining users along the way. And don’t worry, entertainment doesn’t just mean humor—although humor can be a helpful approach. You should really be aiming to captivate your audience.

Whether you’re writing captions for Instagram photos or a meta description for a website, the goal is to entice people to stay, read, or watch. Think about how you consume content. Your patients are no different. They’re looking for content that adds value to their lives and answers their questions about mental health care, specifically how your treatment center provides care. To grab your prospective patients’ attention, ensure that each piece of content you create includes these four elements:

1. Hook: Grab your reader’s attention.
2. Pain point: Identify your patients’ struggles.
3. Solution: Fix the problem.
4. Call-to-Action: Tell the reader what to do next.¹

A recent Facebook post from the Newport Institute did this very well. It reads, “People with higher levels of emotional resilience have an easier time adapting to stressful situations or crises. So for this year’s #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth we’ll be sharing tips every Monday on how to build resilience, with our #ResilienceMonday series. These are small tips that can be applied daily and can make a difference in your life. Follow us so you don’t miss them!”

This content grabbed attention with an interesting fact, identified the pain point of dealing with stress or crisis, offered helpful tips, and asked the audience to follow their progress throughout the month. Perfect!

Tip #2: Pay Attention to Metadata

This may seem a little unorthodox, because most metadata is behind the scenes, right? True. But how can you hope to grab the attention of your audience if they can’t find your content?

Therein lies the magic of metadata. These tags provide essential information to social channels, helping algorithms populate the feeds of your potential patients with information relevant to their lives. The more metadata you add to your content, the more likely qualified leads will find, and hopefully, respond.

Tip #3: Routinely Contribute Diverse Content

There are different schools of thought about how frequently you should post fresh content. Posting every day just isn’t realistic for most centers, so what’s the next best cadence? Most marketing experts agree that posting several times per week is sufficient. Though if you have the capacity to post even more, 45% of marketing managers say doing so contributes to their digital marketing success.²

But posting regularly is only half the battle. Coming up with unique, diverse content is just as important. Fortunately, mental health offers a large universe of topics to cover, and creating content that covers every aspect of mental health will take you some time.

Don’t forget to consider who will be consuming the content. Let’s say you want to create content focusing on eating disorders. Content geared toward a mother who has a child struggling with an eating disorder should be quite different from content targeted to an adult seeking treatment for themselves, right? There’s a large and varied target market for eating disorder treatment, and tailoring your content based on your ideal audience is a must-do.

Although your mental health center likely focuses on a specific demographic, your content should still be as diverse as those reading or watching. Every aspect of your mental health content marketing should reflect all the genders, races, ethnicities, and religious affiliations you serve. Be intentional about the images and videos you use to ensure your efforts are inclusive.

Tip #4: Be Part of a Community

One of the primary goals of content marketing is inspiring followers to respond to your content. This could mean they share your content with someone else, comment on a post, or pick up the phone to make an appointment.

No matter how users interact with your content, building a community is important. Content marketing is all about engagement and inclusivity. The more engaging your content, the more success you’ll have creating a supportive space for patients all along their treatment journey.

Interested in leveling up your content marketing plan but not sure how to get started? Dreamscape Marketing can help. Contact us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a discovery call and learn more about our content marketing strategies for mental health centers, as well as our full suite of behavioral health digital marketing services.

 

For a list of references, please contact us.