Medtech Content Marketing: 2024 Guide

Using content marketing in the medtech industry requires both creativity and regulatory awareness. For a medtech company to successfully execute a content marketing campaign, their marketers must produce content that informs readers while being careful to avoid unsubstantiated claims. This task is made more difficult by the rise of generative AI and the resulting flood of average-level content—in order to stand out and bring in actual leads or customers, content must be higher quality than ever. However, when content meets this high standard, it positions the company as an expert in its field and builds trust with readers, creating a consistent flow of MQLs, increased conversion rates, and a significantly higher ROI than most other forms of marketing.

This guide walks you through the steps of creating a content marketing strategy to meet the needs of 2024’s medtech marketing landscape. The steps are:

1. Define Your Campaign Goals
2. Create Audience Personas?
3. Organize Around Pillars?
4. Assign the Appropriate Content Types to Your Keywords
5. Organize With an Editorial Calendar?
6. Repurpose Content For Multiple Channels
7. Measure, Iterate, and Adjust

Define Your Campaign Goals

The first thing that a content marketing team needs to agree on is the campaign’s purpose. Narrowing down specific goals can be harder than it appears, as it can be tempting to set vague goals with corporate jargon (e.g. “We strive to create visionary content that bridges the gap between our customers’ needs and our solutions”). Specificity is key to avoiding this pitfall and creating a solid foundation for future campaign audits, so we propose the following:?

• Set Clear and Measurable Goals: Avoid vague language that doesn’t clearly define an auditable benchmark (e.g. “Address clients’ pain points”). Direct your campaign toward measurable goals (e.g. generate MQLs, increase sales velocity) to make the final step—auditing and adjusting—more possible.
• Research Your Competitors: Often, your campaign will target gaps and neglected markets left by other firms in your industry. Analyze their products and marketing strategies to determine the best way to angle your product as a disruptor in your industry and reach those they’ve left unreached.
• Standardize Your Voice: In addition to what is being said, consider how it’s being said. Effective content marketing establishes your company’s voice as one of authority within your field, so consider what type of authoritative voice your audience is most responsive to, and aim to keep all of your content speaking uniformly with that voice.

With clearly defined and measurable campaign goals, you’ll be able to more easily decide what type of content needs to be added to your library in order to reap the results you’re looking for. Doing so also allows you to tailor your content to your target audience better and position yourself more aggressively in medtech markets that often leave large groups of potential customers underserved.

Create Audience Personas

The next step in creating an effective content marketing strategy is to create personas for each of your target audiences. Doing so allows you to (a) create content that your audience will respond to, (b) understand what solutions you should present to your audience, and (c) determine the best channels on which to distribute your content. regardless of whether you sell direct-to-consumer, or to medical practitioners/institutions, the process generally involves asking the same questions.

Start by looking at your existing customer base—your prospective and current customers know more about their wants and needs than you do. Ask them:

1. How did they find your company?
2. What made them choose your product over your competitors?
3. What pain points does your product solve for them?
4. What channels do they look to when searching for new products?

Here is an example of a customer persona (which you may recognize from our go-to-market strategy guide):

Their answers to each of these will form the basis of their persona. Next, flesh out those personas with relevant demographic information, such as their job titles, industries, and company size if you’re talking about a medical practice or provider. All of this will help you determine the exact tone and content that will best capture their interest and match their search intent.

Organize Around Pillars

In order to ensure that your content marketing strategy targets every relevant online search to your company, the best-performing campaigns utilize a pillar content strategy, which consists of:

• Pillars: Also called “container” keywords, hubs are short keywords indicating a broad area of search intent.?
• Spokes: Also known as “longtail” keywords, spokes are longer keywords containing the hub that indicate a specialized or otherwise narrow use case.

The most important element of the hub and spoke strategy is that the spokes fit with the hub like gears in a machine. The graphic below illustrates this further:

In the example above, the pillar, “continuous blood glucose monitor,” can be found in every surrounding spoke, demonstrating to Google that your site is obsessed with the topic. Furthermore, each “spoke” in the model above speaks to a specific search intent, as illustrated on the spectrum below:?

A simple search such as “continuous blood glucose monitoring device” would be performed by someone on the research-oriented side of the spectrum. In contrast, “continuous blood glucose monitor without insurance” speaks to a specific problem that the user is trying to solve, placing them directly in the middle. The search “best continuous blood glucose monitor” is more transactional still, and would be searched actively looking for a firm to buy from.

In this sense, not only does a pillar strategy allow you to target multiple instances of a larger keyword being targeted, but it also allows you to address the entire spectrum of intent. Structuring your keywords in this manner helps your content marketing strategy account for every stage of your marketing funnel.

Assign the Appropriate Content Types to Your Keywords

To use content marketing effectively for lead generation, you must create a variety of content types, including blogs, product pages, white papers, and case studies. This content—optimized for Google’s evolving search algorithm—targets users at different stages in their buying journey. For example, blogs are used to target people doing research on Google who probably haven’t heard of your company, and there are many page types that fall under the “blog” category (comparison blogs, best practices blogs, how-to articles, etc.). In contrast to blogs, longer content such as white papers and case studies are used to engage visitors more deeply. The table below shares common content types, examples, and notes on each:

Organize Your Content Strategy with an Editorial Calendar

Next, let’s discuss a more practical element of content marketing strategy. An editorial calendar is a living document that maps out all the marketing activities across a marketing campaign. Its purpose is to keep stakeholders organized and accountable for their marketing responsibilities in the future while documenting the details and timing of what has been accomplished in the past. Essentially, an editorial calendar is your content strategy in action. Here’s how to create one:

• Determine what fields your editorial calendar should have. Before you can start using an editorial calendar, you need to decide what makes the most sense to include. Common fields include: title, keyword & hub/pillar, expected content length, search intent, target persona, content type, funnel stage, additional distribution channels, and expected publication date.
• List Your Channels. Make a list of every channel you use to publish content (website, social media accounts, etc.). Listing your channels ensures you don’t forget to include any in your content plan and helps you better prioritize your content and recognize when you are over- or under-utilizing a particular channel.
• Develop Your Workflows. Publishing regularly is essential for improving your domain authority and SERPs, and by extension, getting your content in front of your audience. Whether you use a simple spreadsheet or an online task management platform, organize your content workflow to allow for frequent publication. Below are ways to improve your workflows:

• Keep track of what tasks need to be completed and by whom
• Ensure your team understands how their work impacts other tasks and deliverables
• Create a content buffer to account for unexpected roadblocks and challenges
• Identify any dependencies or bottlenecks that could impact your deadlines.

Below is an example of an editorial calendar we developed for our own SEO campaign:

Repurpose Content For Multiple Channels

Effective content marketing requires high-quality thought leadership content. The benefit of this approach is that quality is highly transferable between different marketing channels, allowing marketing teams to repurpose existing content and transform it into meaningful content geared toward other channels.?

For example, the graphic below looks at what can be done with just one high-quality article written as part of an ongoing SEO campaign:

When repurposing content, your team should use the following framework:

1. Create an in-depth, highly substantive piece of source content (~2,500 words or longer) that can be easily subdivided
2. Place this source content behind a registration gate in order to grow your email marketing list
3. Create blog posts from each part of the source content
4. Use insights from the source content to create infographics for social media
5. Create an email newsletter promoting the source content that highlights key insights

By using quality content as the basis for a content marketing campaign, medtech marketing teams can cover a wide range of additional marketing channels that generate and nurture leads while driving sales in markets that might otherwise not have been available had it just stuck to a single marketing channel. You can find more information on how to produce high quality content marketing material in our related article here.

Measure Results & Iterate on Successes

Once your campaign is underway, the final step is to measure your results. Start by tracking the right metrics, and establishing benchmarks for success. Here are the 8 KPIs we recommend for B2B campaigns:

By tracking these KPIs, you can learn which topic clusters and types perform best for your audience. You can then focus your efforts on the content that generates the most traffic, MQLs, and ROI for your business.