Share Moving Media

Why Most Healthcare Content Marketing Fails

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Anyone can do content marketing, but few get it right. Healthcare distributors and manufacturers can spend hours on content but never see a single quality return. Thankfully, there is a way to avoid wasting resources on failed content and consistently see positive healthcare content marketing results.

Learn three pitfalls every B2B content marketer should avoid and three strategies to help your content hit the mark every time.

Key Takeaways:

  • Healthcare content marketing should be audience-centric, which first requires a deep understanding of who your customers are and their needs.
  • Your content should be easy to read and understand, even when addressing complex topics.
  • Let your creativity shine through your text by including images, video, and engaging language.

What Is the Current State of Healthcare Content Marketing?

The healthcare marketing industry, as a whole, has a higher-than-normal conversion rate. Marketers see 5.6% of leads turn into customers, compared to the average conversion rate of 3.9% across all industries.

That rate only shows half the picture. Another pattern you might notice from the conversion rate is that industries with high-value or expensive products also have a lower conversion rate. While healthcare facilities like hospitals might enjoy that high conversion rate, manufacturers and suppliers often don’t see those same numbers.

The average B2B conversion rate is 2.23%, considerably less than the overall healthcare industry.

You aren’t alone if you are seeing those less-than-stellar results from your content marketing. Don’t let those numbers get you discouraged about your content promotion and throw out all your work. Over 60% of leading B2B marketers use a content marketing strategy to get where they are.

You can also see that same success if you use what they learned and avoid major healthcare content marketing pitfalls.

3 Reasons Why Healthcare Content Marketing Fails

Healthcare content marketing can fail for dozens of reasons, but the most common B2B content marketing mistakes fall within three categories.

1. Don’t Understand the Audience

If you don’t know who your content is for, it will never connect with your audience. Over 45% of B2B marketers struggle with identifying the audience for their content. Copying the style and format of others in the industry isn’t the answer. For example, if you write healthcare marketing content the same way hospital marketers write their content, you won’t see the same success even though you are both in healthcare marketing.

Healthcare manufacturers and suppliers are working with businesses, not individuals. Within healthcare businesses, your specific organization will have a small number of hospitals and healthcare facilities that would use your supplies and products. If you want to resonate with those businesses, you must write to the primary decision-makers, use a higher level of content, and address business challenges like revenue and productivity.

2. Don’t Have Scannable Content

Physicians work over 50 hours a week on average, with nearly a quarter of doctors working over 60 hours a week. Content that is hard to read won’t resonate with time-strapped hospital workers looking for solutions.

Long paragraphs, no headlines, and industry jargon are all ways to turn your target audience off your content. Instead, placing scannable headlines that let healthcare workers easily find the most relevant information and plenty of white space and lists will encourage more of your audience to spend a few minutes of their valuable time reading what you have to say.

3. Content Has No Real Value

Marketers often focus on quantity over quality. As a result, many will publish new content multiple times each week. However, if your content only adds to the noise of daily blog posts without bringing any unique value, it wastes time and energy.

Healthcare content writing should not be full of fluff or repeat the same information your competitors covered. Instead, if you want your content to stand out, it must present old information in a new way or share new knowledge to leave readers with a fresh perspective and valuable insights that will help them improve their company.

How to Avoid Those Pitfalls

Include these essential elements in your B2B healthcare content marketing strategy to help your content stand above your competitors.

Focus on Your Audience

Audience-centered content is the only type of content that will see high conversion rates. You may be tempted to focus on how great your company is and the incredible features of your new products. However, that information is meaningless to your audience unless you can relate it to them and how you and your products will address their challenges.

You should write your content with empathy and understanding that places you alongside your reader instead of speaking down to them or criticizing their struggles.

Be a Thought Leader

Your content is your business’s chance to shine above the competition by positioning you as a reliable expert in healthcare. Thought leadership content will express your opinion and share valuable insights about healthcare in a way that builds trust and respect from your readers.

Some benefits of writing thought leadership content include:

  • Boosts your reliability as a company
  • Increases your brand awareness
  • Gives you credibility and authority in your industry
  • Inspires your readers

The 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study showed that 51% of executives had increased the amount of thought leadership they read. Additionally, 54% of decision-makers spend over an hour a week reading thought leadership content.

Make Your Content Unique

A misconception in B2B content marketing is that your content must be formal and rigid. While you should retain professionalism, that doesn’t go together with stiff content. Your decision-makers are still human and work in a stress-filled environment. Your content can be a mental escape that uses a variety of colors, interesting writing styles, media, and current healthcare content marketing trends that will capture their attention.

Content marketing for healthcare can also include channels outside your website and blog. For example, you can reach more of your audience by tapping into social media, videos, podcasts, and infographics.

The video below shows examples of companies using these three tips for successful B2B content marketing.

Create a Different Type of Healthcare Content

Why settle for average conversion rates when you can position your organization among the leaders in your industry? Take a few minutes to evaluate your current content marketing strategies and look for any areas holding you back.

Contact us about our publications that provide the latest healthcare insights to help you provide valuable content.

Why Content Marketing for Distribution is Essential

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Distributors have the unique position of working with a variety of audiences. You want to connect to manufacturers and healthcare facilities that want to purchase your supplies. As a result, content marketing for distribution varies from traditional marketing because of your different goals. However, content marketing is just as effective for you as other B2B businesses.

Learn why content marketing is relevant for distributors and how you can build a winning marketing strategy for distribution.

Key Takeaways:

  • Content marketing will help you stand out from your competition as a trustworthy distributor.
  • Content marketing for distribution requires different strategies depending on whether you are reaching manufacturers or healthcare facilities.
  • Your content will lead your customers through their sales journey with easily accessed information and products.

The Role of Marketing for Distribution

Content marketing for distribution is the online materials you create to promote your distribution services to manufacturers or products to healthcare facilities. It helps you educate your readers, build relationships with your clients, and offer customized solutions to help your clients meet their goals.

Benefits of Having Content Marketing for Distribution

Content marketing for distributors helps you reach more customers by positioning yourself as a valuable asset to your specific audience. Here are three specific ways content marketing benefits distributors.

Stand out from your Competition

Content marketing is your way of shining a light on your company’s best features and solutions. Without content marketing, your business can easily blend in with other distributors and have no differentiating value that will make manufacturers and buyers choose you over your competition.

Generate Quality Leads

Content marketing targets and attracts quality leads that are most likely to turn into conversions. Instead of blindly plastering your business name publicly in hopes that someone will respond, you can use keywords and strategic channel placement tactics to target healthcare facilities most likely to need your product.

Build Trust with your Clients

Manufacturers need to trust that you will sell their products and healthcare workers want to know they can depend on your supplies to save lives. Just telling these customers that you are reliable isn’t enough. They want proof through numbers, testimonials, case studies, and specific benefits.

Your healthcare content marketing is a means for sharing that proof and establishing yourself as an industry leader so that more manufacturers and healthcare facilities will choose you. 

The following survey results show some other benefits of B2B content marketing.

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5 Factors in a Successful Content Marketing Strategy for Distributors

Use these five strategies in your distribution content marketing to successfully reach your audience with relevant content that leads to more clients.

1. Establish Audience Groups

Distributors’ two primary audiences are the manufacturer and the buyer. However, the buyer can have many personas like healthcare facilities, retailers, or end-users, depending on the products.

Your manufacturing audience wants to know you are a reliable distributor who understands the industry and can match their products to their ideal audience. However, retailers, healthcare facilities, and end-users want to know about the product and its unique benefit to them.

2. Create Niche Content

Half of B2B content marketers focus on building brand awareness and interest in their products through niche content. This step is essential for attracting leads that will turn into conversions that bring in revenue.

What content should distributors include in their digital marketing strategies?

Your content should offer valuable insights about your products, help buyers and manufacturers improve their supply chain strategies, and build trust with your clients. When you create thought leadership content, you establish yourself as a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert in the industry.

The following video will explore specific types of effective B2B content and the return you can expect from using those strategies in your company.

3. Streamline the Purchase Process

Businesses complete 56% of the purchase process before contacting your sales team. They do this through research, benefits comparisons, and building a list of requirements before reaching out to distributors. If you wait to pass on information once you connect with clients, you miss out on nearly two-thirds of their sales journey.

Instead, you can help your customers choose their best options by posting relevant information that leads them through the purchase process with easily accessible contact information, product details, and distribution options. By streamlining the purchase process, you remain in control over what information they read and can help them decide faster.

Connecting to your customers throughout their journey also opens more doors for upselling and cross-selling because you can offer solutions earlier in their buying process.

4. Offer an Omnichannel Experience

To stay competitive in a saturated content market, 58% of businesses will use at least three different marketing channels to promote their content, often repurposing content across channels. Distributors can use the same platforms as other B2B content marketers, including:

  • Blogs
  • Social media
  • Email campaigns
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • eBooks
  • Whitepages

Below are the top five content marketing channels today.

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5. Network through Your Content

Throughout this discussion on content marketing, trust has come up several times because it is a crucial part of healthcare sales. One way to establish trust is through third-party approval like testimonials and feedback that you can share in your content. However, an underutilized method of building trust is guest posting.

When a healthcare manufacturer is looking for a distributor, they might start their research by asking their network of other manufacturers for recommendations. The same applies to healthcare facilities that need new supplies.

You can get your name in front of more clients by guest posting on reputable channels and current client websites. As a guest post, your content appears more authentic because it has the support of an authority figure your clients already trust.

Invest in Your Distribution Marketing Strategy

Are you looking to boost your content marketing strategy to reach more clients?

Share Moving Media shares news and information about healthcare distribution that keeps you informed about the latest trends in the industry. In addition, our Repertoire Magazine is the only publication for healthcare distribution and provides valuable insights you can use to create content that converts.

Contact us to learn more about our publications and educational materials to help you create high-quality marketing content. 

Increasing Your Market Share with Share Moving Media

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Are you ready to learn how to increase your market share and crush your competition? It all starts with marketing. We’ll take it a step further and say that marketing with the right content is crucial for building a solid foundation – a launchpad for building relationships and winning clients.

At Share Moving Media, our people are passionate about creating and distributing the right content to the right audience at the right time. Our full-service media and content team will create articles, webinars, videos, blog posts, graphics, and other forms of media to help you drum up new business. We also offer live events and educational services to help your team learn and grow in the right direction.

How We Can Help You Increase Your Market Share

Our goal is to help best-in-class medical suppliers – including distributors and manufacturers – gain more share of their market. Explicitly, we help our customers attract new clients by creating intriguing, relevant, engaging, and timely content their audiences are craving.

You can no longer get away with only highlighting the features and benefits of your products and services, then call it a day. Modern consumers need to understand the “why” and “how” behind the “what.”

For example, instead of running through a list of features your product offers, share how it can change your client’s life. Tell them why they can’t live without it. This may sound like a tall order. That’s why we’re here – to create strategic content your clients want to consume.

Why Does Your Business Need Content to Gain Market Share?

It takes time to build trust and turn leads into loyal customers. Content marketing is the perfect solution. It can help you move prospective clients successfully down the sales funnel – through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. 

Here are three reasons content marketing is a game-changer for manufacturing businesses in the healthcare industry.

1. Gain a deeper understanding of your niche, audience, and competition.

To build an effective content marketing strategy, we’ll research your specific market, target audience, and direct competitors to develop a holistic picture of your organization. We’ll learn what sets you apart and makes you unique. Then we’ll help you market why you’re the best choice, emphasizing your quality services and trustworthy products. We’ll find a way to distinguish your offerings from your competitors’ and help you build your reputation as an industry leader.

2. Engage new and existing prospects, leads, and customers.

Your clients know what they want. Sometimes the best way to find answers to questions your team is asking is to ask the source: your target audience. Sending out surveys, engaging with customers on social media and online forums, communicating via email, and sharing relevant information online and in-person are valuable tactics for driving higher engagement.

Once we’ve identified the best channels for reaching and engaging your ideal consumers, we’ll target them using content they won’t be able to resist.

3. Build trust and earn long-term loyalty.

Providing content for consumers at every level of the sales funnel can help you attract your ideal audience at any point in their buying journey. Connect with prospects just starting their search and nurture them until they’re ready to buy. 

  • Awareness stage: Content at the top of the funnel may include educational videos, magazine articles, and blog posts that attract strangers to your company. 
  • Consideration stage: Content in the middle of the funnel may include ebooks, case studies, and podcasts that further engage users and continue building trust with them.
  • Decision stage: For leads at the bottom of the funnel, you can offer training, webinars, and other resources to prove you’re the best solution to their problem.

You can accomplish all this and more through strategic content production and distribution.

Who Can Benefit from Joining Forces with Us?

We work specifically with manufacturers and distributors in the healthcare world. If you’re a medical supplier selling products to distributors or end-users, we would love to partner with you.

How We Help You Gain Market Share

We’re dedicated to providing our customers with the tools and resources required to increase market share. We can develop unique content to help your business reach prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey. We’ll help you attract, engage, and delight customers, converting them into long-term brand ambassadors. Here are some options to consider: 

  • Blog posts
  • Magazine articles
  • Online publications 
  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Online training
  • Podcasts
  • Ebooks
  • Case studies
  • And more

Gain Market Share with Strategic Content

Are you ready to take the next step toward building a highly engaged audience for your business? Share Moving Media would love to partner with you to help you beat your competition and increase your market share. Not only can content help boost your sales and ROI. It can help you gain a loyal client base, become a leader in your field, and maintain success for years into the future.

Contact us to learn more.

5 Tips for Effective Healthcare Organization Content Marketing

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Publishing great content helps establish your brand’s expertise and authority while building trust among your audience. For healthcare organization content marketing, this opportunity comes with benefits and challenges.

This article explores best practices to help your content marketing strategy succeed.

The pandemic impacted how many businesses approach content marketing. As consumer needs and expectations shift, marketers face new challenges to make an impact on their audience.

If you’re ready to boost your healthcare organization’s online presence with the power of content marketing, keep reading to learn more.

Key Takeaways:

  • Content marketing is more cost-effective than traditional forms of marketing, and it generates more traffic and leads.
  • Healthcare organizations are in a unique position to leverage content marketing since many people seek health-related information online to self-diagnose or research treatment options.
  • Content creators should understand their target audience and focus on their area of expertise as they plan out a content calendar for consistent publishing.

Why Should Healthcare Organizations Prioritize Content Marketing?

The third most common online activity in the United States is seeking online health information. Eighty percent of adults have sought health-related information, especially about a specific disease (66%) or a treatment plan (56%).

Organic content is a highly effective marketing channel for healthcare organizations. Mayo Clinic, for example, has become a leading online authority with global reach thanks to strategic content marketing. If you’ve ever Googled a health-related query, you’ve probably seen a Mayo Clinic article ranking among the top results.

Content marketing isn’t a new concept, but it has become a critical component of most marketing strategies over the last few years. Nearly 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.

When you consider that content marketing costs an average of 62% less than traditional forms while yielding approximately three times as many leads, it’s easy to see why.

Healthcare organization content marketing allows professionals to reach their audience online. Well-written, informative, relevant content builds authority, fosters trust in an institution, drives organic traffic, and continues to perform for months and even years after being published.

5 Tips to Optimize Your Healthcare Organization Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is has become a highly competitive field. Simply churning out large quantities of poor content isn’t going to help your brand rank on the search engine results page (SERP) or give you a return on your investment.

To create effective content, follow these tips:

1. Understand Your Target Audience 

Before you start writing, you need to know who will be reading your content. It’s tempting to write about topics you enjoy, but it’s much more important to write about what your audience wants to read instead.

For example, is your target audience potential patients or medical suppliers? Is your goal to provide health advice or boost medical device sales? The topic, tone, and vocabulary in your content will be drastically different for those intended audiences.

Take the time to research your audience demographics and understand what kind of content they prefer to engage with. From there, you can start brainstorming topics and determine what content forms and channels you’ll use. 

2. Focus on Your Expertise 

The most successful content marketing strategies target a well-defined niche rather than a broad subject. “Healthcare” or “medical field” is way too vague and has too much competition with thousands of other content creators targeting those keywords.

Your healthcare organization’s content marketing plan should focus on its area of expertise. Not only does this increase your chances for Google to understand your website and rank your content, but it also allows you to build upon your authority in your field.

If you’re an eye doctor, for example, readers are likely to trust your articles about eye health. They’re much less likely to feel you’re qualified to give advice for a sprained ankle. 

3. Write Like a Human 

Most people searching for health information on Google won’t be looking for advanced scientific studies filled with technical jargon.

Healthcare organization content marketing can sometimes struggle to find balance between demonstrating academic authority on a subject and connecting with average readers.

Remember that search engine optimization (SEO) ranks content that is useful and easy to read. Keep your audience in mind and use language they understand. Break up text with headlines, bulleted lists, and graphics so people can easily skim to find information.

People like to feel connected with doctors and medical staff on a human level. Encourage this by sharing videos, posting on social media, creating interactive content, and engaging with your audience in the comments.

While engagement is important, your organization should have clear guidelines set in place for appropriate conduct. All content must comply with HIPAA, and your team should know when to escalate issues and advise people to contact 911 for medical emergencies.

4. Use a Content Calendar for Consistency 

Data suggests that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. That impromptu approach often leads to topics that haven’t been thought out, long periods between publishing, and last-minute scrambles to think of an idea.

In addition to creating high-quality content that meets basic SEO guidelines, publishing consistently is one of the keys to a successful marketing strategy. A content calendar will help your team stay organized, plan ahead, brainstorm ideas, and stay on track to publish great content consistently. 

5. Refresh and Republish Old Content 

The biggest investment with content marketing is time. For that reason, republishing old posts that are still relevant is an effective way to get more mileage out of that content rather than rewriting it from scratch.

In some cases, this technique can maintain or even improve content traffic and SERP rankings. When repurposing existing content, make sure to:

  • Update old outbound links to more recent sources and studies
  • Verify that internal links aren’t broken
  • Refresh the content
  • Update the headline (if applicable) to more accurately target a focus keyword

Develop an Impactful Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

The pandemic changed the way people seek, view, and interact with content online. Is your team ready to face the challenges of content marketing and adapt to the ever-changing guidelines and best practices?

Following the tips outlined above will help you get started on the right foot, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Contact us to speak with our seasoned team of healthcare content creators and see how we can help you plan a winning marketing strategy today. 

Introductory Guide to Content Marketing for Healthcare Distributors

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Content marketing for healthcare distributors is one of the best ways for you to connect to medical facilities and hospitals while building trust. However, developing a marketing strategy specifically for the healthcare industry doesn’t happen overnight.

That’s why we have this introductory guide for you. First, we will look at what content marketing for healthcare entails then how you can start using it in your business.

Key Takeaways:

  • Content marketing is a top priority for most B2B marketers today.
  • Create an actionable strategy with set goals before creating marketing content.
  • Healthcare marketing requires an extra level of empathy than other B2B strategies.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is using online mediums to connect to your audience. It differs from traditional sales approaches because you often aren’t selling a specific service or product. Instead, you build brand awareness and develop relationships with your clients and potential leads through quality content.

Consumers respond favorably to content marketing because it is a breath of fresh air compared to the bombardment of over 5,000 ads a day. Instead, content marketing gives something back to consumers through information, free products, and community.

Common types of content marketing include:

  • Websites and blogs
  • Emails
  • Ebooks
  • Videos
  • Social media posts

Why is Content Marketing Important for Healthcare Distributors?

Healthcare distributors can use content marketing to build trust with hospitals, pharmacies, medical professionals, nursing homes, and more. You can have a virtually limitless reach and connect to leads you may not have connected with through other sales and marketing tactics.

Content marketing uses around 26% of B2B marketing budgets and is the top priority of 80% of marketers. If you effectively execute a quality marketing strategy, you will see:

  • Broader brand awareness
  • Higher quality leads
  • More loyal customers
  • Better search engine ranking
  • Higher industry authority

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

You would be unwise to drive around a new city without a map. Yet, that is what you are doing if you begin using content marketing without first establishing a strategy. It will save you time and resources by showing where you are, where you want to go, and the most effective route to achieving that goal.

Often, businesses will hire a content marketing manager to help in strategy development to ensure they consider all angles of their approach.

Here are the six essential steps to creating an efficient content marketing strategy for the healthcare distribution industry.

Step 1: Decide on your mission and goals. Begin by asking yourself what you want to accomplish in the long run.

Step 2: Choose a metric for measuring your success to know how well your strategies are working. Tracking your progress with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) also alerts you to potential issues so you can resolve them before they hurt your growth.

Step 3: Decide on an audience based on the type of healthcare facilities most likely to purchase from you, who the decision-maker is within the department, where the facilities are located, and the size or budget of the facility that is most likely able to afford your products.

Step 4: Take inventory of what content marketing practices you already have in a place like your website or social accounts. You may even have some posts or blog articles written that you can spruce up.

Step 5: Decide what channels or content you still need to add to reach your goals.

Step 6: Create an actionable plan including a content calendar, specific deadlines, and managers for each marketing task. 

Now you are ready to start creating consistent, quality content.

5 Tips for Content Marketing for Healthcare Distributors

Here are five tips to apply to every piece of content you create so that you are reaching your intended audience, creating relatable content, and increasing your conversions.

1. Target Your Audience

Your ideal customer profile will help you create content targeted to your intended audience. You can educate, promote, and build trust with your market through engaging blog posts, social media content, and videos. Then, by implementing keywords specific to the healthcare industry, you are more likely to attract quality web traffic.

Your customer profile will also tell you where to locate possible new customers. For instance, LinkedIn has over 722 million professional users and 61 million senior-level decision-makers – making it the leading B2B marketing platform today.

2. Capture Their Attention

Creating content doesn’t guarantee your audience will read what you’ve written. That’s why understanding current content trends is essential, as that will guide you in choosing how you will capture your audience’s attention through optimized content, so they read past the headline.

Startling statistics, images, short paragraphs, and creative headlines are just a few ways you can reel your audience into your content.

One study showed that video content will be the top area of content marketing investment for most B2B in 2022 due to its high rate of engagement.

3. Back Your Claims with Statistics

Doctors and medical professionals aren’t wowed by fluff. They can see right through empty sales talk. Instead, they want proof of claims you make. Statistics and facts build trust with your audience and raise the quality of your article.

When you write an article on how your new device will transform a patient’s life – back that claim up with case studies, measurable metrics, and real stories of changed lives.

4. Have Empathy for Your Audience

Healthcare professionals have emotionally draining jobs, compounded by the effects of COVID-19. Therefore, this is one area where healthcare marketing differs from other B2B marketing tactics since your audience needs more empathy and emotional awareness.

You can show you truly understand and empathize with your audience by being sensitive in your wording, focusing on your product’s positive impact on their patients, and showing you understand and empathize with their work.

5. Create a Call-to-Action

The best marketing content always offers the next step. For example, you don’t want your audience to get to the end of an engaging blog post, then close the tab and never interact with your business again. Instead, give a call-to-action that tells your audience what steps they can do next, such as signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, or calling your business to find out more.

Start Creating Your Marketing Content

Share Moving Media has been working with healthcare distributors for over 27 years. Our communication and educational services help you grow your marketing strategy and achieve greater success.

Contact us to learn how we can help you create content that moves market share.