Storytelling for Healthcare Marketing: Why It Matters and How To Do It Well

“I could never write about healthcare. It sounds so boring,” a fellow writer friend said to me. I shrugged, mumbling something about how it’s a lot more interesting than it seems. Maybe it’s just because I’m passionate about healthcare, but there’s so much nuance to the field, patient stories to highlight, and brilliant experts to interview and quote. And part of my job as a health tech and medical writer is making what I write interesting for people like my friend. How? Storytelling.

Storytelling may sound like we’re writing a children’s book to read at a preschool story time. After all, there’s a misconception that storytelling is best kept for primary schools and novels, but the best content in any niche includes stories. In fact, storytelling for healthcare marketing specifically offers extra benefits when done in an engaging (and HIPAA-compliant) way.

What Is Storytelling for Healthcare Marketing?

Storytelling is an art and the basis for most meaningful communication. Stories allow us to explore new perspectives, learn about the world around us, and connect emotionally — that doesn’t just belong to the Jane Austens and Isabelle Allendes of the world. It can be woven into any content and fill up an entire novel or a few sentences, like the story I told at the beginning of this blog about my writer friend.

In healthcare specifically, storytelling can share a clinician’s perspective, a patient’s experience, or create metaphors and small stories to explain complex medical terms. Too often, healthcare is viewed as a topic as sterile and cold as a hospital room. Storytelling showcases the nuances, interesting findings, and life-altering treatments and habits many might glaze over otherwise.

Examples of Storytelling for Healthcare Marketing

Good storytelling makes the abstract tangible. To help illustrate what good storytelling (hopefully) looks like, here’s three examples of how I used it in recent freelance health writing commissions:

• A piece on antiperspirant for hands which started with a story about someone who couldn’t unlock their phone due to hyperhidrosis.
• This article where a surgeon walked readers through the steps of PAO surgery and recovery.
• An article on patient engagement that incorporates studies on how individual practices used their EHR to improve patient engagement rates.

The Benefits of Storytelling for Healthcare Marketing

“The most underrated benefit of good storytelling in medical marketing is its ability to humanise complex medical or health information,” says Rachel Pascal, a freelance medical writer and healthcare communication specialist, “People connect with stories, so using them to emotionally connect with people and foster trust with audiences makes sense for medical marketers.”

Empowers patients

COVID-19 is still a relatively new virus, and there’s a lot we don’t know about recovering from a severe case. Researchers in Canada interviewed six patients about their recovery story from COVID-19 cases that required hospitalization. These patients found it empowering to tell their own story, and the researchers noted these stories helped others dealing with COVID-19 hospitalizations as they navigated their own recovery.

While this is just one story of how storytelling empowers patients, it serves as a reminder that narratives, especially about patients, empower your audience to take action for their health.

Resonates emotionally with readers

Across almost every discipline, there’s evidence to suggest empathy increases when we read fictional or nonfiction stories. The same is true for healthcare. Reading about someone who has Crohn’s disease, for example, is a much more emotional experience for readers than reading that one million people in the United States have Crohn’s disease.

Can improve patient engagement

Growing up, I was a runner (a slow one, but a runner nonetheless). After not running for years, I signed up for a marathon. Watching other people’s runs on TikTok and hearing their experiences helped me complete my marathon training plan and get to the start line.

Stories can similarly motivate patients to engage with their healthcare. And there’s research to back that up — research that’s a bit more credible than my TikTok/running story, I promise.

A 2022 study, for example, demonstrated how storytelling improves patient engagement. In it, the researchers conducted a six-week study where 30 African American adults with hypertension watched videos of ten storytellers explaining their experience with hypertension. The results? When engaging and accessible, stories motivated the participants to take preventative measures to lower blood pressure.

Delivers patient education in a relatable way

Medical writing shouldn’t just convince someone to make an appointment with your team or buy a healthcare product. No matter your company’s business goals, you also want any communication to double as patient education.

But talking about complex medical topics can sometimes be off-putting for the everyday reader, which is where storytelling comes in. By telling a story, your content can better relate to readers.

There are two storytelling methods that are particularly beneficial for this goal:

• Create a story or metaphor around a certain health topic from the writer’s POV, such as this piece where I compare living with someone who is having a bad day to the gut-brain connection.
• Tell a patient’s story, such as when Pascal worked on a series of case studies for teenagers being recruited into a depression trial, using teenagers’ stories to help make them more relatable.

Helps the entire healthcare community

We’ve talked a lot about how storytelling benefits patients, but it also benefits practitioners too. Too often, practitioners aren’t fully aware of patients’ top concerns. A recent study in Open Rheumatology asked clinicians and patients with psoriatic arthritis to explain their top concerns related to the condition and comorbidities. They also asked patients to share their individual stories, as an FYI.

While the two groups both listed a few common concerns, some main ones from patients weren’t mentioned by the clinicians. Through reading patient stories, clinicians can better understand their practice and more effectively deliver patient-centered healthcare.

Works well for SEO

Let’s take off our healthcare hat for a moment and jump over to the world of marketing. On both social media and in search, stories perform well. In the AI era, anyone can whip up a piece with tried-and-true health advice and possibly the latest research studies. But few take the time to tell stories, or interview patients and subject-matter experts to add unique perspectives. One-of-a-kind content is a recent “SEO strategy” that Google is prioritizing, and one that will keep visitors reading your content once they arrive.

Are You Ready to Tell a Story?

Move over Fourth Wing and Harry Potter. Storytelling has a place in healthcare too. Some of the most impactful pieces I’ve worked on include storytelling-centered strategies, and I’d love to see more healthcare companies take this approach.