INBOUND ACCELERATOR

The core principle behind inbound marketing for B2B brands — whether in healthcare, technology, software or others — is that the content created is designed to have value to prospects and customers. It is not strictly focused on selling something, but rather on teaching or reaching leads in a way that shows how they can best use your product or service to improve their own bottom line.

Healthcare is changing, and how healthcare providers and hospitals approach marketing, is changing along the way.

Those changes in how healthcare is chosen, provided and paid for opens opportunities for healthcare IT companies to step up and assist their customers by changing their own marketing approach to one that provides information and guidance, not just a sales push.

We’d all love to create that piece of content that lights up the metrics meters on our website’s dashboard or Facebook Insights — comments, shares, clicks! But we know that the majority of content created today won’t hit that huge payoff. But what kind of content does?

Content creation is a key element in effective inbound marketing, but sometimes it can be almost overlooked as a less-important step in the overall process. While brands frequently bring in an outside perspective to develop new marketing strategies, or turn to third-party help in auditing strengths, weaknesses, challenges, opportunities and the competition, content creation — especially blog writing — is too often shifted to the least experienced members of the marketing team.

As OneSpot points out in the infographic below, content marketing can seem to be a study in contrasts:

• Less costly, yet budget remains a major challenge.

• Heavily used, but difficult to prove effective.

• And often, even when the content creation is being done right, there are stumbling blocks in distribution from archaic websites (not mobile optimized) to readers’ fleeting attention spans.

How do you find common ground or a way to bridge the gap between the good and challenging?

Brand awareness, patient loyalty and patient engagement are the top goals healthcare marketers are working achieve with their content, along with addressing the need to optimize content for search.

Content marketing is a cornerstone for many marketing strategies today, with more than half of all businesses investing in the tactic, and 1/4 publishing new content every day. But there is always room for improvement.

Usually when we talk about marketing content, we are referring to a few obvious elements: blog posts, social media posts and visuals, contributed articles, or downloadable content such as reports, ebooks or templates.

Too often, we overlook how the same concepts and strategies that are winners when creating the “big picture” content should be applied to the smaller elements, including the landing pages that are gateways for those downloadable offers that convert visitors into leads.

When you create marketing content or write public relations materials, what are you doing? The first instinct would be to say you are selling something, or you are building a brand image.

Some things are meant to bounce. Basketballs. Kids on a trampoline. Baby boys (or so the phrase goes). Others shouldn’t. Video footage. Checks. And business blog visitors.