Content without a purpose is like setting your marketing budget on fire.
What if a simple exercise like creating a B2B healthcare buyer persona could help you with:
Knowing what topics to write about?
Choosing the perfect tone to use?
Deciding your content’s ideal format?
This guide will take you through three pain-free steps to craft your B2B buyer persona.
Best of all, the information required for this easy-to-implement process is hiding in plain sight in your healthcare organization and will almost always improve the performance of your B2B Marketing initiatives.
1) Are You Prepared for Healthcare Marketing in 2021?
As a marketer, the first step to take with buyer personas is simple. You must convince yourself of their importance.
Let’s imagine you’re selling a laboratory test to a hospital. Who is the main decision maker of this potential buyer?
Clinicians rely on tests to diagnose patients.
Laboratory technicians perform the test.
Hospital administrators approve the purchase.
Clinicians are interested in the test’s effectiveness and accuracy.
Technicians care about the test’s safety and simplicity.
Hospital administrators are concerned with cost and payment terms.
Didn’t you forget someone?
Patients!
Patients don’t buy your test, but they are interested in how safe or painful it is.
This is the purpose of buyer personas. They keep your eyes open so you never forget anyone. It’s the first step of effective market research. Also called Marketing persona, it’s often ignored, as it seems straightforward.
But it’s not a step you can skip if you’re serious about using Digital Marketing to increase your market share and make your Sales team happy.
Find Your Prospects
Nothing is as simple as it looks in healthcare content marketing or in the healthcare industry in general.
Who is your ideal potential customer? And how can you talk to this prospect to make them care about you?
B2B marketers are tempted to focus all their content creation efforts on key healthcare decision makers.
This is a mistake.
Your ideal buyer isn’t the one signing the check. You need to persuade many minds before selling your product.
Buyer personas are a necessity you can’t ignore.
What to do next? Spend the next six months creating your ideal customer profile?
No. You take a peek inside your healthcare company.
2) How to Conquer Your Market
Digital marketing isn’t for heroes who do everything by themselves. It’s a team sport.
B2B sales require the whole company to work collaboratively.
This is challenging in healthcare. Every department has its metrics for success and its way of doing things.
Content is a victim of this internal misalignment.
Don’t Do This!
Marketing creates a brochure without consulting the product or sales teams.
The brochure is stunning, and its content appeals to a broad audience.
There’s one problem.
The brochure is shared at a cardiologists’ seminar, a sophisticated audience composed of doctors.
This issue would have been avoided if more areas had been included in the research of the target audience.
A Hidden Treasure
Your company’s expertise is distributed. Your mission as a healthcare marketer is to find and clarify this knowledge. Buyer personas are an exercise in discovery and understanding.
You can’t create a profitable marketing strategy hiding from the rest of your company.
Product teams understand topics that appeal to technical audiences of prospective accounts.
Sales professionals will unveil the motives of decision makers in a client organization. They understand your prospects’ lives.
Researchers keep up to date with scientific developments that move the needle for clinicians.
Customer service coordinates day-to-day operations. They’re crucial to identifying cost-saving opportunities that hospital administrators love.
Teamwork is tough. And profitable. It’s the best way to stay connected with your target market.
It’s time to write.
3) It’s Time to Take a Fresh Look at Content Creation: A Persona Example
You’re planning a marketing campaign for a diabetes medication.
Researching with your customer success, product, and sales teams, you identify five marketing personas to target:
- The public: patients with diabetes.
- The procurement departments of hospitals: in charge of conducting negotiations.
- Doctors: who will prescribe the medication.
- Chief medical officers: in charge of approving medical protocols.
- Hospital administrators: responsible for the final purchasing decision.
What to do next?
Your marketing team has decided to publish a white paper called “Diabetes and Its Pharmacological Management: 2021 Review.”
The white paper will be a comprehensive, 2,800-word piece. It will include interviews with experts, results from a clinical trial, and testimonials from patients.
The document targets clinicians and chief medical officers, showcasing data on the efficacy and safety of current diabetes medications.
Your content is ready. Time to share it with everyone!
Wait a moment.
Your white paper targets clinicians and scientific staff.
Is this piece of content suitable for diabetes patients? No. It’s filled with jargon.
Should you write more content? No.
Get More from Your Content
You researched and published an in-depth guide. Use it to create separate pieces of content with the appropriate information for your audience’s buyer journey.
Check out these ideas:
- Extract two articles from the white paper for your blog. Edit them for general audiences by removing jargon and using a conversational tone. A good writer will do this for you.
- Edit your white paper video interviews with patients and doctors as lead generation tools at medical conferences, webinars, and sales meetings.
- Create a case study based on material from your white paper to announce cost-saving opportunities. Share it via email with hospital administrators.
- Select the most significant findings of the white paper and share them via a newsletter with vendors and resellers.
- Create an email course with marketing automation tools for visitors to your website.
One piece of content is insufficient to increase sales or generate leads. In B2B healthcare marketing, it can take up to 12 months to close a sale. There will be many people involved in the buying process, and you have to create content for each of them.
Without multiple buyer personas, you’re writing with your eyes and mind closed.
Your Turn
Creating content targeting no one, in particular, is easy.
There’s one problem.
This type of content doesn’t generate sales. Effective buyer personas save you time and money. But that’s not the best part. You don’t need to spend months researching. You have the information you need. Just take a look at your existing customers.
All you have to do is put the pieces together.
I can help you create content that solves problems your audience cares about. Please get in touch with me to set up a discovery session.
