How to establish and support a top-notch healthcare content marketing strategy

Recently, experts including NewsCred Insights have dubbed 2019 "the year of healthcare content marketing," and when you consider the current state of the healthcare and marketing sectors, it isn't difficult to understand why:

• Currently 80% of users head straight to search engines as their first source when seeking information on healthcare topics, according to Pew research. What's more, these kind of healthcare-related searches are only expected to increase.
• 78% of pharma and biotech firms alongside 95% of medical technology companies told Accenture researchers that they produce a moderate to high amount of digital content.
• Over half of these firms are spending $50 million on content annually, and many plan to up this investment.

However, organizations in the pharma, medical and overarching healthcare sectors must ensure that their investments are well-placed, and that their content aligns with their audience's needs. Accenture found that only 4% of med tech and 11% of pharma/biotech organizations have a documented content marketing strategy - this is something that needs to change.

As your organization works to better document and cement its content marketing strategies, there are a few key points to keep in mind and incorporate into the approach.

1) Ensure you're marketing according to specific goals

First things first, it's imperative that companies have a well-defined set of goals and objectives to help guide and direct their content marketing efforts. These goals should be detailed and achievable, and should go beyond simple targets like increasing sales or boosting brand awareness.

It's helpful to use the SMART approach, which requires goals to be Specific, Measureable, Aspirational, Realistic and Time-bound. Creating goals according to this structure will help you and your team establish a fine-tuned strategy with well-thought-out parameters to measure your achievements.

It's important to have detailed and well-defined goals to guide your content marketing efforts.

2) Understand your target audience

According to Pew Research Center, while 8 out of 10 individuals go to search engines for health-related information, many are unable to find what they're looking for. This points to several issues, not the least of which is that organizations may be creating content without a full understanding of their target audience. Without this robust view of the audience, content doesn't align with readers' needs and preferences, and falls short on delivering the right information.

In this way, it's imperative for your marketing team to have as complete a view as possible of your target audience. Creating personas can help your team better envision who your target audience is, what they care about and what kinds of content will help them engage with your brand.

3) Consider which are best to reach your audience

In addition to segmenting your target audience, you also need to know where they go to consume the type of content that you'll be publishing. This might include social media, direct email campaigns, search engines and other channels. Your audience personas will be informative here and help you decide the best places to publish content, which will help your content achieve maximum exposure and engagements.

4) Create content according to your sales funnel

There are several types of content you can include in your strategy, but it's important to use these assets to support your sales funnel. In other words, it's a smart approach to provide increasingly in-depth assets to your target audience as they move through the phases of your sales funnel to conversion.

This might include a short, relatively simple blog, which leads to a more informational and statistical infographic. This graphic can then lead readers to a well-researched whitepaper on the same topic. After consuming all of this information, chances are good that your readers will be ready to get in contact with you about purchasing the product or service mentioned in these content assets. In this way, your readers get valuable information on important topics, and you lead them through to conversion.

Check out our resources page to learn more about supporting your healthcare marketing strategy.