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A Guide to Choosing a Content Marketing Agency in Healthcare

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As a medical supplier, you can leverage content marketing to increase your market share and drive profits. The healthcare supply field is highly competitive. Being able to provide consistent, client-centric messages across a range of media channels ensures you stand out from the crowd.

Whether you’re distributing diagnostics equipment to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) or selling exam room supplies like latex gloves to doctors’ offices, the right marketing agency can craft a tailor made content creation plan to reach your desired audience.

The first step is choosing a content marketing agency in healthcare that meets your unique needs.

5 Steps to Choosing a Content Marketing Agency for Medical Suppliers

Trends in healthcare marketing suggest that content will continue to play a valuable role – however, that content needs to deliver value. More than ever before, quality takes priority over quantity. You need a content marketing agency with the knowledge, experience, and skills to meet that need.

1. Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Before you start searching for content marketing agencies, write down your goals. Of course, the end aim is to earn more money – but think specifically about what content will help you get there.

Here are some possibilities:

  • Attract more subscribers to your email newsletter and increase newsletter engagement (opens, clicks, and downloads).
  • Ramp up website traffic and engagement, such as page views, backlinks, unique visitors, and conversions.
  • Increase your business’s ranking in search engines like Google. Of all Google searches, 5% are health-related. Don’t ignore search engine optimization (SEO).
  • Enhance your profile as an industry expert, building trust in your professional community.

Content marketing covers an array of media, from vlogs (video blogs) to whitepapers. Having an idea of where you want to focus your energy ensures you select an appropriate agency. Some agencies prioritize social media content while others concentrate on SEO, for example, and others are all-rounders.

2. Look for Subject Matter Expertise

Content marketing agencies have different areas of expertise. A smaller boutique agency might focus on one select field, like fashion or food, while a larger agency will cover multiple verticals. When choosing a content marketing agency in healthcare, subject matter knowledge is more important than size.

Look for either a boutique agency that exclusively serves the healthcare market – or better yet, the medical supply market – or a larger agency with a dedicated healthcare vertical.

3. Ask for a Portfolio of Previous Work

Anybody can claim to be a subject matter expert. When choosing a content marketing agency in the healthcare supply space – a very niche area, you want this claim to be backed up by data. Ask for a portfolio of previous work, ideally work done for clients with a similar profile to your own.

As you review the portfolio, you will also see what sort of content the agency works with. This is your chance to confirm that they have knowledge of not only the medical supply space but also the media formats you want to prioritize, ensuring they will deliver the type of valuable content you want.

4. Discuss Your Specific Goals and Needs

Never hire based on the portfolio alone. Have a chat face-to-face or via video to talk about your potential project. This is an opportunity for you to present the priorities you wrote down in the first step and to confirm that the content marketing agency in question can help you achieve those goals.

This is also an opportunity for the agency to pitch you ideas. Say you want to draft a series of thought-leader articles in healthcare online magazines, for example. You could ask whether they have ideas for topics to cover and what publications they would recommend targeting.

5. Clarify the Content Marketing Agency’s Working Processes

Your face-to-face discussion with the content marketing agency should also cover practical points – namely, what a working relationship with the agency will look like. You want to make sure you are on the same page in terms of collaborative style.

Here are some topics to touch on:

  • Point of contact: Who will be handling your account? Is it the person you are currently talking to, or will it be someone else?
  • Outsourcing: Does the agency outsource any of their content creation? If so, ask for a sample of the contractor’s work to make sure it meets your standards.
  • Understanding your brand: Do they know your company, your product, and the end-user you are trying to serve?
  • Timelines: How long will they need to deliver the content you’re looking for?
  • Communication: What communication channels will they use to keep you abreast of content updates?

Ask these questions now to clarify expectations and avoid frustration on both sides down the line.

A Full-Service Content Marketing Agency for Medical Suppliers

Share Moving Media is a full-service content marketing agency that caters to professionals in the medical supply sector. We create personalized webinars, eBooks, infographics, and more. With our in-depth understanding of the field, we will help you increase your market share.

Sign up for our newsletter to learn more about healthcare content marketing. Ready to create a content strategy for healthcare that will make your business grow? Contact us today!

In-house vs. Outsource: What’s Best for Healthcare Content Creation?

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Healthcare distributors and suppliers can’t afford to skimp on content quality. 

In the competitive healthcare supply chain industry, you need to squeeze every ounce of trust and authority as you can from your content.

With so much riding on your healthcare content creation, what’s best: in-house or outsourcing? 

You might assume hiring inhouse is the answer – why let content slip out of your control? However, outsourcing often gives you leverage over the competition while reducing costs.

64% of manufacturing marketers and half of B2B marketers outsource at least one content marketing task. Of those who outsource, 84% to 87% outsource their content creation. 

Here’s what you need to know to make the best decision. 

In–house vs. Outsource: What to Choose for Healthcare Content Creation?

Healthcare distributors and manufacturers need content for several market segments and stages of the buyer’s journey. 85% of buyers say they would consider dismissing a company that doesn’t personalize the initial touchpoint. 

That’s a lot of risk and pressure.

Creating effective content requires technical knowledge of your product and the industry, end-users, healthcare professionals, and marketing in general. 

Your content marketing directly reflects your company’s value, expertise, and professionalism. On that note, it would seem like hiring a technical content creator is the only choice.

Should You Hire an Inhouse Healthcare Content Creator?

First things first. Hiring a single technical writer to cover your content production won’t get the job done.

If you want to keep your content creation in-house, you’ll need to hire an entire team. Writing copy for blogs, eBooks, and marketing material is more than a full-time job for one individual – and writing is only one small part of content creation.

Creating effective healthcare content requires a team of creators, strategists, and analysts:

  • Graphic designers for infographics, social media posts, and custom website graphics
  • Video technicians for instructional videos, tutorials, and social content
  • Technical editors and fact-checkers 
  • Social media managers
  • Analysts to track the ROI of your content

Plus, in–house content writers have implicit bias. You don’t want overly promotional content. Your content should be helpful, useful, and actionable – not salesy. An in-house content creation team reports directly to shareholders so they might have trouble overcoming this issue.

7 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Healthcare Content Creation Needs

Outsourcing isn’t synonymous with detachment and low quality. Quite the contrary! 

Entire agencies specialize in creating technical content – the technical yet engaging and digestible content your industry demands. 

1. You Get Access to Leading Talent

Healthcare content marketing agencies specialize in one thing: creating healthcare content. They hire the best writers in the business. 

They’ve already put their team through a thorough vetting process to ensure they can produce the content you need. 

Plus, they handle the editing and quality control, so the burden is totally off your shoulders. 

2. You Can Spend More Time on Strategy

Content creation is time consuming. Behind a single blog, you’ll find hours of keyword research, topic development, copywriting, and editing.

Outsourcing frees up thousands of hours each year. Instead of getting bogged down with content, your marketing team can focus on strategy, audience research, and tactics.

3. Outsourcing is Cost-Effective

Remember, you aren’t hiring a single creator. You need an entire team. 

Glassdoor says the average business spends $4 thousand and 24 days to hire a new worker. Recruitment technology, assessments, job postings – these all cost time and money. 

If the relationship doesn’t work out, it could cost you 200% of the worker’s salary to find a replacement.

4. You’ll Produce Content Consistently

HubSpot recommends large blogs publish up to five pieces of content per week. Those who prioritize their content are 13x more likely to enjoy higher ROI from their efforts.

An outsourced team has the time and resources to publish high-quality content consistently. 

5. Outsourcing Provides Easy Access to Metrics

A specialized healthcare content agency wants you to see ROI from your content investment. They have on-staff analysts tracking your content’s metrics. 

They’ll help you visualize your content’s performance with charts and have all the info ready to go for shareholders.

6. You Can Seamlessly Scale Your Healthcare Content Production

As we’ve seen with COVID-19 vaccine production, healthcare distributors must scale instantly when necessary. Outsourcing your content lets you seamlessly scale up or down as your needs and budget change. 

You don’t have to go through the trouble of hiring during a surge, evaluating, and laying off if things slow down. 

7. Outsourcing Gives You Access to the Latest Technology

Hiring costs are one thing but tools are also costly. Enterprise packages for SEO, social media, and content can cost thousands every month. It’s just one more thing marketers must make their case for to shareholders.

Outsourcing your content means you already have access to the industry-standard tools and emerging technologies. Healthcare content agencies need to stay competitive too.

Start Building Your Healthcare Content Creation Strategy 

At Share Moving Media, healthcare content for distributors is all we do. We’re a full-service agency with industry experts offering everything from eBooks and blogs to videos and podcasts. 

We understand the value of high-quality content. That’s why industry leaders trust us with their content creation. 

Get insider healthcare content knowledge in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay on top of the latest trends, best practices, and tips!

Content Marketing 101 for Medical Equipment Manufacturers

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For many medical equipment manufacturers who operate a lean organization with limited resources, content marketing might be a foreign marketing strategy. However, with the right development and cross-promotion, content marketing can take your business goals to the next level.

In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing tactics but generates three times as many leads. How can you take advantage of content marketing for medical equipment manufacturers? Let’s discover how you get started driving results through content marketing.

Why is Content Marketing for Medical Equipment Manufacturers Important?

Content marketing focuses on developing valuable and relevant content for your target audience. 86% of B2B marketers use some sort of content marketing over traditional advertising to build brand awareness. However, the truth is, any business can benefit from creating content.

When it comes to a successful content marketing strategy, the keyword is value. In a competitive landscape like medical sales, content marketing will highlight your credibility to build brand awareness and increase sales.

However, it’s important to note that while your content should drive customer action, you’re not pushing an obvious sale or advertisement. Your content should be educational and provide actionable takeaways that make your brand stand out against the competition. 

5 Content Marketing for Medical Equipment Manufacturers Best Practices

Whether you develop infographics full of statistics or in-depth educational whitepapers on your industry niche, your content should deliver enough value to persuade your readers to move into your lead funnel. To develop a content marketing strategy for medical equipment manufacturers, consider the following best practices.

1. Strategize and Set Goals

Before you begin writing any content, you need to develop your content marketing strategy. A comprehensive strategy will not only help you save resources and time, but it will also keep you organized and agile. 

The most important part of your strategy revolves around setting goals. Do you want to earn more leads? Boost your search engine optimization efforts (SEO)? Or, are you looking to drive more sales?  You can get started by using the SMART method (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) to formulate your content marketing objectives.

Once you establish your goals, you can build your entire strategy and marketing calendar around them to drive more engagement and boost your bottom line. 

2. Perform Keyword Research

With your goals at the center of your strategy, you need to complete in-depth content and keyword research to understand what your target audience prefers. Content research will help you determine:

  • What content formats are most popular for your niche
  • The topics your audience is most likely to share or learn more about
  • How to develop an ideal piece of content in terms of length, headline type, etc. 

You also need to understand what keywords are relevant to your industry and the long-tail phrases your audience is searching for. Using the right keywords in your content will boost your SEO efforts and help you rank in top results so you’re found by more people. The higher you rank in search pages, the more traffic and conversions you can capture

3. Develop Evergreen Content

Evergreen content provides ongoing value to your audiences and drives long-term traffic to your website – sometimes even years after publishing. Evergreen content types include:

  • How-to guides
  • Checklists
  • Presentations
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Ebooks
  • Podcasts
  • Video

While evergreen may take longer to create than a traditional blog post, you won’t have to rewrite it on a bi-weekly schedule. By developing content that your audience is more likely to consume and enjoy, search engines will take note and rank it higher in search results over time.

4. Target Audiences with Personalization

Personalization continues to be an important factor in content marketing strategy. With consumers bombarded with daily digital ads, emails, and blog posts, your content needs to quickly capture their attention to keep them actively engaged with your brand.

To develop personalized content, consider creating buyer personas for all the different audience types you plan on targeting. You can then start creating specific content for your target audiences that include highly personalized and relevant material. 

For example, different age groups will require different tones and topics depending on their needs. If you’re a medical equipment manufacturer focused on a certain geographic area, your content can also include more localized information.

5. Use Analytics to Optimize Future Content

While your content marketing strategy may start with trial and error, don’t become discouraged. Analytics not only show you the content that your audience prefers to consume, but it also helps you understand trends that you can optimize. For example, your content analytics will teach you:

  • The content that gets the most and least traffic
  • How often your content is shared on social media
  • The content that converted leads the best
  • Headlines or images that earned the most clicks

If you notice certain content formats or topics perform better than others, you can improve future content based on similar fundamentals to capture more audience engagement. 

Discover Valuable Content Marketing for Medical Equipment Manufacturers 

The content marketing landscape for medical equipment manufacturers is wide open for you to take advantage of and grow your company’s bottom line. With the right strategy and optimizations in place, you can develop high-quality content that not only captures your prospect’s attention but also turns them into loyal customer advocates.

If you’re ready to develop quality content that engages your audience, contact Share Moving Media today.

How COVID-19 Has Turned Healthcare Sales Practices on Their Head

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The healthcare industry is in the global spotlight due to COVID-19. Analysts expect the healthcare market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.6% from 2020 to 2027, reaching $520.6 million. For those in healthcare sales, business is set to boom.

However, COVID-19 has wholly upended the healthcare sales cycle. Face-to-face interactions have decreased. Conferences and other large-scale industry events have been canceled. As medical providers and facilities come under financial strain dealing with a widespread pandemic, buyers are reassessing how to best invest their money.

It’s a moment of massive upheaval. You can either adapt and leverage the current changes to your advantage — or stay stagnant and let the sales opportunities pass you by.

This blog examines changes in healthcare sales in COVID times and provides practical pointers on how to increase your market shares in the evolving landscape.

How are Healthcare Sales Changing in COVID Times?

The sales sector has changed in every area. A survey of B2B sales businesses spanning 11 countries identified trends in three key areas:

  • Change in spending: In general, companies are decreasing expenditures. However, specific sectors, including healthcare, are seeing a rise in spending.
  • Emphasis on digital: Across the board, B2B companies anticipate more digital interactions. Traditional sales interactions, like face-to-face meetings and mingling at conferences, are expected to decrease in importance.
  • Increased remote work: As of April 2020, nearly 90 percent of sales had moved to video conferencing, phone, or website models. Compared to previous skepticism, confidence in such models has increased.

These trends become even more pronounced in the medical field. For instance, physicians report that patients are increasingly embracing telemedicine over in-person appointments due to fear of COVID-19 infection.

As a result, healthcare organizations may consider redistributing budgets to invest in improved video conferencing capabilities. Healthcare practitioners will be required to become more tech-savvy in this field. As a sales professional, it’s essential to understand such changes in supply and demand in healthcare.

4 Tips for Effective Healthcare Sales in COVID Times

Understanding the changes in the sales industry is only half the battle. You have to take this knowledge and adapt accordingly. Here’s how.

1. Identify Your Audience’s New Burdens

Whether you sell ultrasound diagnostics equipment to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) or patient data management software to group purchasing networks, your target audience has undoubtedly experienced changes since COVID-19 began.

Educate yourself on the new burdens your target audience faces. For instance, healthcare practitioners have had to change treatment protocols, while organizations grapple with supply chain disruptions. Surveys are a great way to identify barriers — and then determine how you can help address them.

Knowledge of your audience’s needs also allows you to adapt your sales pitch and messages accordingly.

2. Master Virtual Communication Tools

When touching base with existing clients or having a first-time meeting with a new client, odds are the exchange will be virtual. Be prepared to adapt to your customer’s needs. Acquaint yourself with the most popular virtual communication platforms, including Zoom, WebEx, and Google Hangouts.

This way, you can always quickly adapt to your client’s preferences. With COVID-19 draining healthcare resources — including time — you don’t want to demand more of your clients by asking them to download or learn new video conferencing technology.

3. Take Advantage of Digital Events

Conferences used to be a prime spot for building relationships in the healthcare sales space. While some events are continuing with new COVID-19 safety measures, others are moving online (an excellent opportunity for digital advertising in healthcare). Do your research on what events are ongoing.

There is also a new opportunity in the digital space. You don’t have to attend enormous conferences. Hosting a webinar or a virtual round table discussion on a niche topic in your field is a great way to reach your target audience and establish yourself as an authoritative knowledge source.

4. Monitor Your Success and Be Prepared to Pivot

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s the importance of adapting. Major companies have gone from housing employees in offices to having them work from home. Fitness buffs have taken their workouts from the gym to the living room. Schoolteachers have found ways to engage kids via remote learning.

If you want to succeed in healthcare sales in COVID times, you need to be ready to make changes. To enact positive changes, you need information on what works and what doesn’t. You get this by gathering granular data about your methodology.

For example, if you host a webinar, how many people tune in? How many are existing clients versus new leads? How many of them convert to sales when you follow up with those leads via one-on-one video conferences? With such meta-analysis, you can adapt your sales strategies and improve outcomes.

Get Help Enhancing Your Sales in COVID Times

Share Moving Media can help you find new ways to succeed in healthcare sales in COVID times. We help our clients increase their market share through our full-service media offering, including targeted publications, educational services, events, and more. Sign up for our newsletter for the latest healthcare sales and marketing news. Want help revamping your healthcare sales processes? Contact us today!

Manufacturer’s Quandary, Buyer’s Puzzle: Do Buyers Believe Brands?

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Buyers buy brands.

Look for the top marketing tips for any industry and you will find advice on the importance of building a strong, recognizable brand. A 2017 study in the UK found that 71% of consumers consider the brand when making a purchase decision.

But what happens when buyers no longer trust brands?

When it comes to healthcare branding, this trust is especially important because buyers are often committing their health and wellbeing into your hands when they choose your products and services.

An annual brand trust survey conducted in 2019 states that trust in brands is waning. In fact, 41% of respondents said that they do not trust brands to be truthful and accurate, and that 1 in 3 people did not even trust all of the brands they bought from.

Knowing this, your challenge is to figure out how to build the kind of trust that many brands have failed to instill in buyers.

The Importance of Maintaining Trust in Healthcare Branding

Branding, whether in healthcare or any other industry, is about creating trust and familiarity with consumers. If a brand is done well – as in the case of Uber, Airbnb, or even Kleenex – it has the potential to become synonymous with certain services, lifestyles, or products. Think about this: How many people use “rideshare” or “facial tissue” in day-to-day conversations?

Building trust with consumers could make you a household name. But building trust is not a quick or easy process. 

Reasons that buyers trust brands include:

  • Quality products and services
  • Good reviews from customers
  • Fair prices
  • Positive interactions with customers
  • Acknowledgment and action concerning problems or complaints
  • Exceptional workplace culture and treatment of employees

Maintaining all of those things is crucial, but in a world of transparency and openness in brand marketing, any wrong step could set you back.

Take the example of Ellen DeGeneres. She built an entire brand around her name – a brand that was all about joy, positivity, and kindness towards others. When workplace harassment complaints came out, she lost trust with her consumers because they saw that the values that she promoted were not being upheld within her own work environment.

Regaining broken trust is even harder than building it. 45% of consumers say they would never be able to trust a brand again after a scandal like that. 

A buyer’s belief in your brand is hard to come by, but surprisingly easy to lose. 

How Buyers Form Beliefs About Healthcare Brands

Since buyers often do not trust branding itself to be truthful, they will spend a lot of time doing their own research and formulating their own opinions before engaging with a healthcare brand.

Although this is not always the case, B2B buyers have been known to get as far as 90% of the way through their decision-making process before speaking directly with a sales rep. With the increasing availability of resources and reviews for products and services online, buyers feel less and less the need to go to the brands themselves to get relevant information.

Rather than trusting the brand to give them helpful and honest facts, buyers look to these sources instead:

1. Customer Reviews and Shared Experiences 

Buyers do not want to trust marketing gimmicks to tell them which products and services are going to be worth their while. Most prefer the alternative of first-hand customer experience. More than 90% of customers online rely on reviews, and many people place an equal value on personal recommendations that come from people they know and trust.

2. Industry-Related Publications

The appeal to authority is a strong factor in decision making (this is why doctors and lawyers are never chosen to serve on juries). However, when those authorities are peers and experts in the field of healthcare, their opinions and feedback on a brand’s products or services can be extremely useful in choosing the best purchase to make.

3. Influencers 

Although the use of influencers is a relatively new marketing approach, 63% of consumers would trust an influencer’s opinion of a product over the brand’s statements. This is in spite of the fact that influencers get paid to promote products. The most trusted influencers, however, are the ones who build platforms on relatability and not celebrity. Buyers see them as peers, as people who are just like them and therefore can offer them a valuable and honest opinion.

How to Make Your Healthcare Branding Relevant and Trustworthy

In all of these things, the common thread seems to be a human voice that is relatable and that offers genuine, relevant insights.

If you want to build buyer trust for your healthcare brand, then you need to engage with customers earlier in the decision-making process through relevant and valuable content.

That could look like product reviews on your webpages or partnerships with social media influencers. It also means providing the kind of content that your customers are looking for in the earlier stages of their search. If you can give them relevant and valuable information on solutions to meet their present need, then you will have a greater chance of getting them to engage with your brand sooner.

Ready to create some relevant content that will help buyers to believe your brand? Contact us to find out how.