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5 Areas Your HealthTech Content Marketing Plan Needs to Prioritize — Now

Right Source | November 20, 2020
healthcare technology content marketing

Even with the COVID-accelerated shift toward digital marketing, many healthcare technology marketers are still focused on product-centric content and pure sales collateral instead of human-centric content and thought leadership.

Mike Sweeney, CEO of Right Source Marketing, and Yvonne Lyons, COO of Right Source Marketing, recently discussed the five areas that deserve more attention when it comes to building your healthcare technology content marketing plan. These should be included in your top priorities.

Here is a quick recap (link to view the entire webinar is below):

1. Planning Process and Setting Reasonable Goals & Objectives

Data shows that shows less than half of technology companies have a specific plan for content marketing. And, given what’s been happening in the world this year, it’s not surprising that companies running fast and furious either may not have the time to plan or the resources to follow through on those plans. This happens for three reasons: the planning was never made a true priority, they realize they simply don’t have the time, or the team actually doesn’t know where to start; (which leads to a kind of paralysis.

A good planning process solves for these problems, while setting realistic goals and expectations. Quality content marketing isn’t a short-term performance vehicle — it’s a long-term investment.

2. Benchmark the Market & Your Competition

It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole while investigating the competition. We’ve seen 40-plus slides within decks with magic quadrants analyzing every aspect of a competitor’s content, strategy, and approach. The important thing is to learn what ideas you can borrow and improve on, and which you can ignore.

It’s also important not to get confused by who is your “sales competition,” vs. who is your “content competition.” Your sales competition are the other companies that sell the same kind of services or software as you. Your content competition are those companies that are ranking for the same kinds of content you want to own on search engine results pages. These content competitors may include major publishers like newspapers and trade associations, in addition to pure sales competitors.

3. Fine-Tune Your Messages, Themes & Topics

Although it may be easy to come up with a giant list of content ideas, what we call ideation, it’s important to understand which topics and themes are truly worth the time and effort in order to stand out and begin to support your business goals. Core messages, themes, and topics are like a big content tree with different branches – the leaves are the individual content ideas, but these stem from the themes which address your business goals and personas, all of which are supported by your core messaging.

content marketing plan

A lot of people just create content randomly. They start writing things and then wonder why content marketing doesn’t work in the end. Fine-tuning your messages, themes, and topics, and making sure they are all part of a unified whole, is a big part of what ensures your content succeeds in the end.

4. Address All Four Content Distribution Channels

Content marketing doesn’t stop once you create a remarkable piece of content. Five or six years ago, you might still have relied on a strategy of build it and they will come, but that’s no longer the case. Today, you have to keep in mind all possible distribution channels: internal channels, owned media, paid media, and earned media. Within each of those buckets are multiple options for content distribution, each with their own applications depending on your company’s particular situation and business goals.

5. Get the Most Out of Your Content Marketing Efforts

If content marketing is an investment, a good plan accounts for maximizing that investment with the three Rs: repurpose, refresh, and repromote:

Repurpose: This means change the format. For example, parse a case study into an infographic for social, or (what we’ve done here) summarize a webinar into a blog post.

Refresh: Update an older piece of content that performed well. This also means updating the internal links to more current, timely information as well as changing the publish date.

Repromote: Promote and redistribute older pieces of content, especially those that have previously performed well in addition to those that discuss trending topics.

View the entire webinar

There is much more in the full webinar, including Yvonne and Mike’s answers to listener questions. If you’re still curious about how to get started with your healthtech content marketing plan, watch the recording of our webinar.

Not into watching, check out our eBook for healthtech marketers on how to build a content marketing plan.

Related Resources

About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.