About a decade ago, healthcare marketers began realizing content creation was an essential part of the modern healthcare business’ marketing strategy. Ever since then, they’ve been working to create content that wins their prospect’s attention and fuels sales.
According to research by SiriusDecisions, sales teams don’t even use 60-70% of marketing content to close sales. This means a huge amount of the marketing budget is going to waste (and content that should be closing sales is being unused).
Content creation is usually run by the marketing team. Healthcare marketers invest a lot of time and money into researching, strategizing, creating, and distributing content. However, there is an untapped area the sales team can use every day to create high-quality content using customer knowledge.
Sales teams are the ones who often interact with your customers the most. You can use these interactions as an opportunity to fuel your content creation.
Here are 3 ways you can get your sales team involved in the content creation process by connecting customer knowledge and sales insights.
1. Develop Customer Personas Before Focusing on Content Creation
Before you can begin to start creating
relevant content, you have to understand who you’re talking to.
You may have some generic target market information on your customers, but it
needs to be taken further. User Testing Blog refers to a customer persona
as “a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large
segment of your audience, based on the data you’ve collected from user research
and web analytics.”
Get your sales team to begin asking your customers questions, doing surveys,
and extract that data to create in-depth customer personas. They communicate
with prospects, leads, and customers every day, and are familiar with your
customer’s motivations, aspirations, habits, challenges, and desires.
If you make content for the sake of creating something, you’ll lose your
customer’s attention. By developing customer personas, you’ll be able to create
content that resonates with them, keeping them coming back over and over again.
2. Use Frequently Asked Questions To Create Content
There are a variety of questions your sales
team gets asked every day. You can use this sales insight to create content
around the topics that come up frequently.
Most of these questions tend to be how-to questions. You can use these
questions to create FAQ-style content on your site.
One bonus to creating FAQ-centric content is that has a higher chance than
other content to get highlighted as a featured snippet in a Google Search.
3. Be Direct with Your Customers About Content Creation
Your customers are more than willing to help answer your questions, especially if they know it will help them, so have questions ready that directly involve the customer in content creation.
Use these 5 examples to start. Then create more specific questions based on your specific business and customer knowledge:
- Ask them what they’re struggling with
- Ask them what they want to learn
- Ask them how they like to receive content (email, push notification, etc.)
- Ask them how often they like to consume content
- Ask them what types of content they like to receive (blogs, videos, audio, etc.)
You’ll be amazed at how willing your customers are to help you out in content creation.Instead of guessing on your content strategy, get your customers to give your sales team the answers.