7 Content Marketing Tips for B2B Health Startups
Informative, persuasive and credibility building written content is no longer optional for successful digital businesses. This is important for DTC businesses but no less so b2b organisations.
It will help you generate website traffic through search engine optimisation, articulate the benefits of your product/service to a range of clients at different stages of the buying cycle, and help support onboarding and client education (and more!).
Embarking on a content creation initiative can be quite daunting , especially if your business doesn’t have a content team in place already. A successful content initiative takes planning, research, the actual time to write the content and have it reviewed for coherence and technical accuracy.
But there’s some key steps you can take the make the process more approachable and sustainable over time.
1. Give your content a clear ‘job’
Why are you are creating this content? Is it to educate existing clients, customers or end users? Is it a user guide, or perhaps a thought leadership piece indented to attract prospects? What ever the case, get clarity on this.
With this clarity you’ll be able to more easily plan the content, find the right tone and style, while developing the marketing plan for the content (e.g. posting on social media, the company blog post, or emailed to leads/customers).
Note that it’s possible that the content will serve multiple purposes. But ensure that you understand how these purposes are prioritised. Also ensure you have agreement on how you will asses the impact of this content (views, downloads, leads generated, customer reviews etc etc).
2. Start by answering questions
If you’re finding it difficult to start, especially if you already have your content basics in place, answering the most common questions that come up in your interactions with prospects and customers is a great place to start. The fantastic book “They Ask, You Answer” popularised this approach and it’s very powerful.
Most likely your customer facing teams will already have a decent backlog of common questions that they get asked, if not then make sure to put this in place so you can keep track these for the future.
The great thing about this is that the formula is the same, but the content will end up being very unique and personalised to your business, prospects and customers. You can also take the same answers and use them to create longer guides, snappier FAQs, marketing videos and more. For those starting off their content marketing journey this really is the best bang for your buck in terms of tactics.
3. Minimise the clinical jargon
This tip can be applied to technical jargon more specifically, but for health businesses this is really important. Of course we know that any clinical or health related content will have to be reviewed (and often written) by the in-house clinical team. With all due respect to these experts, the clinical content a lot of health businesses produce is pretty difficult to get through. There’s a lot of jargon and convoluted phrases and sentences used.
I have often found that you can still convey a clear, and clinically accurate and safe message while simplifying the language. My best advice here is to have your copywriters work closely with your clinical team to get the right balance, and to have these teams (and management) champion a plain spoken approach.
While you will want to be cautious around optimising content for sear engines, using the phrases and terms readers themselves use if very helpful for legibility and visibility in search engine results.
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4. Embrace variety
Don’t unnecessarily constrain yourself, there’s a huge range of content types and formats you can choose from. Especially if you’re feeling a lack of inspiration. This is especially important if you are looking to produce content on a regular basis for sharing on social media or on a company blog/content library. It also allows you to share different aspects of your business and ensure your readers are faced with the same types of content over and over again.
This is not to mention that the same type of content can also encompass a huge variety and range of topics. Some key types of content that you can explore include:
This is a great opportunity to make your business stand out beyond just listing your product/service specifications.
5. Reuse and repurpose
The most skilled and successful content creators are experts at reusing and repurposing their content. Can you turn a blog post in a short video, map a customer challenge as a visual, or transcribe and adapt a webinar into an industry thought piece? This allows you to get more out of your time/cost investment in developing any content and also allows your prospects and customers to absorb the core messages and wisdom of your content in the way that suits them best.
This is especially useful for building out a social media presence where you can share highlights from your content as a post and link to a more in-depth writing or video version (if it’s interesting enough you can even put a lead capture form in between these steps!).
Just be aware that there’s only so far you can stretch a piece of content before it feels overdone or too flimsy.
6. Share far and wide
Don’t be shy about sharing your content far and wide. If your company and team are active on specific media platforms, respectfully encourage them to amplify the message (this can be especially powerful on Linkedin if you run a b2b business).
Also don’t forget to share with all your customer facing teams as these pieces of content will often be very useful as a piece of follow-up content and can help teams better support customer requests.
7. Track performance
Obvious right? Well there’s a bit of nuance here, in many cases you’ll quite easily be able to track views and engagement with content, especially any you’ve uploaded to social media. You should also be able to track leads generated, and direct purchases through standard tracked links (these can be included in PDFs too). But it might be harder to assess the value of your content if you take too short a time frame to assess this.
The softer metrics could be just as critical, building up brand awareness and a reputation as a trusted thought leader can be trickier to assess. Although it will still be possible to do some analysis related to how many prospects/customers have been exposed to your content, and metrics like followers and post engagement on social media platforms would give you a good indication of how growth in awareness.
8. Bonus - just get started
The road to a robust content marketing engine is a long one, that will likely be paved with some great content and some not so great content. As long anything technical, or clinical is safe and accurate and you’ve stayed consistent with brand tone and style, then you should embrace the rough with the smooth and just get started.
People are generally much more accepting of businesses engaging in a more human and organic way, warts and all. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough, as you’ll really will need to look at creating more content over a longer timeframe to reap the rewards of this powerful marketing approach.
Co-Founder Peerr and The Scrubbed In Podcast | Building a Network for Health & Life Sciences
1 年Matt Williams