How Media Buyers Can Create Higher Content Standards for Effective Health IT Marketing

From a media buying perspective, it's likely that you're often dealing with content as if it were a commodity. It's simply another resource to acquire to fuel more marketing efforts for your organization or an organization you represent.

This dynamic can be perfectly fine, however, it's really only perfectly suited for maintaining the status quo. If you want to be seen as more than a broker of content, and you want to be valued by your organization or your clients as a strategic partner, you need to learn to elevate conversations around content.

This is especially critical in the healthcare IT space, as effective health IT content needs to adequately answer health IT questions, or speak to meaningful health IT issues.

Be Proactive

If the bulk of your current content production comes out of RFPs, you're probably missing out on the opportunity to creatively align content creation to organizational needs. Often, content strategy can take a back seat to seemingly more pressing marketing matters. A reactive approach to generating and publishing content will offer you bare results in a field where opportunity is fruitful for those willing to invest the time and resources into regularly producing quality content and publishing it in the right spaces. This, however, can be difficult to do without the right resources, information and connections. If you do need help, you'll want Healthcare IT content experts who can act as an extension of your team, adding to your content's value by including subject matter expert input and promoting your piece across the right channels and accompanied by trusted media outlets and companies.

Ask More of Content Marketing Than Your Competitors

Content marketing is ubiquitous across modern marketing efforts. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), places overall business-to-business (B2B) adoption of content marketing in 2018 at 91%. Having content, at this point, is as foundational in an organization's marketing efforts as having a car for a drag race. To compete in such a crowded space, content needs to have something special under the hood.

In the healthcare information and technology space, buyers are often highly trained experts in their fields. To ensure a content purchase isn't just a shot in the dark, you need to expect that content can measurably deliver the answers or insights health IT professionals are looking for.

A few key questions to ask:

• Will this help them do their job more effectively?
• Does this convey a data trend or an opportunity readers can exploit?
• Can this asset be a catalyst for a positive change on its own?
• Is this asset adding something new or different to a conversation that's already happening?

These can be hard questions to answer, and may not initially arise from a simple content acquisition request, but by asking questions like these, you help to ensure content is more than just a commodity as a baseline.

Ensure Content Will Land in A Receptive Environment

Part of building pipeline through your content marketing efforts is promoting it on credible media outlets or at credible events and supporting and strengthening it's resonance with audiences by using third party content with clout in the space to sponsor yours. Associating your content with respected healthcare IT media outlets and content producers will get your message in front of the right people, looking for answers to the pain points your organization can solve for. Even the biggest brands need to build credible pipeline by fostering their content in environments where it will thrive.

When your content is paired with trusted names and content topics, your quality awareness and audience is expanded. Analyze the success of your content through these outlets to dictate

Follow Up

Once your content is living within a receptive environment that is accessible to your target audiences, it is important to create a content conversion plan. Have actions queued up for when someone responds to an email, downloads content on your website, or interacts with your content via a third-party media outlets. For example, sending an email triggered by a content download offering related content, and the option of talking to sales or a client-facing expert can help to keep the slow moving consumers engaged, while offering up a fast-track conversion path for anyone who is ready to buy.

Having a system in place to respond to these activities will ensure you are setting your clients up for success. You don't want a client to buy content and have no plan for how to use it effectively. You may get the revenue, but the client will be frustrated when they don't see the expected value from the content.

If you know you need to be more proactive in your content creation, then consider resources to help you expand your volume of creation, the exposure your content is getting, and a team to deliver better results through a heavier pipeline and greater ROI.

For more research on Healthcare Information and Technology content marketing best practices, download our latest ebook: 7 Research-Backed Best Practices for Healthcare IT Content Marketing.