Healthcare Media Buyer Best Practices: Do You Have Enough Content?

Falling behind on industry development and marketing strategies can leave you in a cloud of dust, wondering where all your leads ran off to. You can hemorrhage time trying to catch up; the opportunity cost is abysmally large. That's why it's critical you stay up to date on benchmarks for content creation. A lack of content means you are missing out on opportunities to educate, nurture, convert and close more business.

Here, we've outlined a point-by-point content breakdown to verify what you need to create and consider in order to get the most out of your healthcare content strategy. Following these tips will enable you to connect with personas, close more deals and stay up to date within your market.

Content Audit

Gaining an independent perspective is paramount if you are trying to revamp your healthcare content strategy. A content audit with the help of an independent, expert eye will offer you greater insights into:

• How your content is currently working
• Where content gaps exist
• What content you should be creating to reach your personas
• Where you should be promoting that content

A third-party perspective is crucial for a content audit to create maximum impact. Often, teams are too close to their own projects to effectively analyze where there are faults, shortcomings, or even positive opportunities to address. An expert eye will share fresh perspectives, identify angles or assets worth investing in, and bring new content formats to the table for you to consider and choose from.

From an expert content consulting perspective: Consultants are most often surprised at what media buyers could be doing that they aren't.

Content Need vs. Content Feed

When you're considering if your healthcare content strategy is up to the industry standard, remember that each persona interacting with your content has both content needs and content feeds.

• Content need: Something a persona needs in order to make a buying decision.
• Content feed: Content that a persona needs to share with another persona in order to facilitate a buying decision.

The distinction between the two purposes of content are important for both content development and analytical purposes. As far as content development is concerned, there are opportunities to create multiple forms of content around a specific topic for different personas. This is crucial within the healthcare IT space because of the range in role of decision makers. From role to role, you'll find different people who need their individual questions answered in terms that matter and make sense to them. For example, content that is made for the CIO to understand will be fundamentally different than content made for the CFO to understand. They have different concerns and levels of involvement with the technology itself. A CIO's content need would include technical descriptions of functionality, while their content feed would be a breakdown of the financial implications and possible outcomes based on previous technology implementation or use cases. They could offer that to the CFO or another high-level decision maker.

From an analytical perspective, creating these different forms of content can provide illuminating insights that would otherwise not exist. Imagine, for example, you notice a CIO has downloaded content that was specifically created for CFO personas in mind. If you've differentiated the content enough, then it is unlikely the CIO is downloading that piece of content for their own education — the information they are concerned about is too high-level or off topic. You can take this behavior as a signal that this CIO is feeding that content to their CFO to gain buy in. You'll then know that internal communication is occurring within an organization, and can consider the lead credible and heating up!

Custom Content — But Don't Break the Bank

Organizations often have a similar thought when it comes to all of this content development — that sounds expensive.

But not creating quality content that speaks to each of your personas throughout their buying process is expensive. It's an opportunity cost. However, there are ways of revamping your strategy and getting more out of your content without breaking the bank. Instead of creating 20 different pieces of content that approach the same topic from different angles, consider creating one piece of content with 20 different paragraphs. This can be effective if it is titled correctly. You could also consider the use of custom content. Serve up a piece of content that has been specified for a certain job role based on an altered title, etc. The core 80% of the piece will focus on the general market importance, while the other 20% will focus on the specifics of what that means for each unique persona. There are ways to create content tailored for engagement without spending a fortune.

Think of the margarita menu at your favorite Mexican cuisine restaurant. There's the classic option made with three simple — but strong — ingredients. The list usually goes on to include all possible variations of the drink: grapefruit, mango, frozen, or spicy changes to the recipe. The same core ingredients remain, but the different spins will tailor to each customer's unique taste buds. However, the bartender can still produce each option easily at scale, only needing a few additional ingredients to satisfy a table of eight, all with different tastes.

These healthcare content strategy staples will provide your marketing efforts with more weight and reach. Analyzing where your content stands now — with an independent perspective — will provide clear direction about where it is valuable for you to focus your efforts. Bear in mind the diversity and custom content that will provide your audience with the information they need to inform their own buying decisions and the information they'll need to influence other decision makers within their organization.

For additional help in enhancing your content marketing strategy, contact us here.