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Create B2B Medical Content Your Audience Actually Wants to Read

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A well-researched, 1,400-word blog post can take four hours to write, in addition to the hours you invest in content planning and analysis. Most marketers are willing to make this investment in their B2B medical content because it offers a valuable opportunity for generating and converting leads. These benefits start with quality content your audience wants to read.

Learn steps you can take to ensure the content you create is what your audience is interested in.

Key Takeaways:

  • Content creation starts with a strong topic that doesn’t have too much competition
  • Use an attractive and easy-to-navigate format
  • Keep your topic focused on your audience and the specific challenges they face

What Makes B2B Medical Content Creation Challenging?

Every day, content creators publish over six million new blog posts. If your audience isn’t interested in your content, they have dozens of other options. Marketers struggle to make their content stand out from competing articles and media.

Marketers often treat search engine optimization (SEO) as the golden ticket to success. However, over 90% of online pages don’t see any traffic. SEO is still a profitable healthcare marketing technique, but you need more research and effort to use it successfully by creating relevant content your audience responds to.

Healthcare professionals lead hectic lives, especially due to staffing shortages and supply chain delays. As a result, they don’t have the time they used to for reading online content unless that content offers advice and information that can improve their job.

Despite these challenges, healthcare content marketing is rising because you can cut through the noise and encourage your target audience to read your media if you use the right strategies.

5 Tips for Creating Engaging B2B Medical Content

Use these five tips to create quality and relevant B2B content your audience wants to read.

1. Pick a Relevant Topic

Your content starts with a strong topic choice that’s relevant yet not overused.

Relevant topics aren’t just content that addresses your niche. They are topics your audience is actively researching. You can find several content ideas by performing a search on your industry and looking at related searches.

You can also find popular searches in your niche using keyword research tools like SEMrush or Moz. These tools list over 1,000 topics and details on each topic’s competition. You can see who else is using that keyword, what sites are ranking high, and what similar opportunities are available.

Example of keyword research results

Image from SEMrush

When choosing topics, look at the top-ranking content to see what is currently ranking well for keywords in that topic. Then, find a way to create an improved version of that content that offers more information, updated statistics, or higher quality content. This way, you can improve your chances of ranking well while providing content you know readers want to read since similar content is already receiving traffic.

2. Create a Supporting Layout

The longest proper sentence in the world is 1,287 words from William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom. While most marketers won’t be writing sentences as long as this blog post, they commit several other avoidable formatting mistakes that can make content just as challenging to read as one long sentence.

Your readers will be on phones, laptops, and tablets. To support all scrolling formats and make your content easy to skim and break it up with plenty of headlines, lists, and subheaders. These allow your readers to jump to the most relevant information or quickly read the content if they’re in a hurry.

You can also make your content more visually appealing by inserting images, charts, and videos. Consider using alternative formats for your content, like medical ebooks or whitepapers. These can convey longer pieces of content like case studies in an easier-to-read format than blog posts.

3. Keep Your Content Consistent

A consistent voice in B2B content marketing ensures brand consistency. It ties your content together and offers your audience a more positive reading experience. Companies with a consistent voice also saw a 33% increase in revenue.

For example, if you are an informal brand, you should continue using contractions, casual language, and a personable approach in all your articles. If you suddenly sound like an entirely different person, readers might question your reliability or lose interest in your content.

Your branding should also remain the same. This includes the format of your blog articles, colors, and fonts. In addition, the phrases you use to talk about your brand should be consistent. For example, if your primary value proposition is your reliability, continue repeating similar words that emphasize that feature. This provides a unified brand message to your audience and builds trust with them. 

Trust is one of the main reasons your audience will continue reading your content and purchasing from your brand.

4. Focus on the Reader Rather Than the Topic

Keep your content reader-focused rather than topic-focused. In other words, talk more about why the topic applies to your audience rather than just providing information.

For example, you might address a pain point by covering medical supply chain issues. However, you can increase your reader’s interest in your content by connecting it directly to their challenges with the supply chain. For instance, you might list ways they can improve their supply chain issues.

5. Always Keep Your Content Updated

Fresh content ranks higher than outdated topics. With the influx of online content, your readers can always access the latest information. While an article you published a few years ago saw thousands of readers, you won’t generate the same readership today.

Review some of your most popular articles and update them with new statistics and information. This won’t take as long as rewriting the article because you already have a solid framework. It only requires a slight facelift to stay relevant and rank well in searches.

You can also write the same topic each year. For example, several leading businesses publish annual reports and research. These reports don’t replace the previous year’s publications. Instead, they add another piece of content that can rank online with the latest information.

For example, if you published an article on “The Best Medical Supplies for 2021,” consider writing another piece this year titled “The Best Medical Supplies for 2022.”

Access Resources to Create More Relevant Medical Content

Share Moving Media provides the information and training you need to boost your medical content marketing. Use our solutions to write content your audience wants to read.

Contact us to learn more about our information and communication services.

By Any Other Name–Why Paid Content Placements Are the New Ads

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Digital ads come with a negative connotation. Consumers often see them as intrusive, annoying, and irrelevant. While brands don’t want to add to the digital clutter of ads, they also struggle with brand visibility using organic strategies. Modern content placement options allow healthcare marketers to mix the authenticity and value of organic content with the increased visibility of traditional paid healthcare advertising.

Learn how customer behavior brought about content placement and how to use it in your healthcare content marketing.

Key Takeaways:

  • Content can be organic and appear in searches naturally or paid, which gives you more control over its placement.
  • Pop-up ads are falling out of favor due to digital oversaturation.
  • Ad blockers don’t affect paid content placement and appear more natural to readers.

The 3 Types of Media Today: Owned, Earned, and Paid

Content marketers use three types of media in their strategies:

  • Owned media is the content you create and publish on locations you own, like blog posts, website pages, and social media posts.
  • Earned media, also known as organic media, is content you create that appears in other locations you don’t control, like on people’s social media feeds or searches.
  • Paid media is content you sponsor and control where and how it appears on third-party channels.

Most of the content you create falls into multiple categories. For example, a blog post is owned media that can also be earned when it appears in searches. Over the past few years, there has been a shift in focus between ad formats as marketers adjust to the constantly changing behaviors of their customers.

Consumers Are Tired of the Digital Clutter

Consumers are constantly bombarded with digital clutter and have had enough. For example, 57% of consumers say they don’t like ads that play before videos, and 43% don’t even bother watching them. One estimate says the average person sees 10,000 ads a day.

Because of the oversaturation of promotional content, popups displaying giant product images and promoting deals are slowly becoming a strategy of the past. One of the main contributors to the death of the traditional advertisement is ad blockers.

About 43% of internet users have an ad blocker installed. These are tools that prevent popups or ad widgets from appearing on websites. The top reasons people used ad blockers included:

  • They saw too many online ads
  • They found the ads annoying or irrelevant
  • The ads were too intrusive or took up too much space on their screens

Image from Backlinko

How Organic Search Transformed Marketing

Because of the decline in banner ad clicks and the downward trend of traditional advertising, marketers shifted to organic strategies. As a result, organic content marketing increased in popularity and helped marketers get around ad blockers and build greater trust with the audience. Through content marketing, you focus on the quality of your content and use search engine optimization to appear in your target audience’s searches.

Because you aren’t paying to promote your content, your audience sees it as more authentic and responds more favorably.

However, there was a problem. Nearly 97% of marketers started using content marketing in their business strategies. However, because of the large amount of online content, businesses struggled to get their message heard above the noise. By 2021, only 19% of companies said their content marketing efforts were very successful.

That’s when content placements started getting more attention.

The New Name for Marketing Ads: Content Placements

Paid content placements are marketing content you sponsor to ensure it appears at a specified location. They blend the best of content marketing with the visibility of traditional ads.

For example, as users read through a blog post, they might see a list of related articles at the bottom of the page. However, those articles might be sponsored content from other sites.

Consumers respond well to paid content placement because it doesn’t have the strong sales push of traditional ads. Instead, it’s regular content you might see in a Google search. However, instead of waiting for customers to find that content, you pay for it to appear where you know your customers frequently go, and it blends in with the content around it.

You might also sponsor your content to appear on social media feeds, Google searches, or other locations where it feels like the content around it. Content placement that blends into the surrounding is called native advertising. Native ads will earn a $402B annual revenue by 2025.

Examples of native advertising

Image from Outbrain

How To Use Content Placements in Healthcare Marketing

Use these three steps to help you create a paid content placement campaign that replaces your traditional advertising.

Step 1: Establish an Advertising Goal

Whether using traditional advertising or paid content placement, your goals are the same. You want to educate, convince, and convert your customers. However, content placement is more subtle in how you accomplish that goal.

Establish what your objective is and how you will measure your success. For example, are you aiming to generate leads, make sales, or increase website traffic? Make a specific and measurable goal to guide your content placement campaign and tell you how well you performed.

Step 2: Create Marketing Content

Content marketing in 2022 focuses on building a relationship with your customer. You don’t just want a single sale, which is often the primary objective of traditional ads. Instead, you want to create a longer content piece that offers value to the customer, builds trust, and encourages customer loyalty.

Some examples of effective content for paid placement campaigns include:

  • Thought leadership articles
  • News releases about company updates or product launches
  • Case studies
  • Pieces about the latest trends in healthcare

Step 3: Target Your Content Placement

Because ad blockers still exist, you won’t see many results if you distribute your content through traditional digital advertising channels. It would also lose some credibility.

Instead, consider using a native advertising strategy to place your content where your ideal audience sees it. Some examples include:

  • Paid search
  • Social media-sponsored content
  • Paid content placement on third-party websites
  • Influencer marketer channels
  • Digital or print magazines

Strategically Place Your Marketing Content

Are you having difficulty getting readers in the healthcare industry to notice your content above the oversaturation of digital marketing?

Talk to us about content placement opportunities and get your content in front of your target audience in healthcare.

How to Build a Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

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Your healthcare content marketing strategy is the plan for how to create and execute stellar marketing content. Without a plan, your content will have no aim or focus, hurting your results. However, establishing a firm goal and processes to achieve that goal can ensure you are getting the most return from your efforts and investment.

Explore how to build a content marketing strategy in healthcare that will generate leads, increase website traffic, and lead to more sales.

Key Takeaways:

  • A content marketing strategy keeps your content on track to reach your marketing goals
  • A successful content marketing strategy starts with specific and measurable goals
  • Create a content calendar to keep your message consistent across your channels
  • Continually refresh and optimize your content based on new data and reports

Why Every Healthcare Organization Needs a Content Marketing Strategy

Even though 81% of marketers say content is a key strategy, not all marketers invest in a content marketing strategy. Your strategy is your plan of action. Without a specific aim and roadmap that directs your efforts, you aren’t using a content marketing strategy–you’re just creating content.

Here are three reasons why having a strategy backing your content decisions is essential to your success.

Establishes Yourself as a Leader

Thought leadership content is content that establishes you as an authority in your industry. It addresses the latest topics and offers new and insightful ideas. Over half of primary decision-makers in companies read thought leadership each week.

Publishing regular content that builds trust, establishes yourself as an authority, and appears in front of your target audience requires a strategy that outlines how to create quality content and where to publish your content.

Increases Your Brand Awareness

Just posting content online won’t increase your brand awareness. Over 90% of online content doesn’t see any traffic. If you want your audience to see your content and respond to your message, you must first establish a strategy for creating relevant content and distributing it through the proper channels.

Aligns Your Marketing Channels

Healthcare marketing strategies usually involve several platforms, including:

  • Blogs
  • Email
  • Social media
  • Third-party websites

An aligned content marketing strategy means your message remains consistent across those channels, and you aren’t contradicting yourself or confusing your audience. Establishing a healthcare content strategy keeps all your marketing channels on the same page and working towards the same goals.

5 Steps to Building a Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

Follow these five steps to build a healthcare content marketing strategy that reaches more of your target audience and generates quality leads.

Step 1: Build a Strong Foundation

Your foundational goals will guide all your content decisions. They should align with your marketing goals but with benchmarks and objectives specific to content marketing. For example, if your marketing goal is to generate more leads, your content marketing goal might be to generate 1,000 quality leads through a social media webinar.

When creating goals, make them specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timebound. These criteria ensure you have a clear benchmark that shows you are successful.

Smart goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timebound

Image from Doug Thorpe

Step 2: Understand Your Market

Once you establish your goals, you can begin researching your market and understanding your audience. This stage gives you more information on how you can achieve those goals.

First-party data will be your most valuable source of information on your audience and market. This data is the behaviors of your current customers, website traffic reports, and responses to surveys you sent out.

When you understand your market, you know which marketing channels reach your healthcare buyers, their primary pain points, who the primary decision-makers are within those healthcare facilities, and what your competition is doing to reach this market.

Step 3: Create a Content Calendar

Your content calendar is a visual representation of your content strategy. Saying you want to post once a week isn’t enough for an effective strategy. You must plan weeks or months in advance. List the content you want to share, the channels you will use to distribute it, and how often you post.

As you brainstorm topics to fill your content calendar, use first-party data to identify common questions customers ask, issues that arise, and popular online searches in your healthcare niche. These are all sources of potential content topics where you can address relevant topics your customers are searching for and want to learn about.

A content calendar also unifies your omnichannel marketing strategies for healthcare because you can coordinate your posts and message for a consistent voice.

Here’s a general rule for how often to post content on each channel:

  • Instagram: 3-7 times a week
  • Facebook: 1-2 times a day
  • Twitter: 1-5 times a day
  • LinkedIn: 1-5 times a day
  • Blog: 2-4 times a week

Step 4: Create and Optimize Your Content

You’re ready to start creating content now that you have your posts planned. However, content creation requires additional research as you optimize each piece for search engine rankings through keywords and links or social media through hashtags and mentions.

If your content calendar is overwhelming for your in-house content team, consider outsourcing your content creation. Roughly 81% of marketers outsource content writing, among several other parts of content creation.

Types of content creation services outsourced by marketing professionals worldwide in 2020

Image from Statista

Step 5: Track and Update

Your content strategy doesn’t end once you publish your content. You must also perform tracking and report your results. Analyzing your content’s performance alerts you to any problems that might arise and highlights content that performs well.

Understanding how well your content performed is essential for measuring your success, optimizing your content, and addressing any problems in your strategy.

For example, you can use your reports to go back and update past content. Refreshing your content keeps it relevant and allows you to optimize it to the most updated customer behavior. For instance, if your readers respond better to specific wording, you can update old call-to-actions to use that new wording.

Reach More Goals with Your Content Marketing Strategy

Healthcare content marketing is constantly changing as healthcare facilities and workers’ demands and needs shift. Stay updated on today’s healthcare trends and marketing methods using our training and publications that offer insights and advice from industry experts.

Contact us to learn more about our healthcare marketing resources.

How to Map Your Content to the Customer Journey in Healthcare

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The customer journey might seem straightforward enough. A person thinks, “Hey, I need that product,” and then buys it. In fact, the customer journey is a complex five-part process. Mapping out the steps and tailoring content to target the customer at each step is a great way to bring them on board with your brand at any stage of the sales funnel. 

Below, we provide a step-by-step guide to customer journey mapping in healthcare to help you boost sales.

An Intro to Customer Journey Mapping in Healthcare

Understanding the customer journey’s steps is the first step in content mapping. Here they are:

  • Awareness: This stage makes the consumer aware of their want or need for a product or service. The consumer identifies a problem to solve. Example: A private physician’s practice recognizes the airborne infectiousness of the COVID-19 virus. The physician realizes they need FFP2 masks to protect staff and patients.
  • Evaluate: The consumer starts researching their options, comparing differing providers. They are looking for a solution to their problem. Example: The physician investigates FFP2 vendors, looking for a reliable product, affordable bulk orders, and fast delivery.
  • Decision-making: Having weighed the options, the consumer selects a provider. Example: The physician finds a vendor that meets their criteria and places an order.
  • Advocate: The consumer uses the product or service and is so happy with the experience that they refer other consumers to the product or service provider. Example: The physician is satisfied with the FFP2 product and customer experience. They recommend the vendor to a fellow healthcare practitioner who is also in need of FFP2 masks.
  • Retention: The consumer continues to use the product or service without switching to a different vendor. Example: The physician becomes a recurring customer, placing a new bulk order every month.

As you can see, customer journey mapping in healthcare allows you to step into the consumer’s shoes. With the example above, we peek into the physician’s mind and identify three selling points (reliable product, affordable bulk order, fast delivery) that would be relevant to them.

So, what is the role of content?

Content marketing can come into play at any stage of the journey. The right content format with the right message allows you to target your potential consumer effectively.

4-Step Checklist: Mapping Content to the Customer Journey

Follow these steps to create content according to customer journey mapping in healthcare.

1. Create Your Buyer Persona

Create a theoretical sketch of your target audience. This is your buyer persona. Research and write down a list of traits, like profession, demographic details (age, location, gender), professional goals and challenges, and influences (like medical journals they read).

Forbes recommends consulting frontline workers who work directly with consumers (like salespeople) to create buyer personas.

2. Draw the Map

Next, take your buyer persona and walk them through the customer journey described above. Again, this is about adopting their mindset. Ask yourself these questions at each stage:

  • Awareness: How will the person seek a solution to the problem they’ve identified, e.g., via Google, healthcare publications, industry thought-leader websites, etc.?
  • Evaluate: What points are important to the person, e.g., the price versus convenience?
  • Decision-making: What touchpoints will the person come into contact with to conclude their decision, e.g., visiting a company website versus calling a healthcare sales rep?
  • Advocate: What will convince the person to advocate the brand they end up choosing? What channels will they use to spread the word, e.g., word of mouth versus social media?
  • Retention: What will keep the person coming back, e.g., reliable delivery, special deals, etc.?

3. Perform a Content Analysis

With the answers to these questions, it will become clear what content formats you should use to guide your target consumer through the sales funnel.

Here are some ideas:

  • Awareness can be driven via info-packed content in the form of blog posts or infographics.
  • Evaluation can be informed through website landing and sales pages or live demos.
  • Decision-making might be driven via free trial sign-up pages.
  • Advocacy can be encouraged via shareable social media posts and forward-friendly emails.
  • Retention can be encouraged via engagement-boosters, like user guides, webinars, and podcasts.

4. Craft the Right Content

Finally, you’ve got the information you need to start crafting content according to your customer journey mapping in healthcare.

Let’s get back to that private physician in need of FFP2 masks, for example. He’s a GP running a family medicine practice in his early 50s, has been in private practice for 20+ years, is a family man, and prioritizes giving his patients affordable care.

When he’s looking for FFP2 masks, he’s prioritizing efficacy and convenience. He needs masks that work that will be delivered to his clinic doorstep fast. Cost-effectiveness is another concern, though: He’s willing to pay for quality but would prefer bulk pricing to keep costs down.

How are you going to get this guy’s attention at every stage of the customer journey? Maybe a blog post summarizing clinical study results on the efficacy of different types of masks will catch his eye at the awareness stage.

A clear sales page that offers bulk pricing options might be what wins him over when evaluating.

You might then follow up the sale with an email, asking if he’s satisfied – and whether he wants to place repeat orders, so he doesn’t have to think about re-ordering. There’s your retention phase.

In that email, you might include social media links to your company profiles, like Twitter. He then follows your company on Twitter.

Then, on your company’s Twitter page, you might share some infographics about the efficacy of FFP2 masks in minimizing COVID-19 transmission. The physician retweets the infographic to his followers – becoming an advocate of your brand.

We Help You Create Content Your Customers Love

Share Moving Media helps healthcare manufacturers craft authority content that captivates consumers and spurs them to take action. By boosting conversions, we help you increase your market share. We are a full-service media company, covering diverse formats from e-books to webinars and more.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more healthcare marketing tips.Contact us to take your content marketing in healthcare to the next level.

3 Ways Online Media Coverage Results in More Revenue and Brand Recall

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Reaching a wider audience. Building your reputation. Gaining credibility. You need all three to advance to greater marketing goals.

In the healthcare manufacturing industry, earning a trustworthy reputation is vital, because your products have a direct and lasting impact on people’s lives. A solid reputation also may be the deciding factor when a customer is choosing between you and a competitor.

This is where online media coverage can give your business a huge boost.

Online media coverage is PR (public relations) carried out digitally. Rather than earning mentions in print news stories or TV/radio broadcasts, you’ll pop up in social media feeds, search engine results, online articles, blogs, and other digital media formats. 

And, unlike traditional PR, you can build your online media coverage by publishing authoritative content on your website. This accomplishes three goals:

  • Showcases your expertise 
  • Builds trust with your existing audience
  • Creates inroads with a wider audience as that content is shared, reshared, and mentioned across various channels

Let’s dive deeper into the ways reputation-building marketing tactics like online media coverage boosts your brand recall and bottom-line.

3 Ways Online Media Coverage Earns Results for Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Greater visibility in online media means greater visibility for your brand. In turn, greater visibility is your ticket to more leads, more customers, and more revenue. Here’s how.

1. Online Media Coverage Builds Brand Awareness and Recall Through Greater Reach & Repetition

To ensure your target audience knows who you are and what you sell, you need the power of online media coverage in the form of content.

70% of marketers actively invest in content, so you’re in good company.

It takes many forms, but some of the best types that effectively build brand awareness and brand recall for your business include blog posts and guest blogs.

Blog Posts

These are one of the best tools for online media coverage in healthcare for a few reasons.

First, your company blog is under your complete control. It’s the ideal place to inform and educate your audience about your expertise and your products.

Second, blog posts can be endlessly repurposed. You can share and distribute posts across social media channels and reuse them to create new content assets, such as infographics and videos.

Finally, blog content created with SEO techniques gives you greater visibility in Google search results. That means, when customers are searching for a solution or expertise like yours on search engines, they’ll find you.

This cycle of sharing and repetition is inherent in creating blog content, and is one of the keys to building brand awareness online.

Guest Blogs

These have most of the same benefits as blog posts, but they offer one additional asset: they get your name, company, and expertise in front of another brand’s audience. And, if you play your cards correctly, this audience will overlap with yours.

Most guest blogging opportunities allow you to include one promotional link to your website in a byline. So, it’s a good way to expand your reach and pull in more potential customers.

2. Online Media Coverage in Healthcare Draws in Traffic & Leads

Online media coverage is a direct way to draw in more traffic and leads to your website.

It’s pretty simple. Increase the targeted places you appear on the web, and more of the right people will notice you. Produce more quality content, and you’ll increase your chances of getting shared, getting ranked on Google, and earning links from other websites.

Each of these represents another opportunity for a new customer to click your link. 

3. It Turns One-Time Customers into Repeat Buyers

In the healthcare industry, trust is at a premium. Your customers must be able to trust that your products are safe, reliable, and effective. That means they must also put their trust in your brand overall.

If you can effectively build your trustworthiness in the eyes of your audience, you’ll have an easier time turning them into not just one-time customers but repeat buyers and loyal followers as well.

Trust is never built in a day. That’s why consistent online media coverage is so important. It adds up over time. Here are a few examples:

  • You consistently appear in trusted media outlets (like a reputed digital magazine or blog).
  • You continually publish high-quality content on your website.
  • You routinely get your content shared and mentioned on trusted social media accounts with large followings.

Think of each appearance, mention, and share as a vote in your favor. As your vote count builds, so does your authority and trustworthiness. 

Build Your Online Media Coverage in the Healthcare Industry, Build your Brand Rep & Revenue

Think of online media coverage in the healthcare industry as a compounding investment.

It’s one of the top ways to get your business noticed, to reach a wider audience, and to pull in more traffic and revenue.

The more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

Ready to start boosting your online media coverage? We can help. Contact us at Share Moving Media today to get started.