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Brand Storytelling in Healthcare: If You’re Not Visible, You’re Irrelevant

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Today’s world is fast-paced and digitally driven. Consumers have adopted a “need it now” mentality and value brands that prioritize instant gratification. 

As a result, brands focus on convenience instead of the personalized human touch. However, to better connect with your target audience and break the cycle of endless scrolling, it’s important to engage with them on a deeper level through storytelling. 

Brand storytelling in healthcare requires embedding skill, creativity, and vision in your marketing campaigns to evoke emotion and increase your bottom line. By telling the “why” behind your brand, you’re able to engage with your customers and give them a reason to invest in your products and services. 

You need to start sharing your story to edge out the competition. Let’s take a look at what brand storytelling is and how medical suppliers can implement it in a marketing strategy.

What is Brand Storytelling in Healthcare?

Storytelling has existed for over 27,000 years. Brand storytelling is the art of weaving fact and narrative together to communicate a message to your target audience. While you’re providing real and transparent stories, you can embellish them to better explain your core meaning. While “good” and “bad” storytelling is relative to your customer, developing a positive brand story includes the following elements:

  • Entertainment
  • Education
  • Universal
  • Memorable
  • Organized

As a medical supply brand, you can utilize storytelling to create powerful videos, testimonials, case studies, marketing materials, and more to amplify your brand.

Why is Brand Storytelling Important?

Brand storytelling in healthcare is no longer a nice-to-have. Successful storytelling allows you to boost your brand awareness, profit, and impact to drive more engagement and conversions with your customers.

Why is brand storytelling successful? Consider the following benefits: 

  • Stand out: You can gain an edge against the competition by creating a memorable narrative that highlights your products and how they have helped save lives.
  • Build loyalty: You’re not just attracting customers through a story; you’re building a relationship with people who will become loyal to your brand and products. 
  • Increase bottom line: You can boost your ROI and overall profitability through complex content marketing stories that drive engagement.

How to Create Healthcare Brand Storytelling for Your Brand

As a medical supply brand, your story can bridge the gap between your company, distributors, and the end-user to increase awareness and engagement. It’s not just a differentiator, it’s a strategic tactic that yields long-term results. Here are two types of brand storytelling for healthcare you need to know:

Data-Driven

76% of marketers fail to use behavioral data in their marketing strategy. With 149 zettabytes of data created worldwide by 2024, you can leverage data to create more targeted stories based on your audience’s preferences and pain points. 

As the key to create content that resonates with your audience, your data is one of the most powerful resources you can leverage for powerful storytelling. Consider analyzing your data from qualitative and quantitative sources to derive key insights for your stories. For example, you can use data to discover the following insights:

  • Does your audience prefer videos over static images? 
  • Do they consume short-form or long-form content? 
  • What are they searching for on search engines? 
  • How long are they engaging with content?
  • What platforms does your audience prefer?

Audience-Focused

To develop successful stories, you need to take your healthcare brand out of storytelling. While you may be accustomed to selling yourself, building impactful content needs to focus on your customers instead. The purpose of your story is to provide your audience with valuable content that evokes emotion and compels them to move forward with your products.

Brand storytelling videos are the most popular types of media marketers create. Get started by assessing your current content and note how often you mention your products or brand throughout the story. Depending on your audience needs, you can develop storytelling through the following mediums to attract customers:

  • Podcasts with industry-adjacent guests to connect with your audience on topics that matter
  • Micro-moments through videos and mini-ads that quickly bring your brand to life
  • Philanthropic news to showcase what your business cares about on social media

When you create user-generated content, you’ll be more likely to expand your reach and build trust with your customers.

Strategic Brand Storytelling for Your Healthcare Business

What’s the “why” behind your brand? Impactful storytelling is the art of highlighting your brand purpose. Without honest and transparent content marketing, your customers will likely find a competitor they better connect with. If you’re looking to build a deeper connection with your distributors, developing brand storytelling is the best way to establish long-term relationships. Looking for quality content marketing services that engage your customers? Contact Share Moving Media for more information.

Should Healthcare Leadership Be Overconfident or Uncertain?

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Confidence is an important aspect of leadership for medical suppliers. While you might be someone who tends to step back from the spotlight, your team won’t follow a wishy-washy leader and you’ll have difficulty inspiring top performance. 

However, being too confident often results in rash risks that may come off arrogant and frustrate direct reports or shareholders. The most successful leaders know that while confidence is important, you need to embrace uncertainty as well. 

With evolving business practices in the healthcare industry, leading with uncertainty doesn’t mean a lack of confidence, but rather allows you to search for a middle ground and examine a range of possible options to make the most informed decisions. Uncertainty allows you to communicate more effectively, listen to key stakeholders, and avoid the bad judgment that is often caused by overconfidence.

What’s your healthcare leadership style? Let’s dive deeper into the differences between leading with uncertainty instead of overconfidence. 

The Consequences of Overconfidence in Healthcare Leadership

Only 18% of enterprises believe that their leaders are “very effective” at meeting business goals. Making the wrong decisions in a healthcare leadership position can be the difference between growing your bottom line or losing a valuable deal that jeopardizes your quarterly earnings. 

What does it mean to be an overconfident leader? Consider these behavioral traits that negatively affect your performance:

  • Mistrust: Your peers won’t trust your decisions or authority
  • Arrogance: Overconfidence often leads to you resisting change and feedback
  • Weak relationships: Your direct reports may feel underappreciated by your communication or decision-making skills
  • Integrity: You are unlikely to honor commitments 

Additionally, leaders that lead with sales confidence are often blind to innovation and are misaligned with the company, leading to a weak sale or marketing strategy. 

Confidence Traits that Positively Affect Leadership 

However, as long as you don’t cross the threshold into overconfidence, confident leaders are still successful in leading teams for your brand’s vision. For example, confident leaders have the following positive traits:

  • Dominating projects and marketing themselves
  • Having the courage and willingness to make bold changes
  • Increased levels of energy and inspiration
  • Ability to positively represent your company to customers

Healthcare Leadership Self-Check for Overconfidence

So, how do you know if your leadership style is confident or overconfident? Consider asking yourself the following questions: 

  • Does your organization trust you?
  • Do you ask others for feedback and make an effort to implement it?
  • Do you care about others’ issues?
  • Are you balancing other perspectives? 
  • Are you a role model?

How to Use Uncertainty to Your Advantage in Healthcare Leadership

77% of employees believe that leadership trust is a key motivating factor. How can you instill a motivating work culture through effective healthcare leadership?

Uncertainty. 

Uncertainty isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s the ability to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and practice servant leadership to drive a successful healthcare organization. While you don’t know all the answers, you are willing to ask the right questions to make an informed decision.

Consider the following steps when implementing uncertainty in your healthcare leadership style:

1.Identify What You’re Uncertain About

Where is your uncertainty stemming from? What specific part is causing concern? Your uncertainty is often associated with an upcoming event, decision, or action. Depending on your brainstorming style, consider writing down your thoughts in a notepad and creating an actionable list to help you make an action plan. 

2.Select Actions that Will Propel You Forward

Once you have your thoughts laid out, you’ll want to develop a strategic action plan. Your action plan shouldn’t be just built on your assumptions, but instead, use real-time data and other perspectives to determine how your decision will affect your healthcare organization’s objectives. Don’t be afraid to hold meetings with other key stakeholders to dive into the scope of the project more deeply before making the call.

You’ll also want to consider who or what your decision impacts and any long-term implications. It’s wise to think about the timeline, resources, budget, and even a testing strategy to ensure your decision drives the best results. 

3.Measure and Repeat the Process

If you’ve implemented your action plan, you’ll want to measure the success of your decision and the impact you made on the project or company growth. Do you feel confident in your decision? Did your decision propel the company or your team? You can drive real results by holding follow-up meetings to breakdown the success of the project or analyze metrics that showcase positive growth.

Elevate Your Healthcare Leadership Strategies

To drive innovation and growth, your medical supply brand needs both confident and uncertain leadership. While it’s important to be a confident leader that can inspire your company, you also need to lead with uncertainty to ensure you’re not taking unnecessary risks. 

Ready to feel confident in your content marketing? Contact Share Moving Media today.

How Content Marketing Aids Healthcare Sales Reps at Explaining Product Value

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Content development enables sales teams to drive brand awareness, demand, and convert leads into loyal customers — making it a direct connection to your ROI and buyer engagement.

Situated throughout the lead funnel, effective content development also gives your sales reps everything from website content and presentations to nurtured qualified leads throughout the entire buyer’s journey with advanced case studies and whitepapers. 

When you have a sales enablement strategy in place, utilizing the right types of content can benefit your overall bottom line and create more cohesion between your internal teams. After all, 73% of sales teams agree that cross-functional collaboration is key to the overall sales process.

Let’s take a look at what sales enablement is and how you can develop impactful content to aid healthcare sales reps.

What is Sales Enablement for Healthcare?

Your medical distributors are an integral part of your business, responsible for selling your products to healthcare facilities across the country. Since they’re spread throughout different regions, it’s essential to arm them with content resources that successfully educate key audiences on your product’s use cases and benefits.

Sales enablement is the process, technology, and content that empowers these sales reps to sell your product effectively. When you provide content that educates, offers solutions, and breaks down barriers, you enable reps to improve their sales conversions and ultimately spend more time selling.

77% of companies currently use a content marketing strategy to empower sales teams. You can get started with the following steps:

  • Understand what makes your customers move through your buyer’s journey and create content for every stage 
  • Develop customer-centric content that targets pain points and positions your product as the solution
  • Make content accessible to your sales teams, such as using cloud storage or CRM tool
  • Utilize sales analytics to understand what content your reps using and where you can improve

By aligning distribution sales reps and marketing teams to create quality content, you’re more likely to see higher engagement and conversion rates.

6 Types of Content that Aids Healthcare Sales Reps

By developing a sales enablement strategy, you can create content for every interaction your distributors have with existing and potential customers. Here are a few types of quality content to aid healthcare sales:

1.Competitor Research

If you understand your customer’s pain points and needs, it’s essential you analyze where you stand amongst the competition with real statistics. To create successful competitor analysis, you also need to educate your sales teams on how they can persuade potential customers to make the next final conversion step by filling in your competitor’s gaps and highlighting the success of your products. 

2. Case Studies

Case studies are true testaments to your products and help prospects resonate with your brand. High-quality and customer-centric case studies demonstrate your audience’s struggles and showcase how your services are a valuable solution.

You can develop case studies in several ways:

  • Written testimonials
  • Video interviews
  • Reviews

4. Blog Posts

Blog posts are utilized in an early stage, search engine optimization (SEO) marketing strategy, but they are also valuable sales tools to help nurture prospects. While they typically live on your website, you can turn your blog posts into one-page reference flyers for your sales team to quickly send to customers.

4. Ebooks or Whitepapers

High-quality ebooks and whitepapers often provide in-depth educational material and statistics around your product’s benefits. Typically used in the early stage of the sales process, they are ideal for a quick pitch or last-minute call to provide additional information and proof. 

5. Video

Video marketing results in 66% more qualified leads in your pipeline. By developing education video content, you can explain your product’s benefits, features, and even instructions beyond your sales rep knowledge. Videos are also more digestible and hold attention for longer periods, so they are excellent material to showcase in a presentation, webinar, or email. 

6. Onboarding Content

Often overlooked by marketing teams, developing engaging onboarding materials help train your sales reps on how to effectively sell your products. Not only does onboarding content provide valuable company and product information, but it also establishes your ideal sales pitch for each customer interaction, so your reps feel confident nailing the sale.

Start Developing Content to Aid Healthcare Sales and Boost Your ROI

For marketing to impact the success of your sales reps, it’s essential to develop quality content that meets their needs, helps streamline the process, and improves your ROI. Your content should not only affect each stage of the buyer’s journey but also help your team be more prepared to interact and educate customers. When marketing and sales collaborate, you’ll be more equipped to engage and convert your customers into long-term brand advocates.

If you’re ready to develop content that empowers your healthcare sales reps, contact Share Moving Media today.

A Guide to Healthcare SEO for Smart Manufacturers

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Search engine optimization is one of the most effective inbound marketing tactics you can employ as a healthcare manufacturer. SEO optimizes your company website so that it ranks higher in search engines like Google, driving organic, unpaid traffic to your primary sales portal.

This allows your target audience to find you naturally on the internet based on their interests. Instead of blindly trying to target potential leads, you will have potential leads coming to you. These leads will already have an expressed interest in your market area, making them more likely to convert.

Done right, SEO can drive conversion rates of 14.6%. Consider that traditional media advertisement has a conversion rate of 1.7% to put that into context. Given those statistics, it’s no wonder that more companies are investing in SEO.

That said, SEO marketing for healthcare sales requires a unique approach compared to other industries. This guide explains the complexities of SEO in healthcare and provides step-by-step guidance to help you improve your search engine page rankings.

How the “Your Money or Your Life” Principal Impacts SEO in Healthcare

Google, the primary gatekeepers of SEO rankings results, is incredibly strict regarding so-called “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) sites.

YMYL content is information that could impact an individual’s health, safety, emotional well-being, or financial stability if it’s presented untruthfully, incorrectly, or deceptively. Examples of YMYL content include medical and financial advice.

Smart manufacturers must present their products objectively and ensure any medically relevant information is clear and factual.

A Quick Guide to Healthcare SEO

When someone types a phrase into Google – say “hearing aid manufacturer” – they get many search results pages. Being at the top of that first page of results boosts your website’s visibility dramatically. Research reveals that the first position in the SERPs achieves an average click-through rate of 28.5%. The CTR drops to 15% for the second search result and continues to decrease, with the search result in the tenth position achieving a CTR of just 2.5%.

Here’s how to increase your odds of climbing the SERPs.

Ensure Your Content Meets the E-A-T Principle

High-quality, value-added content is critical to successful SEO, especially in the YMYL category. Your content should meet Google’s E-A-T guidelines, demonstrating expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

You can boost your EAT score by citing high-quality sources, for example. Always provide data for any assertions you make, ideally with citations to reputable “.gov” or “.edu” sources. Medical journals are also a great source.

Make Your Website Technically SEO-Friendly

Your content further needs to be optimized for SEO. This is a way of structuring your on-page content so that Google’s algorithm-driven bots can “crawl” through it, figure out what it’s about, and confirm its relevance and value for internet users.

Here’s a quick on-page SEO checklist to get you started. For each page on your website, you should:

  • Select one primary keyword to include in the content.
  • Choose three to four secondary keywords to include in the content.
  • Add the primary keyword in the webpage’s title tag, meta description, and H1 header.
  • Break up content into scannable chunks with H2 and H3 headers.
  • Include at least one image.

If you want to know more about technical SEO, Google offers a wealth of resources.

Tap into the Power of High-Value Backlinks

Google recognizes a website as trustworthy and providing valuable content to consumers via backlinks – when other websites link back to your website. Getting high-quality backlinks from high-ranking, authoritative sources is a great way to improve SEO results.

Getting backlinks from respected healthcare publications is one option. You can further drive valuable clicks by publishing your blogs, whitepapers, and more on platforms like LinkedIn or Medium.

Infographics are another great trick for generating high-quality backlinks. An attractive visual with relevant, industry-specific facts or statistics is share-worthy. Create your graphic, email it to thought leaders in your field, and invite them to share it. They should include a backlink when they publish it.

Don’t Forget to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, both technically and in terms of content structure. For example, since mobile screens are smaller, it’s best to use larger fonts.

To get you started, Google has a free tool that can tell if your website is mobile-friendly. It even gives you hints on how to improve, for example, by telling you if the text is too small to read or the links are spaced too closely together.

Boost Your SEO Today

Share Moving Media is dedicated to helping medical manufacturers boost sales and increase market share. From blogs to white papers, our value-added content marketing in healthcare can help you climb the SERPs.

Subscribe to our newsletter to learn more about digital advertising in healthcare. Want support for your SEO strategy? Contact us.

3 Steadfast Ways Print Marketing for Healthcare Supports Digital Campaigns

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How often do you scroll through your preferred social media feed? Check your email? Tune into a webinar? With the rise of new digital tactics influencing consumer behaviors every day, it’s easy to fall into the fallacy that print marketing is dead. 

No one can doubt the importance of digital marketing channels like your website, search engines, social media, and more. While digital marketing plays a crucial role in your overall sales growth strategy, you can still keep traditional tactics in your back pocket to meet your end objectives.

However, print marketing isn’t a substitute for digital marketing, but rather a strategic partner that compliments your brand and helps you deliver personalized experiences. 7 out of 10 people find print advertising more personal than online ads.

Let’s take a look at how you can integrate your digital and print marketing for healthcare initiatives to drive long-term revenue and customer loyalty. 

Why Should Medical Suppliers Invest in Print Marketing for Healthcare?

You might think print marketing for healthcare is outdated and lacks innovation. However, by marrying digital and traditional tactics, you can develop a robust strategy that meets your customers at every stage of their customer journey. 

Here are a few reasons to consider utilizing print marketing in collaboration with your digital campaigns:

  • Touch: With so much digital noise out there, print marketing thrives on touch and taps into your customer’s haptic memory to build an emotional connection with your brand. 
  • Engagement: 78% of executives agree that an integrated digital and print marketing approach drives the most results and a higher engagement rate with customers.
  • Personalization: You’re able to develop personalized print campaigns based on demographics, location, interests, past purchases, and more, which is instrumental in connecting with physician offices across the country and distributor reps.
  • Trust: In the digital age, 63% of consumers trust and read print ads more than digital campaigns.

What’s the biggest benefit of print marketing for healthcare? You don’t have to choose print over digital. By developing a consistent experience across each channel, you can pair print with your digital marketing strategy to drive results that engage and convert your customers.

3 Ways Print Marketing for Healthcare Supports Your Digital Campaigns

To reach your target audience, you need to develop a powerful combined digital and print marketing healthcare strategy. Here are a few ways both channels work together:

1.Drives Website Traffic

Direct mail postcards and published print advertising is a great way to drive traffic back to your website. Whether you’re targeting specific leads or a larger industry audience, you can send hyper-personalized content directly to their mailboxes that target their pain-points and persuade them to learn more.

For example, postcards act as mini product catalogs that give your customers a snapshot into your full offering. Consider adding a quick response (QR) code and personalized URLs (PURLs) to track who is going back to your website so you can deliver a personalized experience and better report on your return on investment (ROI). 

2.Increases Newsletter Signups

Email marketing provides you the opportunity to send personalized, frequent messages to contacts who are interested in your products. Email marketing provides an average return rate of $42. It’s a great way to showcase your brand, educate customers on product tips, and highlight upcoming events. 

However, it can be difficult to grow a qualified email subscriber list. By utilizing table tents or direct mail postcards, you can consistently promote your newsletter’s benefits and encourage recipients to subscribe. You can also employ your print and email marketing initiatives in your workflow automation to provide touchpoints throughout the customer’s journey. 

3.Boosts Social Media Following

Have you considered sending a print newsletter or sponsoring content in a print ad? Both are great ways to reach your target audience on a more personal level to establish credibility or flagship product updates. These print marketing initiatives are also a gateway to building your social media following.

Since your print marketing already demonstrates your expertise, you can utilize it as a platform to encourage recipients to follow your social media accounts for even more information. Tease out more incentives, product education, and more to work on growing your online presence. 

Combine Print and Digital Marketing to Target Your Ideal Customer

While you might believe “print is dead,” that sentiment couldn’t be farther from the truth as more consumers are starting to tune out digital noise. It’s essential to mix both digital and traditional tactics to engage with your target audience and create a powerful marketing strategy for your medical products. Instead of siloing your strategy, you’ll be able to meet your customer at every point in their journey to boost your bottom line.

Ready to increase your marketing share? Contact Share Moving Media to grow your business through content marketing.