Share your research findings to reach more users

Rosemary says: “Healthcare brands can use AI and SEO to reach more patients using research papers.”

How can you use research papers to reach more users, and why is this particularly beneficial for healthcare brands?

“First of all, I'm a healthcare professional. I'm a pharmacist, and I also happen to be in SEO. I've been on both sides, from the healthcare perspective and from the SEO perspective.

From my experience, research papers are always published in academic journals, and that's it. That content is not always repurposed. I used to make that mistake, but over time I realised that this can be a real content engine.

Healthcare brands often invest heavily in research. There's always research work being done. There's always a new innovation or investigation. Sometimes, that research can be beneficial to patients, but they aren’t reading academic journals. Most of the time, patients will just Google their symptoms.

If you are not putting that research work where your patients are, you are losing money, and patients are not getting the right information from an authoritative source.

Besides healthcare brands, this is also relevant for any business that heavily invests in research work. You can take advantage of this if you do any form of research and produce data and statistics to back up the claims that you are making. Instead of leaving it in Google Scholar, you can also repurpose that into long-form content and redistribute it across different platforms like social media, YouTube, etc.

It's relevant to any businesses that carry out research, not just healthcare brands.”

What different formats can you use to present research paper findings, and how do you use AI to assist with that?

“Let me start by defining what a research paper is, and I'm talking from the clinical point of view. A research paper is typically a document that describes an experiment that has been done or an investigation into a specific topic. It usually contains a title, an abstract, a method, a discussion, and a conclusion.

The title is the title of the work. The abstract is a brief summary. The method is the procedure you used to carry out that work. Then, the discussion describes and relates your findings from the results. That’s what a research paper is, and how it ideally looks.

The next thing I usually do is go and search for research work that is relevant to my brand. If you are working with an organisation that already invests in research work, you just need to filter through that. If you don't, you have to go to a journal site that already has research work, like PubMed. Input a keyword there, which has to be related to your organisation's goals.

For example, imagine that you are a supplement company and you sell a vitamin D supplement. You would then input your pain points into PubMed by searching for keywords like ‘vitamin D deficiency’. Then, filter that for research that has been published in the last five years, because you want your work to feel relevant and new. Once you have that, you can read through the results.

Sometimes it can contain a lot of jargon, and that's where AI comes in. You can take a relevant piece of content and ask AI to break it down in a way that a layman can understand, and AI does a good job of that.

When you understand the research and you understand the results, you can then ask AI to give you blog post ideas. You can also take it further by going to tools like Semrush to fan out a query format that will address the pain points of your readers at every point in their journey. That will give you a holistic point of view.

Then, you can write the content on that topic. You can use AI to create a content brief, but you have to write the content yourself. Usually, it's long form, maybe 2,000-3,000 words. It's about being as brief as possible, attaching the headings, and keeping it very succinct.

After that, you can take that work and, for redistribution, you can ask AI to create a YouTube script, a social media caption – everywhere your users are. If your readers tend to engage on forums, you can also tell it to create a summary that can be posted in forums. You can take that one piece of work and then publish it across different channels.”

Can you not train an AI on your tone of voice, and then get it to produce content based on the research paper that you have?

“You can train AI on what your brand represents with a custom GPT by giving it your brand tone, your brand voice, etc., and repeating the process over and over again.

However, over time, AI forgets. If you have a custom GPT and you keep using it, over time, it manipulates figures and it manipulates facts.

Because it's a health niche, it's Your Money or Your Life. It's better to handwrite it, but it makes it a lot faster when you already have the research work to base the content on. It doesn’t take a long time, which it would if you didn’t have that research to begin with.”

How can you use AI to harness the power of FAQs?

“In the healthcare industry, the FAQs of a clinic are typically based on the observations of healthcare professionals and not from the patient. If a health organisation wants to utilise FAQs from patients, they have to ask for permission to do so, due to HIPAA laws. If they don’t do that, then the questions will be about what a healthcare professional or the team has observed over time.

For example, in one organisation that I worked for, we observed that a specific brand of over-the-counter flu medication was being used as a contraceptive. People thought it was a contraceptive. We had to check whether that was true, and fortunately, there was already research on it.

We looked online, found the research, and used that to create blog content explaining that this medication was not an effective form of contraception.

If you want to use questions from a patient, you have to get their approval. You have to tell them that you’re going to use those questions that they have provided, and ask them for permission to do so.

However, if it's just based on observations from the healthcare team, then you are free to create content around that, so you just get those questions that way. You can then input those into LLMs to fan out a blog cluster.”

How can you use AI to create content from presentations and case studies?

“Where a case study comes in is when there is a rare occasion, like a rare condition that all healthcare professionals have studied in school, and all of a sudden, you see one of those cases. In that scenario, you first talk to the patient and ask them for permission to talk about it.

Most of the time, they are happy for you to talk about it because they are fine and well. Obviously, you don’t include the person’s name or any identifying details. You would essentially be saying, ‘A patient came to us with this condition, and this is how our team handled it.’

The best way to get that permission is by asking your patients to give a review or a testimonial, and directly asking them to give permission, if you want to feature that on your blog. Then, if they have given that permission, you can add that review/testimonial to your blog post to increase the EEAT signals there.”

How can you use AI to convert long-form blog content into different formats, and where is it most effective to publish that content at the moment?

“First, you simply want to copy the content into an LLM and say, ‘I want to post this on LinkedIn or TikTok. Can you create a social media post that is conversational?’ You also need to make sure it is based on your brand tone, so you would include your brand tone to make it sound human. It will usually be able to produce good content, although you will sometimes need to rewrite it to make it better.

As for channels that tend to be more engaging, that is usually Facebook, TikTok, and sometimes LinkedIn. However, each of these channels has a unique way of presenting content. LinkedIn will come from a professional angle. Facebook will come from another angle. LLM does a very good job at fine-tuning your content based on the different social media platforms.

For Instagram, you would be creating more video content and pictures, and LinkedIn might just need text or maybe a carousel that just gives a brief overview of the topic. For YouTube, you will have to shoot a video, so you can use AI to create a script. You can also create webinar topics and invites for those, or you can also repurpose that into a newsletter that you send to your patients.

Every time, you have to include your brand tone so that the content it produces is aligned with your organisation. What AI does is just speed up the process and make it less of a hassle.”

Are you finding that video content resonates well and gets high engagement at the moment?

“Yes. I also use video content, and webinars are an important part of that. If you’re having a webinar where you’re talking about a specific topic or demystifying a myth, you can record those sessions and put them on YouTube: ‘Here is our session on X subject. We educated on X, Y, and Z.’

Sometimes it can just be a normal tutorial on YouTube. It changes over time, and it depends on what the best research work is at that moment.”

Rosemary, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Healthcare brands should not leave their research work in academic journals or keep it stored away somewhere.

Repurpose that content and spread it across different channels – on forums, YouTube, LinkedIn, everywhere – to reach more patients.”

Rosemary Osuoha is an SEO Specialist for healthcare brands. Find out more over at MeandYouPharma.com.