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
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:
The stand-up comic
The talk-show host
The music producer
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.
I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.