Share Moving Media

A Guide to Digital PR in Healthcare and Medical Supplies

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“Advertising is what you pay for. Publicity is what you pray for.”

This phrase has long been used to differentiate public relations from advertising. Even though both fields have transitioned from traditional media (TV, radio, print) to digital formats, it remains true today. Essentially, it means that advertising relies on paid media placement, while PR consists of earned media.

Say you want to promote a product. You can buy ad space in an e-publication. Alternatively, you might write a thought leader article for that e-publication. You share your valuable expertise while also seizing the opportunity to include a subtle callout for your product. Your readership benefits – and so do you.

This mutually beneficial characteristic defines PR. The Public Relations Society of America defines PR as a “strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

Digital PR maintains this principle while using modern tools, like content marketing and social media. For those in the healthcare and medical supplies space, digital PR offers a valuable means of showcasing expertise, engaging with target audiences, and building authority in a competitive field.

This guide gives you a toolbox of techniques you can use in your digital PR strategy.

A Toolbox for Digital PR in Healthcare

Effective PR is essentially about building a reputation. This requires multiple touchpoints. You have to target different media to reach a broad audience, establish yourself as a recognized authority in your field, and build trust.

Expert Commentaries

An expert commentary is a quote within a larger story, such as a case study, community panel, or news story written by a journalist. When you are quoted in this kind of objective content, you are acting as an expert. Look to tools like HARO, which connects experts and the journalists who need their insights.

With digital PR, you additionally gain the advantage of being able to gain backlinks. You can ask the author if they are willing to add a link to your website, driving traffic to your portal and increasing SEO rank.

Bylines

With a byline, you get to be the author. Examples include guest blog posts on other websites or op-ed pieces in digital newspapers and magazines. Again, this paints you as an expert, sharing your insights.

To leverage the power of bylines, try to write unique opinion pieces. Ideally, you will also address a trending topic. People will already be searching for information about this topic and be more likely to click on your article.

Blogs

You don’t always have to look externally for ways to get your opinion out there and establish your authority status. Your company’s blog can serve as a valuable tool for sharing practical, fact-based knowledge about your health or marketing niche. Blogs can increase your ROI 13x.

Blogs are easy to share on social media, where they can be disseminated widely by other users. You can also exchange blogs with others in your field, allowing them to post on your platform in exchange for you posting on theirs. With this publishing strategy for blogs, you both gain traction and new audiences.

Webinars and Podcasts

Webinars and podcasts are like the digital PR 2.0 of expert commentaries, bylines, and blogs. Webinars allow you to offer your expert opinion in a visual format, while podcasts offer an aural format. If the concept is so similar, what’s the point?

Different people respond to different formats. You might have people in your target audience who don’t enjoy reading long-form articles or blogs – but love listening to podcasts when they’re on the go. Disseminate your voice across more channels for maximum impact.

Social Media

Don’t write off social media as “fluff.” This is a valuable broadcasting tool. Take any of the formats described above and distribute it across social channels to expand your reach. You never know who will repost or retweet a provocative piece of content, rapidly boosting your clout.

Another reason health and medical supplies professionals can’t ignore social media is the price point. Social tools are incredibly cost-efficient. Most of them are free.

We Help You Create Your PR Toolbox

Digital PR in healthcare doesn’t have to be complicated. Share Moving Media can help you create your toolkit. We are a full-service media agency, making everything from white papers to webinars. Thanks to our focus on the healthcare and medical supplies space, we are uniquely positioned to know what kind of content you need to get the PR you want.

Subscribe to our newsletter for more tips on content strategy for healthcare. For help stocking your digital PR toolkit, contact us directly.

3 Critical Metrics You Must Measure for Long-Term Brand Loyalty

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Customer loyalty is one element of success for any business. Once you’ve won a client’s trust, they will return to you repeatedly without new sales and marketing efforts on your part. If they love your product or service, they may even recommend it to others, serving as a free brand ambassador for your business. Brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing is especially critical due to the competitive nature of the industry.

The healthcare marketplace is challenging. You’ve undoubtedly experienced the struggle at some point – having difficulty getting new leads or, even worse, thinking you’ve locked in a new lead, only to have it snatched away by a competitor.

In this business, long-term brand loyalty is worth working for.

But how can you know if you’re succeeding in maintaining that high level of trust that will keep a customer by your side for months, years, or even decades?

You can use a few metrics to check if your brand is resonating with consumers and winning them over.

Understanding the Value of Brand Loyalty

We aren’t alone in our emphasis on the importance of brand loyalty. In the year ahead, retention marketing is expected to be one of the biggest marketing trends. Instead of exclusively trying to attract new customers, professional marketers are refocusing on keeping existing customers happy.

Why the shift?

It’s a simple numbers game: With effective retention efforts, you can enjoy steady sales without paying big bucks for lead generation. This allows for a lower cost-per-sale investment overall.

Ideas for Boosting Brand Loyalty in Healthcare Manufacturing

There are a few ways you can nurture brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing.

You can try personalized cross-selling and up-selling, for example. Check your database of existing clients. What products are they ordering, and what products could they benefit from? Giving customized recommendations for useful items your customers can actually use shows you’re paying attention to their needs.

Think of it like the “Customers Also Bought” function on retail e-commerce websites like Amazon. If you buy a flashlight, do you also need to buy batteries? If you buy leather boots, do you need a leather protectant spray? Those little suggestions are surprisingly useful sometimes.

Another tactic is to boost brand engagement with useful content. For healthcare manufacturers, this could come in the form of information-packed blogs, webinars, or social media content that’s relevant to your target audience.

Notice, we said information-packed – not promotional! Say you sell cardiac stents, for example. Instead of writing a blog that pushes your product, write a blog about the latest stent research or live-tweet an event, like the World Congress on Cardiac Surgery and Medical Devices.

Why do these techniques work?

They show that you care about your consumer and your consumer’s wants and needs.

According to Harvard Business Review, successful modern brands don’t focus on buyers but on users. That means instead of aggressively pushing products – consumers are too savvy for that now – they aim to make the consumer’s life easier. Isn’t that what we all want?

3 Metrics for Measuring Brand Loyalty

So, now you’ve got some idea of how to harness brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing. But how can you be sure your efforts are working? 

Let these three metrics be your guide.

1. Content Engagement

We talked about using content to engage with customers and nurture their loyalty above. To see if your content strategy is working, you have to check your engagement levels. The precise metric will vary depending on the content format.

For social media, engagement can be measured using figures like clicks, likes, and shares.

Also, don’t forget the comments! A Facebook post with 500 likes but zero comments is arguably less valuable than a post with 300 likes but 100 comments.

Why? Comments show a more active interest. They require more than the click of a button. Comments can spark debates and discussions, allowing your brand to reply directly to consumers. This creates a more personalized engagement situation.

For podcasts, engagement might be measured by the number of listens, downloads, and likes. For webinars, it’s all about how many people tuned in. Email, however, is about the number of opens and clicks your content gets. Metrics need to be tailored to the given format.

2. Repurchasing Figures

Your customers can tell you whether they’re loyal to your brand or not – and they can do it without saying a word. Periodically revisit your sales data and check client behavior over set periods (e.g., monthly, quarterly, annually).

Specifically, look for repurchasing levels. This allows you to calculate the overall retention rate (proportion of returning customers versus new customers).

Analyzing repurchasing metrics may also allow you to regenerate leads. For example, if a customer who was a regular has suddenly dropped off, follow up. Did something happen that turned them off? Targeting issues will ultimately allow you to improve brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing.

Also, keep an eye out for multiple product purchases. This is a great sign. It often means a customer was happy enough about their product purchase – and their experience with you as a provider – and thus expanded their order.

Conversely, follow up on orders that have decreased.

3. Reported Customer Satisfaction

Last but not least, if you want the harsh truths as to how engaged and loyal your customers are, go to the source: ask them directly.

Inviting your customers to provide feedback shows them you care about their opinion. It also gives them the chance to tell you where they’d like to see improvement – and gives you the opportunity to make changes accordingly.

Survey tools like SurveyMonkey are a great way to solicit feedback.

Keep your survey questions pointed and specific. Don’t just ask, “Are you happy with your experience?” Ask about their satisfaction with particular parts of the customer process, like placing an order, paying, or follow-up customer care.

Get Support for Your Brand Messaging in Healthcare

Share Moving Media is a full-service media company that supports healthcare suppliers in building trust among their consumers and increasing their market share.

We help our clients leverage top-quality content to boost brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Marketing Minute, for more best practices.

Want help with your healthcare marketing? Contact us.

6 Content Optimization Tweaks for Effective Branding in Healthcare

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Why do you, as a healthcare supplier, publish content? 

You want to demonstrate your authority as a brand and set yourself apart from competitors, right?

You can’t accomplish any of your goals without solid branding throughout your content.

Branding your healthcare content isn’t as simple as tossing in a logo and colors. Instead, it requires a more nuanced strategy.

Today, we’ll cover some untapped content optimization tweaks for effective branding in healthcare to solidify your presence. 

6 Content Optimization Tips to Improve Branding in Healthcare

For healthcare suppliers and manufacturers, branding cannot be an afterthought. You must incorporate branding throughout every piece of content you publish. 

In some cases, branding will indeed include obvious logos and colors. In others, however, branding will ooze from your content in less noticeable ways. 

Potential buyers and current customers need familiarity with your content. Familiarity breeds trust. Trust encourages loyalty. 

Consistent branding is especially important for healthcare suppliers where the buyer’s journey is long, and the stakes are high. Your branding must be standardized and preserved over time. Make it your goal to prioritize branding in every comment, blog post, tweet, video, and more.

1. Look for Content Gaps to Position Yourself

7% of Google searches – over 1 billion a day and 70,000 every minute – relate to healthcare. While some come from consumers, many are doctors and decisionmakers searching for answers to their problems and questions.

Your job is to figure out which of those queries you can answer. 

Start with your competitors– research their content strategy to see which topics they already cover thoroughly. From there, study your audience’s pain points to find a content gap and focus on creating content within that arena.

2. Develop a Thought Leadership Strategy

Thought leadership isn’t reserved for Silicon Valley startups, and it’s not about nuance for its own sake. Thought leadership is about leading in your industry through well-researched content and conversations – and it’s an important part of content optimization for branding in healthcare.

In an industry like healthcare, it’s especially vital to use real author names for your content instead of generic terms like “staff writer.” Make sure only experts in your field create your content and use the same author names to build familiarity. 

All of Share Moving Media’s unique publications fill a distinct gap as thought leaders. The Journal of Healthcare Contracting, for example, is the only publication dedicated to the healthcare supply chain, and readers rely on us for the authoritative content we provide.

3. Incorporate Your Identity into Media Content

Multimedia content is your big chance to incorporate branding like logos and colors into your content marketing:

  • Custom email newsletter and social media header images
  • Adding a color filter to your images and graphics
  • Using your brand’s color scheme for infographics and social graphics
  • Adding a watermark to your image content
  • Including a brand logo in the corner of your videos 
  • Using your brand color palette for video production

First, make sure every piece of multimedia you publish is authoritative, useful, and relevant to your audience. You don’t want your brand associated with generic or boring content. 

4. Settle on a Specific Brand Voice

Remember, branding must be standardized and preserved. You can’t preserve your branding if you don’t create a standard. Comprehensive brand guidelines are key. 

Most brands know to include logo and color rules in their guidelines, but they neglect voice and tone. 

Setting the standard for voice and tone ensures your blogs, videos, and social media posts all sound the same no matter who writes them. A consistent tone might seem subtle, and it certainly is. However, a consistent tone also has a huge impact on trust and familiarity. 

5. Interact with Your Followers

Don’t be a broadcaster. A broadcaster publishes content to social media but never interacts with their followers or shares content from other accounts. 

Social media is most useful as a conversation or relationship-building tool. For healthcare suppliers and manufacturers, casual conversations in your comments and tweet replies go miles towards humanizing your brand. 

6. Include Emotional Social Share Triggers Throughout Your Content

Creating useful content is important, but usefulness alone won’t earn you shares. You must trigger an emotion if you want people to share your content with others. 

If sharing the content will demonstrate that someone is a good person, they’re more likely to share it:

  • People want to look intelligent and informed on the most current medical best practices (urgency, importance)
  • People share content to help others, like tips or insider information (exclusive, interesting, unusual)
  • People want to show their humanitarian nature by sharing content on important causes (heartwarming, optimism, inclusivity, sadness)
  • People share content that sparks conversations (intrigue, excitement, surprise)

Certain emotions work better than others. Consider what emotions you want associated with your brand. 

Prioritize Content Optimization for Branding in Healthcare and Build Better Relationships

Consistent branding in content humanizes your business and is necessary for technical fields like healthcare supplies. Content is your big chance to connect with decisionmakers at offices and hospitals and form professional relationships. 

Use branding to give them something to remember and solidify your presence as a thought leader in your industry.

Content from Share Moving Media reaches the offices and homes of several thousand healthcare decision-makers across the country. Get in touch with us to start planning your comprehensive content strategy today!

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!

How to Make Your Content Sell When You Never Meet the End Customer

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A guide to successful content marketing in the healthcare supply chain.

Content is a global industry and it’s more accessible than ever before. You can hammer out a blog at your computer and have your words read by someone you’ve never met, in a country you’ve never visited.

The great news is that this gives you an enormous scope. You can reach consumers across the state, the nation, or even the world. The bad news? You lose specificity. You lose personalization. And you lose trust – the same trust that is essential to successfully selling an idea, a service, or a product.

Those drawbacks might make it sound like effective content marketing – especially in the competitive healthcare supply chain market – is a losing battle. But it doesn’t have to be.

This guide lays out what it takes to craft compelling healthcare content marketing.

Hurdles to Effective Content for Healthcare Sales

In a globalized world, the key to creating content that converts is to overcome the two “T”s: Targeting and Trust.

1. Targeting

You’ve written an original blog. It’s informative. It’s eloquent. It’s a masterpiece. But if you don’t get that blog in front of the right eyes, it’s useless. Being able to sift through the massive content marketplace and get the right people looking at the right content is critical.

2. Trust

Sales used to be personal. In the ’50s, salespeople went door-to-door to peddle their wares – or, in the case of the healthcare industry, from one healthcare provider’s office or hospital to the next.

Today? Not so much. With modern technology – fast internet, fast communications, fast logistics – sales has become just as far-reaching as the global content industry.

This has created a trust issue with consumers. When it comes to content, research reveals that people distrust internet information, especially social media. That’s bad news for content marketing, which is increasingly digital-reliant.

How to Craft Content That Converts

The same tools and technologies that have created a content marketplace hampered by targeting and trust issues can be leveraged in your interests.

Here’s how to tame the beast.

Understand Your Customer

Just because you never meet your end customer in the flesh doesn’t mean that you can’t develop an understanding of who they are and what they want. Develop a customer journey map to articulate customer personas, allowing you to target different content marketing types to different niches. This helps you create content for healthcare sales that is meaningful to the end customer – even if you never meet them.

As you map out the customer journey, consider different decision-maker roles. Who makes the choices about what the consumer receives? How do you reach that audience? Determining the gatekeepers will help you define relevant brand messaging in healthcare.

Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader

There are a few essential keys to success in sales. Expertise is one. The best salespersons are experts in their fields, backed by industry knowledge. Study, learn, and establish an opinion in your area, whether it’s catheters or stents.

This opens the gates to healthcare organization thought leadership. You can become a thought leader by publishing blogs, opinion pieces, or investigator-initiated studies in respected healthcare publications. Target both digital and physical media for maximum impact.

Get Personal

Don’t rely on just one channel to sell your content. You have many avenues available to you. A multi-platform approach encompassing both inbound and outbound marketing allows you to diversify your target audience.

Speaking at events, live streaming seminars, or participating in podcasts further confirms your position as a thought leader. It also lets people get to know you. Once people have a face to the name, they feel more connected, and you start building trust. 

Run with it. Get personal. Talk about your background. Did you spend years touring hospitals as a medical sales rep? Have you spent time working in a lab in healthcare R&D? Are you personally invested in the message, product, or service you are selling? You should be. And you should make that clear to consumers.

Be Adaptive

Another trait of great salespersons is that they know when to pivot. One of the best things about content marketing is that it’s measurable. Don’t just put content out there and hope for the best—Set KPIs (key performance indicators).

How many subscribers does your newsletter have? How many people follow you on Twitter? How many unique clicks did your last thought-leader article in a healthcare online magazine receive? Did those clicks convert to new contacts or, better yet, sales?

There are many healthcare marketing tools available to help you craft and track content. If something isn’t working, reexamine your approach. Is it the medium, the message, or a combination of both? With KPIs, you can better understand that elusive end customer and tailor your marketing accordingly.

Get More Tips on Content Strategy for Healthcare

Here at Share Moving Media, we know how to craft content for healthcare sales. As a full-service media company, we create articles, webinars, podcasts, e-books, blogs, and more. Our mission is to give clients the tools they need to increase their market share.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more best practice tips and tricks. Interested in collaborating? Then contact us today!