As with everyone else, B2B clients across the healthcare industry hate ads and don’t want to be bombarded with sales pitches. They expect healthcare firms to provide value in exchange for their time and attention. Content marketing is one of the most crucial ways to offer meaningful value to prospects while pushing them further into the sales funnel.

Google handles an average of 70,000 health-related searches each minute. That’s around seven percent of the daily Google search volume. For B2B marketers and industry organizations, the demand for credible, trustworthy, and accurate healthcare content is soaring — and your firm can respond to this call in your market and beyond.

As you look to elevate your healthcare content marketing, here are crucial trends, tactics, and methods to improve your chances of success.

1. Define Your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

It’s one thing to create and publish content, but you must develop a solid strategy around your content to guide all aspects of your healthcare content marketing efforts.

Recent studies suggest that nearly all healthcare brands have embraced content marketing. However, only a third of these brands have implemented a formal content marketing plan or strategy.

Without a well-thought-out program, your B2B team is likely to engage in content marketing and other sales activity without a way of tracking the return on investment (ROI) or success of your efforts. Your team could end up creating content that doesn’t align with your target audience’s needs or your core marketing mission.

Planning your content is a crucial step to marketing success. Never skip this step—establish and document a strong content marketing strategy for your healthcare business. And start with defining your target audience.

Create buyer personas and profiles to represent your target audience. In turn, this will help you zero in on what types of content and topics to cover. Detailed and tailored messaging will help you generate more leads and increase conversion.

Perhaps you’ve got different personas you want to target because your organization caters to multiple types of clients. For instance, if you sell medical equipment, your content for hospital systems or government agencies differs from that for small medical practices and providers.

One segment of your content marketing may target patients themselves, although you don’t sell to them directly. And then, there are different decision-makers across healthcare organizations. Factor these kinds of details into the equation.

The bottom line is that you should outline your content objectives and goals, along with the rest of your marketing plans. You can rest assured that your effort and time will eventually pay off.

2. Create High-Quality Content That Speaks To Your Target Audience

Once you’ve defined your target audience and outlined your strategy, it’s time to get down to brass tacks – creating the content. It should be valid, engaging, and valuable to your audience.

As a B2B firm, it’s important to make your clients feel valued, especially regarding what they care the most about, including value for time and money. Show them you share a similar dedication and attitude towards their customers. Nothing is more important than building a healthy working relationship and reassuring your clients that you’re on the same page.

Leverage content to build upon this relationship. As reported by Digital Authority Partners, the overarching premise behind successful B2B healthcare marketing is that each prospect or client is unique. Tailor your content messaging based on their specific pain points, interests, needs, decision-making role, and buying behavior.

Tailor your content to every client, ensuring they’re engaged, satisfied, and happy.

How to create top-notch healthcare content

•   Prioritize quality over quantity, generating content that provides the highest value to your audience
•   Refresh your content regularly – provide your readers with a content update schedule to keep them in the loop.
•   Create a balanced blend of short and long-form content. Do market research and reader analysis to find the sweet spot when it comes to content length. Short posts are usually great for FAQ-style content, but long-form pieces will get you to the top of search results pages faster.
•   Recycle old content but update the content format, add recent infographics, videos, or images, and re-share to give them a fresh breath of life.
•   Keep the latest healthcare trends in mind when creating your content
•   Address your clients’ challenges, pain points, and questions with relevant content formats, such as informative blog posts, Q&As, webinars, and other types of content that generate quality backlinks.
•   Leverage video content to explain and demonstrate your services and products to prospects. How-to videos usually appeal to B2B buyers in the research stage.
•   Optimize your content for search to attract prospects to your healthcare business website.

3. Incorporate Social Media Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

B2B content marketers often overlook social media. It’s a powerful channel essential to any successful inbound marketing strategy. Sharing your content across social media can increase your website’s social signal, boost engagement, and drive web traffic.

When done correctly, social media marketing can help improve your content game and other marketing activities. That’s especially true if your end game is to push prospects further down your sales cycle. Social media is also one of the most crucial research tools for companies in the healthcare industry.

For B2B healthcare marketers and organizations, LinkedIn is probably the most critical social platform. Tap into the platform’s powerful outreach potential by publishing content related to your niche, product, or the overall healthcare industry. Don’t rule out other social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

How to leverage social media for healthcare content marketing

•   Answer questions, address complaints, and reply to comments to boost engagement
•   Encourage your followers to sign up for your email list, check out your website, and visit your other channels via outgoing links.
•   Organize social contests and give away freebies to provide value for their attention
•   Ensure there’s messaging and branding cohesion/consistency across your social media profiles

4. Let Your Brand Stand Out

Differentiating your brand from your competitors should be one of the top agendas of your healthcare content marketing strategy. Creating branded content that addresses your target audience’s needs and interests will boost your search engine rankings and conversions.

For instance, if you sell healthcare insurance mainly to the tech industry, you want your content to clarify this. In fact, when crafting your content marketing strategy, it’s important to focus on branded content around who you are, what you do, and what makes your brand different from your competitors.

Moreover, creating content about healthcare policies or illnesses you cover will help build up your content foundation and improve your website’s chances of appearing in search engine results pages. If you serve a specific location, you should ensure that most of your content mentions it so that your content can help with local search engine optimization.

5. Promote and Optimize your Healthcare Content

There’s no point in creating content if no one will ever read or see it. Your website should boast useful content about various topics that resonate with your target audience.

Even so, a couple of things are essential when developing your healthcare content. Ensure:

•   It’s discoverable and easy to find
•   You’ve got marketing dollars to promote it

You should do keyword research and optimize your content for high search engine rankings. Be prepared to use sponsored posts, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, influencers, and other avenues to promote your content. It must be read to deliver value!

6. Create Demand with your Content

In healthcare marketing, most marketers design their content strategy around capturing existing demand. That means trying to reach the small fraction of prospects actively looking in the market. They’re searching for products or services you provide and are ready to jump into buying action.

With a demand-capturing approach, you can use inbound marketing strategies like PPC, webinars, SEO, and email marketing. But that’s not nearly enough if you want to compete in today’s highly competitive B2B healthcare space.

You need to create demand! The demand-creating approach to content marketing helps you go after more than 90% of your target buyers that aren’t actively looking in the market. Some of them may be locked into a contract with other vendors, aren’t ready to make a move, or may not be aware they have a problem for which you can provide the solution.

Creating demand is all about using content to build brand awareness with your target market. It’s about educating your target audience so they’ll think about your healthcare organization when they’re ready to seek a solution or purchase.

Methods you can use to create demand include:

•   Sponsoring events
•   Boosting your thought leadership through high-value content and on social media
•   Posting educational content on social media, website, and other channels

7. Promote the Value of your Healthcare Solutions

Promoting your services or products’ value is another way to engage prospective customers and clients. Take advantage of your content to focus on the benefits or pros of using your products, services, or solutions. The value you wish to convey might vary from client to client.

For instance, one client may see value in the money they’ll save from using your products or services. Meanwhile, others may be interested in the convenience that your solutions provide. You can leverage your content to highlight these specific benefits, values, or selling points and show that your solutions solve your target audience’s concerns, issues, and pain points

You must employ tailored or personalized content to convey unique value for every client. Begin with target market research, and then go on to segment and identify your buyer personas. Identify the roles of each persona, including their pain points and goals, to develop helpful, relevant, and engaging content.

Don’t just define buyer personas; use the following tips to make your content go the extra distance and promote value.

•   Include up-to-date resources and helpful tools when presenting content
•   Explain how your solution addresses your clients’ issues and pain points
•   Use different languages to convey your message at the client’s communication level
•   Create and share educational webinars, reports, blog posts, eBooks, infographics, and white papers to communicate the value of your solutions.

Conclusion

Content marketing can be highly beneficial to B2B healthcare companies if done correctly. It can help you establish thought leadership, build trust, and improve brand awareness, eventually boosting your sales and bottom line. You’ll get closer to your marketing goals with methods like incorporating social media, promoting the value of your offerings, and creating demand for your products and services.