Hospitals, healthcare providers, and biotech companies need successful healthcare marketing strategies to consistently generate new leads.
Basically, that involves capturing the attention—and contact information—of prospective B2B buyers with eye-catching, valuable content marketing. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship: Those looking for a new healthcare product or service will find answers to their burning problems online, and with the right content marketing approach, those questions can be answered, while the buyer’s info can be captured.
Need help generating leads within your healthcare marketing? Here’s how companies in the healthcare industry can turbo-charge their lead gen efforts through content marketing:
1. Research Your Audience
Before you can generate leads, you have to know who it is you’re targeting. What’s their age? Location? Gender? What kind of Internet browser do they prefer? Do they do research on mobile devices or desktop computers? Do they like sports? Movies? Video games?
You can find all this out with a few tools and procedures, including Google Analytics, one of the most popular analytics platforms available. 58 percent of B2B marketers use website analysis to research their target audience according to the Content Marketing Institute, because it can tell you so much about who visits your site.
Twitter Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights offer a similar suite of tools with which you can identify the demographics of your social media followers. Social listening, blog monitoring, and engaging with customers on social media will also grant you more information about your audience.
With enough data, you can build customer personas, so you can better match them to the content and the topics they want to read (or view), which helps build better brand retention and lead generation. Analytics software can also help you target the best keywords for your lead gen campaign. By searching for keywords and phrases with high search volume and low competition you’ll gain a better chance at generating qualified leads in your niche.
2. Target audience pain points
Besides demographic information, the most important aspect of your audience you must discover are their pain points, or challenges. What problems are your customers facing that your product or service can solve?
To find out, ask your sales and support teams and gather frequently asked questions and complaints they hear from customers. Or, go right to the source and ask customers directly. This can be one of the best ways to get real, unbiased feedback. A simple phone call to past buyers can collect enough information to fill an editorial calendar—and be sure to ask if you can record the call, so you can refer back to it later. A workshop or roundtable event where you invite a select few customers for a Q&A session can also yield lots of info.
Not only will this flood of feedback help form your pain point-targeting content, it will provide you with more content in the way of customer testimonials, which will lead to more leads.
3. Craft Content with Specific Conversions in Mind
Using research from your sales team and customer feedback, you can create content around specific challenges your company alone can solve.
Does your buyer use certain equipment too expensive for them to maintain? If so, you can emphasize the great savings they will benefit from your less costly, more efficient alternative in a short-form video. Are they wasting valuable time and resources with a troublesome payment service? Then you can tell them all about how your service that has no difficult bottlenecks in a carefully researched white paper. Do they use outdated patient record software riddled with bugs? Produce a series of blog articles detailing the features and use cases of your software.
The narrower you get with certain topics, the more personalized the content will feel, and the greater chance you’ll have at attracting leads looking for answers to that specific problem. And use content formats that make sense for that topic, while also cross-linking to other resourceful content. The buyer likely has multiple pain points that need addressing.
4. End Each Piece of Content with a Strong CTA
Treat every piece of content you produce like it’s a landing page. Provide clear, clean copy about the problem you can solve along with catchy titles, relevant images, and a specific action for the visitor to take—a call-to-action. It can be to contact you via email. Or they can sign up your email newsletter, which comes with a series of exclusive blog articles they can only get via the newsletter. Or they can sign up for a free trial version of your software. Whatever the offer, make sure it’s bright, bold, and obvious.