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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!

Can Content Marketing Help You Squeeze ROI Out of Your R&D Process?

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Research and development, R&D, is the key to advancement in the healthcare industry. From pharmaceutical companies to med-tech suppliers, healthcare companies must continuously innovate to find new treatments to improve the patient experience. And all that innovation? It costs.

Getting a return on R&D investment is more challenging than ever. R&D leaders face numerous challenges, such as the increased complexity of global regulatory requirements. Unfortunately, this has led to dwindling investment, particularly in the med-tech field.

Companies that want to increase their market share shouldn’t be cutting back on R&D investment. They should be focusing on securing a greater return on investment (ROI). Content marketing is one avenue to do this.

This guide explains how content marketing assists R&D in healthcare and provides five golden rules for using content marketing to squeeze more ROI out of your innovation.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing uses relevant content to attract a clearly defined target consumer audience with the ultimate aim of driving profitable consumer action. The term “content” encompasses digital media, like websites, blogs, infographics, and traditional media, like healthcare conference speeches and print magazine articles. Content marketing gives you a huge toolbox of ways to reach consumers.

How to Create Content Marketing That Assists R&D in Healthcare

The med-tech industry is expected to grow at a rate of 5.6% annually in the years to come, reaching $595 billion by 2024. Now is not the time to cut back on R&D investment. It’s time to harness content marketing to increase your ROI.

Here’s how to use content marketing to reach your target audience, boost consumer engagement, and ultimately increase ROI.

1. Create Content with Value

To create content that converts into sales, you need to know who you’re selling to. Healthcare buying behaviors have changed. Physicians themselves are less influential as many now work for hospitals, group practices, or medical centers, instead of independently.

These larger organizations are the economic buyers, mainly focused on cutting costs – especially in cutting-edge segments like implantable heart defibrillators and knee implants. As a healthcare supplier, it’s up to you to understand such decision-makers’ hurdles (like tumbling product costs coupled with increased regulatory burden).

Create buyer personas to get in the mind of your target audience. You can then craft content that speaks to the points they care about. This allows you to ensure that your content adds value – the secret to success in any marketing endeavor.

2. Diversify Content Platforms

One of content marketing’s most valuable traits is its versatility. Content can consist of blogs, webpages, thought-leader articles, infographics, e-books, print books, white papers, videos, podcasts, and more. The list goes on.

Content marketing can be easily adapted to diverse purposes and target audiences. It can also be integrated with other marketing techniques. For example, you can use social media to drive consumers to a webpage or blog.

3. Create a Content Calendar

Content marketing isn’t made to be stagnant. Update your marketing materials regularly. For example, if a new iteration of an ultrasound machine you are selling is coming out, plan a publishing strategy for your blog to highlight this development.

A content calendar is an excellent way to track all of your content marketing efforts. Advanced planning allows you to roll out campaigns highlighting new R&D developments and whet the consumers’ appetites. If you know your company has a cutting-edge product that will enter the market in 2021, you should start planning content to flag this innovation in 2020.

4. Repurpose Content for Maximum Efficiency

Just because you plan, it doesn’t mean that your content marketing plan is set in stone. Again, content marketing is versatile. Finding ways to repurpose content across diverse platforms reduces costs while improving reach. For instance, a series of blogs can be adapted to a white paper or even an ebook, while talking points from a conference presentation can be used for a blog.

5. Analyze and Optimize Content’s Impact

Rely on healthcare marketing tools to create, track, and analyze content. Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) in advance will help you measure success and pivot as needed. For instance, if you publish a thought-leader article in a healthcare online magazine, you should be able to get feedback on how many clicks this drove to your website – and how many of those visitors became buyers.

Optimizing content doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing the wording of a headline or swapping out images. Even the format of a concluding call-to-action (CTA) can influence whether a consumer decides to click or not. Timing is also a factor: Sending out an email newsletter at 2:00 a.m. when your target audience is sleeping isn’t a great idea.

Learn More About Content Marketing for Healthcare

Share Moving Media can help you increase healthcare sales with comprehensive content marketing. A full-service media company, we create many types of content, including webinars, blog posts, e-books, graphics, and more. With this diverse array of healthcare marketing tools, we help your brand grow.

Subscribe to our newsletter and discover more ways to ensure your content marketing assists R&D in healthcare. Want personalized content strategy guidance? Contact us to get started.

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!