Two recent healthcare content marketing reports – Ceralytics’ 2018 Healthcare Content Marketing Report and True North Custom’s 2018 State of Healthcare Content Marketing Report – advance a common finding: content is becoming more and more of a commodity across today’s highly competitive digital health landscape. This places greater emphasis on healthcare marketers to design and execute strategies that will help them differentiate their brand in a given market segment and move ideas forward.

Source: pexels.com used under CC license.

Earlier this year we shared some tips for creating great content. From blogs and bylines to eBooks and case studies; tips that we hold as best practices for elevating your content marketing game and making it work for you. Across our healthcare portfolio we see tremendous competition between brands vying for share of voice, be it in the life sciences and biotech arenas or across the medical device, health benefits and chronic care management/total population health sectors. What they may not realize is that by pairing the right content with the right curation strategy, they will break free of that competition and move their brand more quickly down the funnel.

Arguably, the most important element is solving for that last mile of amplification and engagement. Just take this stat from the Ceralytics report when it comes to targeting healthcare providers:

[P]rovider-focused (B2B) content made up 32.2% of the content [analyzed] but only 3% of social shares. This makes sense considering provider-based content is targeted to a much smaller demographic. In fact, it’s over 15x harder to get a social share in B2B healthcare than in consumer healthcare.

It might be hard out there for B2B healthcare brands, but they also find themselves uniquely poised to bring their content to life with the right PR and integrated marketing strategy. Content effectiveness, according to the reports, is contingent on content consistency. In other words, the frequency with which you follow through and revisit topics through your campaigns. Follow through is essential for gaining share of voice and moving the brand on topics that resonate with established audiences and new stakeholder segments.

Want more on integrated marketing for healthcare brands? Read, ‘Implementing an Integrated Marketing and PR Strategy for Healthcare Brands’.

Consider the five “impact topics” identified by Ceralytics as currently driving the most traffic and engagement in the provider-focused healthcare industry (determined by their total presence in organic search, inbound links, social shares and other ranking factors). It followed this ranking by another list of “potential topics” currently underutilized in the B2C healthcare industry that present opportunities for B2B healthcare content marketers in the future:

Top Five Impact Topics – Current

• Study
• America
• Mental Health
• Autism
• Cancer

Top Five Impact Topics – Potential

• Medical Error
• Autism
• Depression/Anxiety
• Addiction
• Cancer Patients

Oftentimes, B2B healthcare brands – more so than their B2C counterparts – know the topics and have the content, but lack resources and expertise to distribute it in ways that are less episodic or siloed. Even so, they may even be unaware of the topical relevancies inside their content that, in large part, drive a successful thought leadership strategy. Furthermore, social channels may not be as developed or optimized for inbound engagement and shares, and executive profiles might not be built out to support networking and referral.

Regardless of where your B2B healthcare brand is on the content marketing spectrum, content is table stakes. It’s what you do with it and how you optimize it against core topics that will drive results, engagement and emotion with your healthcare stakeholders. For maximum impact, consider pairing it with PR and creative storytelling opportunities across your entire integrated marketing efforts.

Don’t know where to start? Learn more about how PAN is supporting some of the top B2B digital health brands with customized content marketing strategies.