Content marketing for healthcare is gaining momentum. Leading organizations are embracing the challenge of developing content and the primary channel for its distribution: a business blog. For many medical device and diagnostic marketers, the mere suggestion that they should consider adding a blog to their digital marketing arsenal incites fear, paranoia and a sense of utter hopelessness.....
Fear not intrepid ones! Here are some tips to overcome the most common hurdles you'll encounter when implementing a new business blog.
Hurdle #1: Win Over Your Boss
The data clearly shows that a well executed business blog is a powerful marketing tool. Research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute on B2B Content Marketing shows that over 70% of North American businesses have implemented a business blog as part of their content marketing strategy.
Survey Data from HubSpot:
20 Fresh Stats About the State of Inbound Marketing in 2012 HubSpot,February 27, 2012 |
Just stating the facts probably isn’t going to be enough to convince anyone that the time and resources that will be needed are justified. You need to lay out a solid strategy for how your blog will complement and support your marketing goals and objectives. Your strategy should:
- Define the business objectives for your blog: brand awareness, expanding reach, education, supporting sales, SEO, or reputation building
- Specify the metrics that will measure success
- Determine of your personae you will be targeting with your writing
- Develop the creative theme–including the visual style and personality for the blog
- Identify existing content and materials that can be re-purposed into a blog format
- Compile a list of topics and regular features or columns that are planned
- Define your blog team, likely a cross-functional group that could include marketing, IT, business analysis, graphic design and regulatory
Hurdle #2: Get Legal / Regulatory Buy-In
My first advice is to involve your legal and regulatory people early in the planning process. As you're developing your blog strategy, work with your legal and regulatory specialists to develop guidelines to dictate what can and can't be published on the blog.
Getting Regulatory buy-in can be particularly challenging in some organizations, but unlike other digital tactics (like social media) a blog has the advantage that if can be of sufficient length to provide balanced benefit claim and risk information and can contain links to provide easy access to more complete discussions of risks. In this way, a business blog is more in line with the current FDA guidelines on social media than other social media (i.e. Twitter's 140 character limit makes meeting this standard difficult).
Develop an editorial calendar with a proposed list of topics that can be reviewed and approved by your legal and regulatory people before you put pen to paper. A spreadsheet with the topics and the planned publication dates will help you develop an internal review process so that everyone on the team can anticipate when and how frequently they will be expected to review and approve new content.
Hurdle #3: Writer's Block
Once you've established your blog and you've gotten a few posts under your belt, the time will come when you think you can't possibly keep coming up with more topics. The best approach is to recognize in advance that this is going to happen and proactively keep a running list of ideas. This can be as simple as a list of customer questions or a file folder of other industry blogs or news that you'd like to comment on or curate. If you need suggestions, download our list of 20 Ways to Brainstorm New Blog Content!
As for the topics themselves, shorter more specific posts have a number of advantages as they are not only easier to write and to review (and approve), but more frequent shorter posts are easier to digest and share than longer posts. In the blog world, more frequent posts are advantageous so don't be afraid to keep your topics focused and your blog posts short.
Hurdle #4: Measuring Success
The best advice I can give here is: keep it simple! You don't want to end up spending more time analyzing data than you do writing. What matters most is that the metrics accomplish two main objectives.
- Support your overall marketing goals; and,
- Provide information that will help you make decisions about your blog marketing effectiveness.
- Visitors: The total number should be increasing over time, but also consider visits by individual post or topic to help determine which subjects are generating the most interest.
- Leads: Leads fuel growth. How many leads are generated and how quickly these can be converted to sales is one of the most common measures of success of a business blog. You should be asking yourself which posts / topics are attracting the best leads. They might not be the most popular but could be your most profitable.
- Subscribers: Subscribers are an indication of the quality and consistency of your content. You should consider how important it is to grow your base readership who can help spread your content to others.
- Inbound Links: An inbound link is when another website links to a page on your website. Inbound links help generate search traffic and as a result can be a driver for other metrics.
- Social Media Shares: understanding what types of content your customers share gives great insights into what subjects are resonating with your readers. Look at WHO is sharing as well as WHAT is being shared to help target content to your buyer personae.
Ready, Set, Go!
Your business blog can be an important part of your overall content marketing program. Great blogs help companies gain exposure and establish themselves as industry leaders. Don't forget, once you've launched your blog, make sure you are promoting it through your professional networks.
What hurdles have you encountered that discourage or prevent you from blogging? If you've successfully implemented a business blog for your medical device or diagnostic company what advice can you give others?
Jacqueline Murray is a Marketing Strategist for DardenLentz, a B2B Marketing and Branding Agency focused on healthcare and technology. Jacqueline heads the firm's Ohio office, established to support the region's bioscience industry. She has held senior positions with global marketing responsibilities for both diagnostic and medical device companies.