Content marketing for B2B healthcare brands is boring.
B2B healthcare content marketing demands that you publish confusing treatises that few can grasp.
The good news?
This is a lie.
B2B healthcare marketing is not a dead science.
B2B buyers connect with content that brightens their lives with captivating stories and practical insights: fantastic news for us believers in the power of content marketing to educate, build trust, and persuade.
I have collected five B2B healthcare content tips to share your brand’s voice with charm and grace.
How to Be Boring
No content creator sits down and decides to write a non-engaging article when planning an inbound marketing campaign.
Every talented B2B marketer in the healthcare sector wants their content to share life-changing insights, be read by thousands of people, and connect with their readers’ lives.
Most B2B healthcare articles share general or technical information that is irrelevant to the audience’s problems.
It’s quality content, but non-valid for potential customers who are busy running a medical practice or are managers of a healthcare provider and expect from digital marketing in general, and from content marketers in specific, information that help them run their business in a better way.
Why does this happen?
Healthcare organizations talk to many stakeholders. All have unique levels of expertise, interests, habits, and motivations.
A Tale of a White Paper
A hospital posts a white paper on social media with technical details about a breast cancer detection procedure.
It’s a meaningful subject. Problem is, the white paper’s tone is formal, and its language is jargon filled.
What happened?
The average social media user wants to read about things they understand! They are used to influencer marketing dominating these platforms, so very serious vibe clashes with the culture. Always a wrong move.
Doctors don’t consult social media to discover the latest scientific research.
What’s the result of this disconnect? An article the average reader finds complex and dull, while its intended audience, doctors, don’t read the piece.
What can you learn from this example?
Engaging content is much more than fancy graphics or interactive elements.
Engaging content shares valuable insights that are relevant to the reader’s life.
Companies want to position themselves as thought leaders in their industries and attract new customers.
Convince the market of your authority by creating content that your audience understands and cares about. Your sales team can help you pinpoint your potential buyers’ problems and channels, so you’re always in sync with them.
Healthcare Content 101: Play Well with Others
You know that you need to create content that speaks to the problems of your target audience.
How do you know who your audience is?
Ask others inside your company!
Why? Because other parts of your company know stuff Marketing doesn’t. See yourself as a public relations expert who brings out the best in every area to generate more business for your healthcare organization.
Product Development
Product teams are experts in improvements, complaints, and technical issues that B2B buyers care about. They can help you create growth marketing experiments as they think in sprints.
Sales
Salespeople learn to identify the hidden motives of each stakeholder within a client’s organization. Sales knows who makes the buying decisions and who freezes them. Their intel is critical for nailing your healthcare SEO efforts, building marketing automation campaigns that convert, and creating a solid Marketing Health IT infrastructure connected to the day-to-day reality.
Customer Service
Customer service works amidst the day-to-day operations and possesses an overlooked wealth of knowledge you should use to your advantage.
Marketing
After collecting information, your marketing team is armed with ammunition to craft a content strategy that aligns with your customers’ real problems.
Collaboration is a shortcut for success in content creation. Savvy B2B healthcare marketers search for hidden assets inside their companies to clarify the deepest wishes of their target audience.
Marketers Are Cold: Why Emotional Marketing Is The Answer
In healthcare, science and storytelling love each other.
Behind every cutting-edge medical breakthrough are transformed lives and devoted professionals with a story to share.
Narrative is a mega-valuable persuasion tool you must include in your marketing efforts.
Your product’s power to change lives must be backed with testimonials from patients and clinicians who advocate for your brand. Video marketing is a great assest to capture the transforming naturee of your product.
Emotions for Healthcare Marketers
Stories of extreme sadness and suffering dominate the media.
You don’t need to go there.
Your job is to illustrate the benefits of your product with positive emotions, such as the following:
- A clinician’s trust in your dialysis machine.
- The peace of mind resulting from being insured by your healthcare company.
- A patient’s joy after listening to his or her grandchildren with the assistance of your hearing device.
Sharing positive experiences that express your brand’s values is one of your main jobs as a healthcare marketer.
The Reason No One Downloads Your White Paper
Healthcare professionals are busy.
Most won’t read your new blog post or visit your social media profiles.
As a healthcare marketer, you must find your audience.
COVID-19 changed the way B2B healthcare companies organize events, conferences, and seminars. Content distribution, lead generation, and relationship building were shocked by the pandemic.
Your content marketing strategy must evolve over time. Reaching your audience is more complicated in 2021, but there’s hope.
Content Repurposing to the Rescue
- You publish an article on your blog about the risks of bone injury in high-impact sports directed to a general audience.
- You edit the post to include technical specs about your X-ray machine and send a newsletter to medical and technical contacts.
- You launch a case study based on the original article and share it with cold leads via email and direct mail.
- You collect 30-second testimonials from patients to present them at a virtual radiology conference as a success story based on the original article.
Every piece of content triggers the creation of valuable assets adapted to specific audiences and distributed to them where they consume content.
B2B Healthcare Sales in Times of COVID-19
After 17 months of calls, meetings, clinical trials, technical adjustments, bureaucracy, and unmet sales goals, you’re tired.
Eighteen months later, you close the sale.
B2B healthcare sales are for the brave.
Everyone would like to accelerate the sales cycle in the B2B healthcare industry.
This won’t happen. People’s lives are at stake. The path to success is adaptation.
You must build long-term relationships, and content is your ally.
Content is your secret weapon for recognizing your audience’s concerns and empowering them with the following:
- Tactics for being productive.
- Hope and positivism with testimonials and success stories.
- New ways healthcare professionals can offer more value to their patients.
B2B healthcare sales take time. Content allows you to keep the conversation going and your healthcare brand top of mind.
No Country for B2B Sales
Selling to healthcare organizations is a complex process.
Healthcare executives are conservative in their buying decisions. Choosing the wrong vendor could destroy their careers and hurt patients.
As a result, selling products that require a change in how healthcare organizations operate remains a challenge.
Workflows in hospitals are sacred, and no one has a second to waste. Content must convince decision makers that your product is easy to implement and necessary.
You must equip decision makers with the required knowledge to support change.
How can you do this?
Inspire curiosity in the medical staff, sharing ingenious ideas to serve their patients better.
Support hospital administrators in creating content exposing cost-saving opportunities to their operations.
Understand your audience. Connect with their needs.
Your sales will thank you.
Wrapping Up
B2B healthcare content is boring. It is boring if it doesn’t help readers resolve problems that matter to them.
B2B healthcare organizations want to sell more products and increase brand awareness.
Content will help your organization achieve these goals—if your content helps readers first.
If you are interested in creating healthcare content that increases engagement and persuades, please get in touch to schedule a discovery session.
