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Notes

The Differential | #8

David McCarthy

In this edition:

  • B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: A16Z keeps its content engine running. Lyra and Evernorth wrap up their large conferences. And Pearl demonstrates how a brand can use awards to generate awareness.

  • Data point: Which advocacy and navigation brands talk about themselves the most on the home page—established brands or up-and-coming brands?

  • NEW - Promptly: Five prompts to spark social content for your clinical leaders.

  • Differential diagnosis: Generative AI will transform many marketers’ workflows and responsibilities. But is there another impact, especially in B2B healthcare, that’s going unnoticed?

  • Napkin draft: B2B healthcare marketers’ competition goes beyond just their respective brand and product competitors. So who else should teams monitor?

  • Four things on marketing tactics: The SERP will change dramatically based on Google’s I/O announcement; LinkedIn and Canva double down on employees as being key channels to drive business; and marketers are “meh” about Meta’s new app.

  • 1:1 Office hours: A free 45-minute session to brainstorm and untangle marketing and content projects.

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

  • Andreesen Horowtiz’s engine isn’t slowing. The firm published a landing page the outlines their thesis for merging healthcare and fintech capabilities, and they shared their fifth and final playbook on digital health GTM — selling through channel partnerships. → Read more

  • Oy! At Lyra Health’s conference, Breakthrough, Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy Kent on Ted Lasso, spoke, in addition to leaders from Zoom and Starbucks. → Read more

  • Cigna’s health-services brand Evernorth wrapped up their conference, Outcomes, recently. The event focused on “elevating benefit offerings, improving total population health, and unveiling what’s possible through the power of Evernorth.” → Read more

  • In what seems like a (sub)category-design play, CertifyOS shared an article differentiating provider network management and provider intelligence. → Read more

  • Abacus Insights’ senior director of solution strategy penned a LinkedIn article on how they differ from other health-data companies. I genuinely appreciate the “on-the-nose-ness” of this. Many brands veil their differentiation messaging too much, in my opinion, forcing prospective buyers to discern differentiators for themselves. → Read more

  • Pearl Health released their second annual Top 50 Value-Based Care Thinkers list. From an awareness perspective, I appreciate these types of plays. They can attract inbound links and seem to generate a lot of social engagement across different relevant connection networks. (One organic post about the list generated 120-plus engagements and 20 reposts alone.) → Read more

  • apree health shared its 2023 Workforce Health Index. Much like “state of” reports, indices like these work best, in my opinion, when the angle is unique or hyperspecific and when the data is differentiated. From a content-marketing perspective, these are a gold mine of content breakouts. → Read more

And now, some data on content

Within the healthcare advocacy and navigation category, messaging about customer and consumer centricity is quite prevalent.

But many brands in the space seem to approach that messaging differently, especially on their website's home page, where, often, a brand conveys their value proposition and introduces what's possible.

For example, based on rough observation of some well-known brands in the advocacy and navigation market, older brands tend to talk more about themselves on the home page. They use their brand name more frequently, and they use first-person pronouns more frequently.

Younger brands, meanwhile, take the opposite approach, it appears. They use self-referential language less frequently, focusing more on the customer and their jobs, via second-person language, like "you" and "your."

Promptly

Five Quick prompts for clinical leaders’ LinkedIn content

Like most of B2B marketing, healthcare and digital health marketing is likely evolving from its top-down NFL era into its flatter NBA era: like NBA players, employees have become prominent ambassadors that help build brand equity and, perhaps most importantly, establish trust and new channels with prospects.

Within our healthcare and digital health world, clinical leaders can carry the same appeal that top-tier athletes do. Yet many clinicians struggle to establish a regular habit of sharing their points of view with prospects or even the public at large.

The five prompts below intend to help marketing and operator leaders spark micro-thought-leadership ideas for their respective brand’s clinical leaders.

  1. Social platforms are filled with posts about the failure and inefficiency of the healthcare system. Take a positive-contrarian position: what initiative, policy, technology breakthrough, or modality is working but not getting the attention it deserves?

  2. Healthcare is in a new era of technological innovation. Identify and describe the innovation that excites you most, and compare its possible impact to that of an invention in the past. (The catch: you can't compare it to the iPhone, T-model, or printing press.)

  3. Name the likely winner of the next era of healthcare. What are they doing differently, and what impact has that difference made across the healthcare system?

  4. Few industries involve as many stakeholders as healthcare does. Which stakeholder deserves a louder voice? Why, and what's the potential impact of that?

  5. Imagine you have the power to test a new payment model that rewards innovative, efficient, high-quality care for a particular population. Which population or condition would you target, why, and what does the model look like?

A differential diagnosis

The other side of Generative AI’s impact

TL;DR: The flood of content that generative AI tools will produce may make it even harder for buyers to sift through noise for signals they can trust.

Early takes from marketers on ChatGPT and other generative AI tools — that marketers' productivity can soar and that SEO may be at risk, for example — have been enlightening. However, many of these predictions have focused on the supply side of the B2B buying equation, or the work that marketers themselves are responsible for.

There’s another side of the story that, from my perspective, hasn’t been focused on much. Generative AI tools will almost certainly impact the other side of the equation—the demand side, or the buyer, and add another layer of complexity their already-complex journey.

Within B2B healthcare marketing, effective content signals differentiating expertise and cultivates a sense of trust within the buying team. The blog series that distills a new intricate, technical reimbursement policy into simple takeaways, for example, can be an early origin of a long-standing partnership between an up-and-coming health-tech company and an established enterprise buyer.

But if AI technology can not only level the playing field when it comes to educational content but multiply it, how do B2B healthcare brands still signify their credibility? And how can buying teams discern which brand is a partner they can rely on?

Some content plays and tactics that may be able to help counter these dilutive effects of generative AI are for brands to:

  1. Leverage employees' own brands and channels

  2. Design a hyperspecific, hyperunique narrative that can win in any feed

  3. Double down on technically rich “boring content”

  4. Reimagine what “content” means or can be (e.g., think of content as a product)

  5. Weave in more of your brand’s operating frameworks and proprietary research

  6. Lean on customer stories

  7. Make sense of the buying journey for the buyers

Content will still be an essential lever worth investing in because of its ability to scale. But I suspect that the B2B healthcare brands that plan around the new AI reality now will see more efficient production, acquisition, and retention down the road.

Napkin draft

Who are your actual marketing competitors?

In B2B healthcare marketing, if a brand is aiming to be a community-building thought leader and market educator, it's useful (and sobering) to remember that their marketing competition is broader than their brand or product competitors.

For example, many leads of an enterprise buying team are probably regular readers of:

- CMS and CMMI
- STAT News
- Fierce Healthcare
- Becker's
- Modern Healthcare
- Deloitte
- McKinsey
- ZS
- Willis Towers Watson
- Health Affairs
- NEJM Catalyst
- Individual creators and influencers

With that many voices in the space, a distinct point of view and distribution-focused content strategy are no longer optional in B2B healthcare.

Four things On marketing tactics

  • It sounds like a broken record, but the search results page experience we’ve known will likely be gone for good, based on what Google announced at their conference. → Read more

  • Early this summer, LinkedIn is reportedly going to launch a feature that enables brands to promote content through their employees’ profiles.

  • Marketers may not rush to adopt Meta’s supposed Twitter killer. → Read more

  • Canva’s latest product launch suggests that they are betting big on employees becoming creators for their employer’s brand. → Read more

Virtual office hours

Free | 1 to 2 team members | 45 minutes

In B2B healthcare, content engines can get stuck fairly quickly. Ideas to engage sophisticated, scrutinizing buying teams are hard to come by, stakeholder reviews can stall projects, and limited resources can threaten output and distribution.

Sometimes, an outside point of view can help uncover new possibilities and solutions.

I’m piloting one free 45-minute brainstorm in June to help 1 to 2 members of a B2B healthcare marketing team “unstuck” their content engine.

We can work together to tailor the agenda, but some potential challenges to cover include:

  • Topic generation

  • Content planning, including tools

  • Content reviews

  • Content prioritization

  • Content atomization, or repurposing

Given how casual the conversation aims to be, it’s best for 1 to 2 team members rather than an entire team.

→ Reach out if you’re interested

I post on LinkedIn, too

Let’s connect

A brief disclaimer

I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.

categories newsletter

The Differential | #7

David McCarthy

In this edition:

  • B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: Slack joins the healthcare-marketing chat. Summit Health publishes a best-of-the-year piece of content. Redox demonstrates how to win at content in B2B healthcare. And Andreesen and its portfolio member Thyme Care have an enviably productive quarter.

  • Data point: For B2B brands, a website is the flagship property. But it performs a lot of functions for the brand. So, how do leaders measure its performance?

  • NEW - Off the Page interview: For Ashling Lee, who led content at Quartet Health and Season Health, content is all about playing the long game.

  • Differential diagnosis: Long-form authors have served as a blueprint for the content creation process in B2B healthcare and digital health. It’s time to experiment with new models of creating content.

  • Napkin draft: What are the ways a marketing program can differentiate its brand’s content?

  • Four things on marketing tactics: Hubspot ponders whether this content mainstay is on the way out, Gartner shares new email-marketing benchmarks, and ChatGPT may render this type of search a thing of the past.

  • NEW - 1:1 Office hours: In B2B healthcare marketing, content engines can get stuck, quickly and often, This free, friendly 45-minute session aims to help.

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

  • Amid Salesforce’s new moves within healthcare, Slack recently shared a customer success story about OneOncology’s use of the collaboration tool to “drive innovation.” → Read more

  • Summit Health released its 2023 Healthcare Platform Report in late February. It’s a wonderfully rich piece of content and a perfectly chosen format for this trending, relatively emergent topic. → Read more

  • Charts have been having a moment for a bit as a content type, and the League, who very openly are courting the Blues, is taking advantage of it. In a new article, the company anchors their new article on several charts to spotlight how “the healthcare data explosion will power CX innovation.” (Side note: I really appreciate how all-in the League is on messaging around the topic of CX. It appears in nearly every single article they’ve written in 2023.) → Read more

  • The head of platform growth at Turquoise Health published a post on LinkedIn that exemplifies how LinkedIn has become a publishing platform, not a distribution platform. In the post, he compares a hospital list price and a payer list price for a billing code related to pneumonia. The post is educational, relevant, and memorable. Well done. → Read more

  • For its series on digital health builders (which progressively looks like a book in the making), Andreesen Horowitz’s Jay Rughani teased that Andreesen’s new GTM playbook will focus on selling via channel partners and ecosystems. The firm also recently published an article on how health-tech companies can “show and quantify their magic,” as well as an article about the status of healthcare marketplaces. → Read more

  • On LinkedIn, brand-refreshed Redox has been advertising its white paper on how to sell into health system, a solid example of a brand educating the market on a topic that aligns with its business, without overtly pitching the business. → Read more

  • Elevance Health, formerly Anthem, Inc., who is also my employer and the parent company of Carelon, the business that I focus on, released its 2022 report, and accompanying microsite, on advancing whole health. → Read more

  • In a document-post ad on LinkedIn, OneOncology is advertising its 2022 annual report. The ad is such a wisely chosen format for this type of content. → Read more

  • Abacus Insights’ CEO joined PwC’s “Next in Health” podcast to discuss how healthcare companies can innovate care-delivery models with interoperable, usable data. → Listen

  • Oscar Health’s Mario Schlosser promoted a new microsite, authored by him, that breaks down what Oscar does. As usual, the design is beautiful, the copy clear and memorable. But when I put my SEO hat on, I wonder why Oscar did not put this on their own domain to capitalize on the traffic from social and any inbound links. Mario’s post had nearly 200 engagements. → Read more

  • Cancer care management startup Thyme Care has been active this quarter, to say the least. The Nashville-based company refined its brand design and has earned media in American Journal of Managed Care, MedCityNews, and several podcasts. → Read more

And now, some data on content marketing

For many B2B brands in healthcare and digital health, the website is their flagship property.

It deepens awareness among visitors, can help turn visitors into leads, and, in some cases, can turn leads into customers.

So with a property serving so many different purposes, what metrics are marketing leaders using to measure the performance of their website?

Off the Page

Meet Ashling Lee

For Ashling Lee, playing the long game in content leads to better business results. It's the long game, not the short-term, clickbaity "hacks," that drives value and loyalty.

In her Off the Page interview, Ashling, who's produced content and led content marketing at high-growth brands like POPSUGAR, Virgin, Quartet Health, and Season, shares:

↣ What type of content can help create that value and loyalty
↣ Which brand she thinks plays the long game best
↣ What editorial decisions can corrode value and loyalty
↣ What, operationally, healthcare marketing teams can improve to impact more business outcomes with content

→ Read the interview

A differential diagnosis

New role models for content creation

TL;DR: Marketers can turn to other “creative” roles in arts and entertainment to model their content production process.

We need new production models for content marketing within B2B healthcare and digital health.

For years, authors and journalists served as a guide for B2B marketers within healthcare and digital health. But they no longer seem like the only instructive models. Algorithm fluctuations, crowded markets, saturated feeds and inboxes, and waning attention spans have changed things.

Whereas merely creating an authoritative piece of content used to be a feat in and of itself, now, it’s likely not enough. The stakes are too high. Every week is a new round of content sweepstakes.

Other roles in arts and entertainment can help us learn new ways to address the challenges and needs marketers have today.

Three roles, in particular, come to mind:

  1. The stand-up comic

  2. The talk-show host

  3. The music producer

→ Explore this note more

Napkin draft

The 10 content-function advantages

If content is a product, then what advantages enable healthcare marketing teams to separate their content product from competitors?

Four things On marketing tactics

  • Hubspot ponders whether blogging is dead. → Read the article

  • Generally, there are three different types of searches: informational, navigational, and transactional. One reputable SEO consultant thinks informational searches will diminish because of ChatGPT. → Read the post

  • In a new report, Gartner published email-marketing benchmarks, which they preview on LinkedIn. The most popular type of email sent, unsurprisingly, were product-discovery emails. The most opened type of emails are also unsurprising but likely disappointing to marketers focused on the top of the funnel. → Read the post

  • Influencer creators are just young adults promoting D2C brands, right? Right? → See the data

“Unstuck your content engine”

Virtual office hours

Free | 1 to 2 team members | 45 minutes

In B2B healthcare, content engines can get stuck fairly quickly. Ideas to engage sophisticated, scrutinizing buying teams are hard to come by, stakeholder reviews can stall projects, and limited resources can threaten output and distribution.

Sometimes, an outside point of view can help uncover new possibilities and solutions.

I’m piloting one free 45-minute brainstorm in May to help 1 to 2 members of a B2B healthcare marketing team “unstuck” their content engine.

We can work together to tailor the agenda, but some potential challenges to cover include:

  • Topic generation

  • Content planning, including tools

  • Content reviews

  • Content prioritization

  • Content atomization, or repurposing

Given how casual the conversation aims to be, it’s best for 1 to 2 team members rather than an entire team.

→ Reach out if you’re interested

I post on LinkedIn, too

Let’s connect

A brief disclaimer

I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.

categories newsletter

The Differential | #6

David McCarthy

In this edition:

  • B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: Prealize nails titles for its long-form lead-generation content. Unite Us gives us hope that B2B healthcare marketing can be educational and entertaining. And Modern Health launches two new lead offers.

  • Data point: Will marketers’ go-to channels in 2023 be the same ones they used the most in 2022?

  • Differential diagnosis: Creative reviews can go off course quickly. Protecting their agenda can keep them productive and relevant.

  • What if a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad: There’s lots of space to play creatively with provider enablement as a topic. For example, is there a way to tie it to matches and wheels?

  • Marketing tactics: Search continues to change, and amid stalling growth, TikTok wants to help its organic content creators.

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

  • Predictive analytics company Prealize Health has a knack for sticky, suspenseful titles for their lead-generation offers. I’m into it. Their state of health report for 2023 is titled “In the Aftermath,” and last year’s is titled “The Domino Effect.” These are a good reminder that in technical fields like healthcare analytics, consumer-oriented voices and angles help content stand out. → Read more

  • The marketing team at Unite Us is doing some progressive podcasts for a brand that focuses on social determinants of health. When was the last time a healthcare brand interviewed Rob Dyrdek, aka Bobby Light? → Read more

  • Particle Health published its 2023 State of US Healthcare’s National Network Data Exchanges. → Read more

  • Benefits navigation startup HealthJoy published an infographic preview of its first insights report, detailing “the difference between the type of benefits that members want versus what employers know is needed to drive long-term health outcomes.” → Read more

  • Urgent-care-marketplace Solv announced new brand illustration to “visualize an aspiration of healthcare as being convenient and easy.” → Read more

  • Lyra Health is promoting its “Workforce Mental Health Trends for 2023.” It’s a powerful offer, I imagine, and I wonder how a landing page with more conversion-focused copy, such as social proof from early readers or a slideshow illustrating several pages, would affect the conversion rate. → Read more

  • Ribbon Health launched a consumer survey report on how health plans can use data to unlock better care. → Read more

  • Reflecting its focus on “whole-person virtual care,” Teladoc is sharing a two-page case study on its multi-condition program for the American Foreign Service Protective Association. → Read more

  • Rachel Woods, who hosts The Advisory Board’s podcast “Radio Advisory,” launched part 2 of the “What CEOS need to know in 2023” series. To me, the Advisory Board creates compelling content, and it’s nice to see a traditionally conservative brand invest in a podcast with a relatively progressive style like this. → Read more

  • Modern Health has launched a couple of new lead-generation offers as of late. “Table Talks” is an “exclusive” series geared for leaders at employers to discuss well-being trends in the workplace. And their consumer-facing Daily Pause gives consumers tips and tools to build mental health. → Read more

  • Jasper Health has started a community for its members with cancer to share their experiences and provide support to one another. This topic has been covered in the past, but I expect to see more brands turn to communities this year. → Read more

  • On the heels of its rebrand, Hinge Health has hired its first chief marketing officer, who has past experience at Included Health (Ground Rounds). → Read more

And now, some data on content marketing

The healthcare marketplace isn’t the only place that’s likely to shift dramatically in 2023.

Marketers’ favorite channels are likely to fluctuate as well, especially with the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and the financial pinch that may limit use of paid channels.

So which top channels from 2022 will remain at the top of marketers’ go-to list? Which will fall?

A differential diagnosis

Creating purposeful agendas for creative reviews

TL;DR: Be ruthless in what’s in scope during reviews, and encourage team members to align content that they share with your buyer and your current business scenarios or goals.

Creative reviews or workshops, where your team reviews content or plays together, can be a productive setting for brainstorming and learning. They can spur better work in the future, align the team on the brand’s essence, and tacitly signal your risk or experimentation tolerance.

The reviews I’ve found to be most valuable do something different than most. They’re ruthlessly purposeful in the agenda and in the work that’s shared. For example, they discourage sessions from becoming a political show-and-tell (e.g., “Look at this beautiful campaign we launched”), or they tactfully encourage to share what hasn’t worked. In other words, they keep learning front and center.

Protecting the purpose of these sessions can involve some work and consistent, clear communication within the team. Here are some ground rules or expectations that can help keep that purpose in tact:

  • Focus on your own brand’s own work if there’s a clear lesson to learn. Spend more time on your competitors' work, trade publications (or content competitors), and especially those outside of your market

  • Beware the “anxiety of influence” when reviewing competitors’ work.

  • Anchor each session to a specific business scenario your team encounters or will encounter soon (e.g., if you’re about to launch a new feature to your existing customers, spend a session reviewing product or feature launch campaigns)

  • Treat the session less like an MFA fiction workshop and more like an engineering workshop—work or think backwards to understand why something works or doesn’t

  • Tie in KPIs, when possible, to determine whether the work is actually successful (We can all learn about new design and content trends, but it may be more beneficial to learn why certain on-trend assets didn't convert)

  • Apply the lens of your ideal buyer, rather than yourself, when providing feedback on work already in market or when brainstorming new ways to reach your buyer (This is a tough one.)

What if a consumer brand designed a b2B healthcare ad?

Provider enablement has been having a moment for some time now.

As Blake Madden wrote in his January 2023 update of “Breaking Down Physician Enablement Care Platforms, ”Aledade is performing quite well…Pearl Health announced a $75M raise led by a16z and Viking Global Investors. Companies like Lumeris are flying under the radar while producing stellar results in health system and physician enablement. Other firms like Emergence, Third Way Health, and Ease are working in more focused areas of enablement…There’s a ton of positive momentum here, and the future of the physician practice is nigh as robust turnkey solutions grow in prevalence.”

In other words, the space seems competitive, which makes differentiated marketing and brand awareness likely a growing need.

So how would a consumer brand concept the category in a print-like ad to gain the attention of buyers flipping through their preferred trade magazine?

The paths to communicate provider enablement’s value seem unlimited. (I don’t think yet another ad of executives talking in a heavily windowed room is one of them, though.) Here’s a rough concept I played with.

Content, Illustrated

Content can get easily misconstrued outside of marketing teams.

“It’s just blogs, right?” many say. “And ebooks. And maybe some TikTok videos.”

Those are types of content, for sure.

But really, isn’t content, when done right, something much bigger?

On marketing tactics

Sometimes I post on LinkedIn, too

Let’s connect

A brief disclaimer

I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.

Woodstock versus the Super Bowl

David McCarthy

The first Woodstock festival had 400,000 attendees. Last year’s Super Bowl had 112 million viewers in the United States alone.

To me, the ideal project is to create content for Woodstock rather than the Super Bowl.

That point of view approaches blasphemy as a marketer. With the Super Bowl, the reach is historic, the engagement exponential.

But in a setting attempting to reach everyone, who is the content actually for? How progressive can it really be, and what can I, as a marketer, learn from it? And perhaps most importantly, how long will people really remember it for?

Woodstock’s audience is a fraction of the Super Bowl’s. But the creative and the audience-building opportunities, I’d argue, are better.

Unlike the Super Bowl, attendees aren’t seen as a treasure trove of various markets in one place — they’re a community of like-minded people with similar passions. The setting isn’t overmanaged and clinical — it’s organic. The content wouldn’t be for internal agendas — it would be for the audience. And the cultural imprint wouldn’t be a temporary trending topic on social — but rather a long-term movement built from the long tail.

Maybe if I were given the chance at a Super Bowl-like stage, I’d change my mind and abandon my idealism. But I’d have to keep in mind that few remember uncontroversial Super Bowls, whereas most adults across the globe can recall what Woodstock was about and how it changed their life.