The new role models for B2B healthcare content marketers
David McCarthy
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.
The author analogy originally made sense. Writing long-form copy was how we marketers spent much of our time when creating premium assets, and many of us came from the same lineage: English and journalism classrooms, newspaper rooms, publisher offices, and trade magazine cubicles.
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.
Classic author model and the new role models
The differences between the classic author model and new role models are not unlike the pipes-versus-platform argument in conversations about product and strategy.
The author model is the pipes approach. It’s linear and relies on efficiency and scale in each step: from topic research through writing and copyediting. But the cracks in this model are starting to show, the risks increasing. Namely, the approach, in certain situations, can prolong time to market, drive up costs, fail to actually address audience’s needs, and limit viral distribution (which I know is much, much smaller and rare in B2B healthcare).
Other roles in arts and entertainment can help us learn new ways to address the challenges and needs we marketers have today.
Three roles, in particular, come to mind:
The stand-up comic
The talk-show host
The music producer
The stand-up comic model
Not long after the conclusion of his series Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld ventured out to a comedy club in the dingy basement of a building in New York City. He was returning to stand-up, and he, like many comedians, was using a low-stakes setting to test out new work and collect real-time feedback to refine the work before heading on a major national tour. It was, as he remarked during the show, a “painful” but necessary experience.
Years later, in an interview, Seinfeld elaborated on the value of the feedback he receives during shows:
There is no other feedback [than the feedback from the audience], if that means anything…You don’t have to ask [other professionals for feedback]. Stand-up comics receive a score on what they’re doing more often and more critically than any other human on Earth. Even a pitcher, he’s not on the mound for an hour-and-20-minutes straight, having his pitches judged by the umpire.
In the author model, feedback often comes too late. Dozens of hours have been spent researching, creating and editing, and in the case for many B2B healthcare brands, thousands of dollars have been spent distributing it.
Social platforms and communities, however, are those low-stakes, feedback-rich venues for us marketers. In most cases, if we assume the model that a stand-up artists uses, these channels offer us a chance to quickly and iteratively test the appeal of new concepts or narratives, new messaging, and new topics. The audience’s feedback can signal where to invest weeks of time and thousands of dollars for premium content assets, much like a comedian does before a major tour.
The talk-show host model
I once interviewed Notable Health’s customer advocacy and brand strategist, Gianni Fornesi. During our conversation, she said something that has stuck with me for years now:
In the age of democratized content, I am less and less interested in what one person (that we've somehow deemed their point-of-view to be more '“right” than anyone else's) has to say, and more interested in what many people have to say.
That point of view seems increasingly more relevant each quarter, perhaps each week. Marketing research suggests that buyers trust employees more than brands themselves. A community of voices, in many ways, has become a logical solution, for both targeted audiences and to marketers.
The marketer and creator who can cultivate that community, formally or informally, will charge their brand and see downstream impact across awareness, engagement, and channel efficiency.
The talk-show host is an apt model for that.
Combining their company’s brand and their own personality as a magnet, the creator in this model can attract authoritative, entertaining, and sought-after industry experts and spark thought-provoking conversations across numerous channels — social, events, and even static long-form content.
The result is rich, unscripted, polyphonic customer-driven content (and limitless repurposing opportunities), with the brand as the platform that delivered it.
The music producer model
In 2004, music producer Danger Mouse released to much anticipation and controversy the Grey Album. The work combined the vocals and lyrics of Jay-Z from The Black Album and the music from various songs by The Beatles. Entertainment publications lauded it as the best album of the year, even though its initial run was only 4,000 copies, reportedly.
The Grey Album was a brilliant mash-up. It was also, most likely, a more efficient production process (though likely not easy) and dramatically low-risk: Jay-Z and The Beatles are two of the most successful artists of all time, commercially and critically.
In marketing jargon, it was genius content repurposing.
Repurposing, or content sampling like a producer, is a logical, effective antidote to the maladies many marketers face.
Content repurposing is the strategic distribution of already-created content across different channels and within different formats. For example, chapters in an ebook become blog posts, or a video interview with a client becomes a printed case study.
The marketers who proactively plan how to repurpose or sample successful, highly invested in content are often laps ahead of those who do not. They multiply the number of assets they can produce quickly. They’re almost guaranteed that that content, generally, will resonate and perform well within the market. And they bypass the process of securing stakeholder feedback and sign-offs, which often slow time-to-market.
Suddenly, that OKR to fill the lead pipeline by producing one long-form asset, eight blog articles, and twenty-plus social posts in a month can be achieved with one content project.
Danger Mouse isn’t a producer. He’s a content savant.
A case study from a Novelist
Some may argue that the author model is the only model for content within B2B healthcare marketing. Maybe so. But literary history, of all places, has an anecdote that puts that fixed belief into doubt.
In the 1800s, one novelist chose to create his work differently.
A magazine approached the author with a unique offer — serialization. Rather than spend months or years drafting a complete novel at once, he could write and publish installments in each magazine issue.
That model offered several benefits. For the author, it provided structure and accountability, and it enabled him to collect nearly real-time feedback. It also increased his readership more easily. For the magazine and its advertisers, it enabled the publisher to increase sales and retain readers.
The novelist agreed to the offer, and he subsequently published many commercially and critically beloved works in that format. The novelist was Charles Dickens.