3 Rs of healthcare content marketing increases efficiency, improves productivity, and reduces headaches.
Attracting Customers
According to Kurve, 90% of B2B buyers start their purchase journey with an online search. They research 2-7 websites before making a decision. Availability of online research has enabled customers to become more discerning and informed, allowing them to evaluate multiple options, features, and benefits, before choosing a product that is most relevant to their needs.
To attract customers, you must present your company and your products in a favorable light by writing relevant content. A consistent content strategy allows a company to establish themselves as a thought leader in their niche. It keeps you on the radar screen, educates prospects, and builds trust. These are essential ingredients in fostering brand awareness, generating qualified leads, and driving revenue.
But creating new, relevant, and engaging content continually is no easy feat. Just coming up with an engaging topic can be a chore. I know because I try to write one or two blog articles a month and rest of the time, I am thinking about an interesting topic to write about. So, to assist content writers, I decided to write about the 3 Rs of content marketing to increase efficiency, improve productivity, and reduce headaches.
1 Reduce
“Reduce” is the art of minimizing the time and resources required to produce impactful content. You do it by:
Strategic Content Planning: Conduct thorough audience research to understand their needs and pain points. Remember, they may not yet know or understand what they need. By knowing the audience, one can develop a content calendar that directly addresses their interests and avoids creating content that might not resonate.
Be Concise: There is a place for whitepapers and long in-depth articles, but this is unsustainable. Your primary output should be bite-sized content formats like infographics, short videos, or social media snippets that are easier to digest for busy B2B audiences.
Central Content Library: Store all your content from various sources in one location. Searching and discussing with co-workers where an infographic is from three months ago is inefficient and frustrating.
2 Repurpose/Recycle
Content repurposing or recycling, is re-using existing content and presenting it in a new format to expand its reach and lifespan. This involves transforming existing content assets into new formats to reach a particular audience or using different channels. It may include transforming webinars into infographics, whitepapers into blogs, or case studies into social media posts.
Consider repackaging if your content:
- covers comprehensive information that can be broken down into simpler, more focused parts
- has been well-received by your audience, indicating that the same information in a different format could attract a wider audience
- is primarily in a format that may not be the most convenient for all segments of your audience
- contains versatile information that can be tailored to different audiences or contexts
- covers a broad topic that can be divided into narrower, more focused subtopics
- is evergreen and can be altered slightly to remain relevant over an extended period
Here are some common examples:
- Post snippets of existing YouTube video content — Most platforms allow you to post video content. Some tweaking may be required to fit within their video-length requirements, but you can easily repurpose a video for each of the platforms you have a presence on.
- Post user-generated content — User-generated content can be anything from testimonials to product reviews or tweets from a satisfied customer. This is impactful and ready-made content for you.
- Create new infographics — Creating infographics from your existing content is a valuable repurposing strategy, especially if content is data intensive. Words can get cumbersome, and data visualization is a terrific way to synthesize the information into an appealing format.
- Create text transcripts of your videos — An effective way to ensure that your videos, podcasts, and webinars are accessible to everyone is to create transcripts. While you can certainly create captions for your content, creating transcripts presents your information in another format.
3 Refresh/Re-optimize:
Refresh or re-optimize means to revisit older content and update it to make it more recent and relevant. You might have written a blog about writing impactful Google ads a few years ago, but that information is stale now. Google’s algorithms change. Some things may be kept because they will always be relevant, e.g., producing useful content. This ensures the audience has access to the most accurate and up-to-date information.
You may take core ideas from existing content and transforming it into a new format. Length may be added or subtracted, and focus shifted a bit. One way to do this is to take a high-performing blog post from the past that has slipped in search rankings. Update it with new data, revise the metadata, add relevant links, and incorporate more relevant keywords. This enhances its findability and relevancy.
New assets can be swiftly built by mixing and matching pre-existing content blocks which have already been through the approval process, saving you valuable time and resources.
Applying a sustainable approach to your content strategy will save you time in developing new blog posts or videos as well as searching for existing assets. The idea is to transform content production from a linear process to a cyclical one. It is quite likely that your audience has not read everything you have written. This gives them another opportunity to see your best work. Not only would this boost your SEO rankings, it will also make your site a destination for continual authoritative content.
BTS Consulting is a full-service strategy and marketing consulting company. With our background as laboratory researchers developing diagnostic tests and discovering drug candidates, senior product managers, and pharmaceutical sales professionals, we have proven to be a valuable resource to develop content for pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics, and health service providers. We look forward to collaborating with you.
