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

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

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

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

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

What is Brand Storytelling in Healthcare?

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

  • Entertainment
  • Education
  • Universal
  • Memorable
  • Organized

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

Why is Brand Storytelling Important?

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

Why is brand storytelling successful? Consider the following benefits: 

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

How to Create Healthcare Brand Storytelling for Your Brand

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

Data-Driven

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

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

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

Audience-Focused

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

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

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

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

Strategic Brand Storytelling for Your Healthcare Business

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

How Content Marketing Aids Healthcare Sales Reps at Explaining Product Value

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

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

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

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

What is Sales Enablement for Healthcare?

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

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

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

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

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

6 Types of Content that Aids Healthcare Sales Reps

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

1.Competitor Research

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

2. Case Studies

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

You can develop case studies in several ways:

  • Written testimonials
  • Video interviews
  • Reviews

4. Blog Posts

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

4. Ebooks or Whitepapers

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

5. Video

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

6. Onboarding Content

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

Start Developing Content to Aid Healthcare Sales and Boost Your ROI

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

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

3 Steadfast Ways Print Marketing for Healthcare Supports Digital Campaigns

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

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

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

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

Why Should Medical Suppliers Invest in Print Marketing for Healthcare?

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

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

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

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

3 Ways Print Marketing for Healthcare Supports Your Digital Campaigns

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

1.Drives Website Traffic

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

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

2.Increases Newsletter Signups

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

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

3.Boosts Social Media Following

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

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

Combine Print and Digital Marketing to Target Your Ideal Customer

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

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

A Six-Step Guide to Getting New Products Featured in Health Trade Journals

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Medical manufacturers know that a big part of their healthcare marketing strategy involves getting their products seen by practitioners in various fields, and one of the best ways to do that is to get their product featured in health trade journals. 

One of the best healthcare marketing tips and tricks out there is to put your products where your audience’s eyes are. So, which publications are practitioners paying attention to?

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Source: The Script

Why Industry Journal Exposure is Good for Digital Advertising in Healthcare

While many of these publications have a printed version available, most of them have transitioned to a digital platform. This helps them get more eyes on their content, which means more eyes on your products. Sure, while it can be beneficial to have your products featured in smaller, niche publications, the results of being published in a larger publication are 10 to 100x greater. 

Another good reason to consider attempting to get your product featured in a health trade journal is that you gain instant authority in your field. How? Once you’ve been approved and published in a major health trade journal, readers know that you are a source worth investing in because you made it through the rigorous vetting processes to be featured in the first place. 

That authority and credibility go a long way, not only with prospective clients but with other publications as well. If you’re credible enough to be published in a major health trade journal, then other healthcare publications are going to be more willing to work with you in the future. 

6 Steps to Getting Your Product Featured in Health Trade Journals 

There are countless benefits to getting your product featured in a health trade journal. However, getting to that step takes a bit of work. To reap the benefits of being featured in a healthcare journal, you’ll want to follow this six-step guideline to get your product featured in the first place.

1. Make a List of Relevant Journals 

In marketing, one of the golden rules is that you cannot market to everyone. Well, that same rule applies to pitching your products to health trade journals. If your product is geared towards older men in their 60s, you wouldn’t want to pitch it to a popular yoga magazine whose target audience is women in their mid to late 20s.

That said, you’ll want to make a list of 10-20 publications that you’d like to be featured in. These can, and should, include major health trade journals, popular online blogs, etc. 

2. Research Publication Requirements

Once you’ve taken the time to find the right publications that would best suit your product, you’ll want to research them. You need to figure out:

  • Who their target audience is 
  • What their audience is looking for when reading the particular publication
  • The type of content they’re most likely to publish

No two publications are exactly alike, so you’ll want to make sure you are taking detailed notes and take time to review the content itself to help you later on when crafting your pitch. 

3. Identify Specific Individuals to Pitch To

During your research, you’ll also want to look into the best individuals to contact and pitch to. There are quite a few publications that allow for self-submissions, and others that require a rigorous vetting process. Others will only accept pitches from the craftiest of researchers who can find and pitch to the right person — say a chief editor or head of marketing. 

Once you’ve identified the best individual to reach out to, you’ll want to take some time to check out their online presence. Have they previously published work themselves? If so, you’ll want to study their work to get an idea of what kind of content may spark their interest. 

Finally, make sure you make a note of the best ways to reach them. At the very least, you’ll want to find their email addresses. 

4. Create Share-Worthy Content to Pitch

Now, when it comes to creating your pitch, you want to take adequate time to craft various pieces of content to pitch, including:

  • Educational blog post
  • A brief on how your product works, who it’s for, etc. 
  • An educational video
  • Testimonials from current customers 

5. Send Your Pitch

Once you’ve created your content, it’s time to pitch it! The best way to pitch an idea is via email. Why? Because it’s not only the preferred channel for receiving pitches by most journalists but because the average business professional checks their email approximately every 37 minutes. 

Now, research shows that there is an ideal time to send pitches, and that’s on Tuesdays or Wednesdays between 8-9 am, and then around 3 pm. Just remember to keep time zones in mind when you send it!

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Source: Publicize

6. Always Follow Up

You know how crowded an email inbox can get. Just imagine how much more crowded these individual’s inboxes must be. Show them you are serious and want to be noticed by following up on your initial email at least once, if not twice, to make sure they’ve received and seen your message. 

Increase Your Market Share with the Help of Share Moving Media

Here at Share Moving Media, we are a full-service media and content company. Our goal is to help you get noticed by creating and helping you to distribute high-quality content. 

Curious how we can help you increase your market share? Then contact us today to learn more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a lot of risk and pressure.

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

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

Should You Hire an Inhouse Healthcare Content Creator?

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

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

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

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

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

7 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Healthcare Content Creation Needs

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

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

1. You Get Access to Leading Talent

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

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

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

2. You Can Spend More Time on Strategy

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

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

3. Outsourcing is Cost-Effective

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

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

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

4. You’ll Produce Content Consistently

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

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

5. Outsourcing Provides Easy Access to Metrics

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

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

6. You Can Seamlessly Scale Your Healthcare Content Production

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

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

7. Outsourcing Gives You Access to the Latest Technology

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

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

Start Building Your Healthcare Content Creation Strategy 

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

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

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