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Are you stuck for pharmacy blog post ideas?

Blogs are central to promoting your pharmacy business online. After all, business websites that include a blog have a 434% better chance of ranking highly on search engines like Google.

But if your pharmacy blog only has one entry – “Welcome to our blog”  – you risk losing credibility and it may even harm your Google ranking.

Coming up with healthcare blog ideas is a chore and if you’re a pharmacy owner, you probably don’t have time for writing content.

But consider these statistics on why you need to commit time and resources to your blog:

  • 66% of marketers also use their blog content for their social media posts
  • 81% of people consider blogs to be trusted sources of information
  • 94% of people will share a blog if they think the content is helpful.

Trusted and helpful? That sounds exactly like a community pharmacy.

Getting started, or revitalising an existing blog is a lot easier with these fourteen pharmacy blog post ideas that will last forever:

The 14 Pharmacy Blog Post Ideas which last forever

1. Tips for staying healthy

Get straight down to business and offer some advice on staying healthy. Ideas on maintaining a healthy lifestyle are great, but avoid getting preachy. Other topics could be how to reduce IBS symptoms, common allergy triggers, or avoiding flu this winter (don’t forget to link to your flu jab service).

2. Think seasonal

New Year is weight-loss and quitting smoking, spring is getting travel vaccines for summer holidays. Summer is allergies and sun protection.  Winter is avoiding colds and looking after our elderly.

3. Frequently asked questions

What are those questions you get asked time and time again? Answer them in a blog post!

4. Frequently un-asked questions

What are the questions your customers may be too embarrassed to ask? Such as how do you use a suppository. Answer these in a blog post too.

5. Instructional Vlogs

Take a tour of your pharmacy including your consultation rooms; show where to find the sunscreen or painkillers or demonstrate how to properly use an inhaler. Vlogs can be found on YouTube just as easily (if not more easily) than articles on Google. Because Google owns YouTube, you can often find videos in the results for a search when it’s appropriate. There is a big gap in the market for How-To videos for healthcare, which pharmacists could fill easily and get their pharmacy and products in the spotlight as a result.

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6. Pharmacy vs GP

As the pharmacist’s role in the community continues to evolve, patients’ awareness of accessing healthcare can be left behind. So let your customers know when they should visit their GP, a Private Specialist even, and when they can come to you instead.

7. A day in the life

Go through a typical shift for different roles within your pharmacy team. How does an early shift compare to an evening or weekend shift?

8. New Services

Offering a new service to patients? How else are they supposed to find out more about it? Write details of the service, why it’s beneficial, and how patients can use it.

9. Customer success stories

Tell the story of a recently treated patient (anonymously, of course.) This could be how you were able to source an out-of-stock medicine or spotting a serious symptom and referring to a hospital.

10. Spotting the signs of…

… someone having a stroke, sepsis, or bad reactions to new medicines.

11. Discuss something controversial

Maybe there is a new wonder drug available or what about the use of medical cannabis? Talk about it, however, remember to present a balanced view.

12. Charity work

Writing about the charity work you do is a great way to show your customers what a friendly and helpful community pharmacy you are. Not only that, but if you let the charity know you’re writing a blog about them, they’ll almost certainly share it with their audience.

13. Staff profiles

You can keep it strictly professional and talk about training, qualifications and career motivation. Or keep it fun with favourite ice cream flavours or whether they prefer cats or dogs.

Include a decent photo too as that will add to the friendliness of your pharmacy team.

14. Myth-busting posts

Quick advice posts that dispel mistakes people often make. For example, “What NOT to do if you burn yourself”, “What to do if you forget to take your prescription” etc.

These catchy titles draw people into your post, and your article can get stuck into the advice.

Your pharmacy blog post ideas need to offer helpful content

Remember what you are trying to achieve with your pharmacy blog post ideas. It’s more than selling services. It’s about building the reputation of being professional, helpful and friendly.

By demonstrating how knowledgeable and helpful you are, you are more likely to:

  • Get social media shares
  • Gain links from other websites
  • Turn web traffic into pharmacy customers

Interested in learning more about how Pharmacy Mentor can help with your digital marketing including blog posts? Contact us here.

Marketing statistics source https://expresswriters.com/blogging-statistics/

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Changing the Landscape of Google and Healthcare

I firmly believe that if Community Pharmacies become more proactive online, we’d cause a shift in healthcare. We could change the behaviour of potential consumers which would then lead to the use of more pharmacy services. We live in a digital world where more and more people look for information online before conducting their activities. Imagine if a person searched for a term on Google and the first thing that popped up was linked to your Pharmacy…we may just be able to influence that person’s decision to use our services. I believe one way in which we could achieve this is through blogging.

A powerful form of Content Marketing

Blogging is a powerful form of content marketing that anybody can do, but there seems to be a huge deficiency in its application in Community Pharmacy. Time and time again have I come across a pharmacy website that has a blog or news section on there that looks like the image below.

 

An empty blog on a pharmacy website

 

It’s a real shame because 1) It looks unprofessional, and 2) It’s a place where you may be able to impact the people in your catchment area, improving their access to healthcare, while winning more business in the process. Let me explain how.

Independents currently don’t exist on Google

Let’s say you’re an Independent Community Pharmacy in Southampton that offers a flu vaccination service. If a consumer would like to get a flu vaccine, they may well log onto Google and type in the search term “flu vaccination Southampton” or “flu jab Southampton”. As it stands, both of these search terms result in a variety of options for the consumer, but I don’t see a single Independent Contractor for at least the first 4 pages. And we all know that it’s extremely rare that anyone visits even the 2nd page of Google. Even though most Independent Pharmacies now offer a flu vaccination service, to that consumer, we simply do not exist.

 

Currently, Independents don’t exist for search terms specific to their pharmacy business

 

The story could be different through Blogging

However, if you created a solid blog post that was optimised specifically for those keywords and which led to your services, the story could be different. Having a look at the content that currently exists out there, I believe it to be highly probable that an Independent could position themselves somewhere close to the top of the rankings, increasing the likeliness of consumers using their flu jab service.

This is exactly what I’ve started doing with one of the chemist’s I’m working with. Like most pharmacies, they offer an emergency contraceptive service and so a few weeks ago I began experimenting with some keywords on Google to see what kind of landscape I was dealing with. I found that a search term that people are looking for on Google is “morning after pill Sheffield”. At that time, as I expected, there was not a single service or article that directly led the consumer to an Independent Community Pharmacy for at least the first 3 pages. All I could see on there were surgeries, hospitals and of course some paid google ads from the big corps, Boots and Lloyds.

So, what did I do? I created a simple blog post on the topic of Emergency contraception, focusing on the keywords “morning after pill Sheffield”. Right now, only three weeks down the line, this blog post sits on the first page of Google at position 3 and as I continue to promote the post across their social platforms every now and then, it’s quite likely that it will top Google for that search term. Hopefully, this blog post may just influence more consumers to go and see a pharmacist to get the morning after pill.

 

In less than 3 weeks, this simple yet optimised blog post has reached position 3 on Google

One blog post a month, per pharmacy

Can you imagine if every single independent contractor started blogging for search terms associated with their business in their locality? We’d end up dominating the Google rankings and that really is no exaggeration. I’ve just shown you how easy it can be done. All it would take is one optimised blog post a month, per pharmacy, and we might be able to direct 100’s, if not 1000’s more people towards pharmacy services.

More examples of blog articles I’ve created for Independents that have reached Page 1 on Google, significantly improved the visibility of their service and are generating leads are:

If you want to start blogging or you’d like me to take a look at the blog post you’ve already created to see how it might be improved, then please get in touch and I’ll help you. Together, we can make Community Pharmacy stronger.

Thanks for visiting and see you in the next learning module!

Saam