The Differential | #5

In this edition:

• B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: What content stood out in late 2022, and how did one beloved startup rebrand?

• Data point: Does your brand plan as far in advance as most brands do?

• Differential diagnosis: Briefs need to get more granular with and better distinguish objectives.

• Napkin draft: Yeah, “narrative altitude” is jargon (that I created). But, like an editorial angle, it can play a big role in the success of content.

• Marketing tactics: So search might be different this year…

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

• In what may be one of the first major rebrands among startup darlings from the pandemic, Hinge Health has a new look (and a new product — house calls). Hinge Health dropped its famous orange and adopted green as its primary color, a la Landmark Health and Garner Health. → See the rebrand

• One Medical published a (gated) white paper recently on a common theme in healthcare marketing these days: the integration of behavioral health with primary care. According to the newly acquired company, the white paper “explores how integrated behavioral health rooted in primary care is key to supporting employees’ mental and physical well-being.” → Read the paper

• Brand agency Prophet touted on LinkedIn how it helped a surgical tech brand clarify its value proposition. The brand promise Prophet recommended is “Transforming surgery.” Working on value propositions, creating a new brand identity, crafting content, these are all difficult tasks, and usually more complex than what most non-marketers expect. However, the number of healthcare brands relying on value propositions around “transformation” and “reimagining” may be leading to parity and diluting the actual value that these brands can deliver. I also don’t know if clients understand the meaning of “reimagining” and “transforming” healthcare. I don’t sometimes. (Full disclosure: I’ve used “transformation,” “reimagine,” “rethink,” and countless others these last couple of years.) → See the case study

• Digital cancer care management startup Jasper Health’s content engine is running on all cylinders, it seems. The brand, which has partnered with Walgreen’s and Evernorth, recently launched a member testimonial and, interestingly, a “custom savings and ROI report.” The latter is an interesting lower-funnel piece that has the potential to deliver helpful insights and move the prospect along the sales journey (even better, it does not seem to require setting up a meeting to share the findings, which may be a deterrent) . There’s also a calculator that teases the report’s insights, a brilliant play to reduce form abandonment. But I wonder, how long does it take to turn around and publish? → See the landing page

• Employer-focused navigation company Quantum Health continues its marketing push, most recently launching a campaign for its new solution, Quantum Health Access. The campaign has included a video and an announcement/editorial in Med City News. → See the post

• Healthcare platform startup League, who has also announced partnerships with Google and Highmark, has hired an editor-in-chief. To me, this signals that they’re pushing their chips into audience building, which I love. Lots of B2B brands talk about audience building; few seem to invest in it the way that League seems to be doing. The new hire comes from Health Evolution and Healthcare IT News. This will be a brand to watch, I think. → See the post

• SDOH-focused and apparent Rob Dyrdek fan Unite Us published a report on how “ACOs can meet new health equity requirements” that CMS will effect in January 2023. (Hats off to the team for optimizing the report’s landing page for search, both in the slug and the H1.) → Visit the landing page

• Lyra recently penned an editorial or missive, based on recent WHO and US Surgeon General reports, arguing that the employers provide behavioral health screening, coaching, and care as well as cultural changes. Titled “The New Employee Contract,” it’s a bold narrative, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been giving more prominence on Lyra’s digital properties. → Read the article

• Several weeks ago, Rock Health created a “pocket guide to value-based care.” The brand routinely publishes solid, educational content, often with a memorable hook (usually in the title). To me, what’s effective with this piece is Rock Health’s categorization of the content. “Value-based care” is a highly prevalent, highly searched topic (Moz reports up to 500 searches a month), and the topic is represented in numerous books already. Few existing pieces on the topic out there seem digestible or memorable, at least to a non-operator, like me. → Read the article

• Morgan Health-backed health insurance company Centivo launched a LinkedIn newsletter, Centiments. In several months, the newsletter, whose focus is “advancing the conversation around health plan innovation, has acquired more than 5,000 subscribers. And thus far, it’s not mincing words or shying away from competition. Its newsletter titles thus far: “The Health Plan Innovation Conversation,” “Risk and Reward: Challenging the Health Plan Status Quo,” and “Impacts of the Affordability Crisis.” → Visit the newsletter home

• Nothing new here: Health Tech Nerds has published a string of deep-dives over the last couple of months for its community, including a bookmark-worthy exploration of Medicaid’s “functions and structures” (with editorial support from Casey Langwith, Dr. Lindsey Leininger, and Duncan Reece). → Read the article (available to community members)

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And now, some data on content marketing

Digital may have made year-long planning a relic of the past. (I can’t even imagine that.)

Today’s marketers seem to embrace agility (or be forced to adopt it): according to HubSpot, most marketing teams plan their work one to four months in advance.

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A differential diagnosis

defining better marketing objectives

TL;DR: In campaign briefs or during project conversations, distinguish between message objectives and business, or performance, objectives.

Campaign briefs and conversations about marketing projects can benefit from a change.

In the “objective” field of many briefs I’ve seen over the years, I see guidance like this: “Educate the market about an upcoming CMS reimbursement mandate.” “Differentiate our product from the others.” “Communicate the value of our product.”

These, and others like it, are not objectives, in my opinion, They don’t tell me what the business or the project must, measurably, accomplish in order to be successful. If achieved, they alone don’t translate into business value. I don’t know why it’s important to the business.

But they still are useful. They can clarify the tone of voice, the structure, and the psychology of the content.

So, add them to briefs, debate them in planning sessions. But don’t forget to add a broader, measurable business objective, too.

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Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays

On Narrative Altitude

Narrative altitude is the “height” or vertical point of view your story or messaging assumes. (It’s also a term that I’ve completely made up, because that’s what we marketers like to do.)

Ideally, it aligns with your intended audience’s role and their immediate perspective of their business and the market (or the perspective that their desired role assumes).

Whereas point of view often can imply a horizontal angle on a topic (e.g., “organic search is an underrated channel for brand building” or “paid search is the only channel for growth”), narrative altitude is about how much the content zooms in on the trees or conversely, how much the content zooms out on the forest, so to speak.

To me, the altitudes can differ for every company, for every category, and for every industry.

View fullsize

However, some general principles apply across those dimensions.

For example, generally, lower-altitude content is more tactical, specific, and prescriptive because up-and-coming individual contributors or managers, who tend to focus on tactical execution, are the intended audience.

Alternatively, higher-altitude content is more abstract, strategic, and even philosophical. (In its worst form, it’s a victim of Steven Pinker’s concept of “the Curse of Knowledge,” which he defined in his book The Sense of Style as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else to not know something that you know.”)

Narrative altitude at this height focuses more on the “forest,” enabling senior leaders to see their business, their market, and their industry as a whole in new ways. The usual consulting firms (e.g., McKinsey, ZS, and Willis Towers) excel in this space. The Advisory Board develops content at this altitude frequently, with a prime example being their campaigns and their content on “systemness” in healthcare.

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Content, Illustrated

Is there such thing as a linear or even logical sales journey? I’m not so sure. To me, it seems different for every prospect.

But the best content — from the top of the funnel to conversion — helps it move more linearly and more quickly.

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On marketing tactics

• To me, “small” stories can be hugely effective when they are ruthlessly focused on a job that the intended audience has to do well (but may not know how to yet). Reforge’s summer article on writing an executive summary is exactly that for me. → Read the article

• SEO advisor Eli Schwartz makes several intriguing forecasts for 2023, including that Google will deprioritize the value of inbound links and invest in visual results, that TikTok indexes webpages, and that Amazon launches a search engine with organic results. → Read the article

• Citing Consumer Trends Survey, Scott Galloway highlights that Gen Z and Millennials choose TikTok over TV and streaming when asked to choose their preference. → Read the article

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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.

On narrative altitude

In the mid-2010s, HubSpot, a marketing platform company (among other things), became a marketing juggernaut. Their blog dominated organic search. Their newsletter was save-worthy every week. And their lead magnets, like ebooks, were authoritative guides for nimble marketing teams needing help navigating the ever-changing marketing landscape.

As a result, the HubSpot brand become inextricably linked with “inbound marketing,” a GTM strategy that’s still dominant today.

And much of their success in content marketing ties to one thing: narrative altitude.

What is narrative altitude?

Narrative altitude is the “height” or vertical point of view your story or messaging assumes.

Ideally, it aligns with your intended audience’s role and their immediate perspective of their business and the market (or the perspective that their desired role assumes).

Whereas point of view often implies a horizontal angle on a topic (e.g., “organic search is an underrated channel for brand building”), narrative altitude is about how much the content zooms in on the trees or conversely, how much the content zooms out on the forest, so to speak, .

What are the different altitudes?

To me, the altitudes can differ for every company, for every category, and for every industry.

However, some general principles apply across those dimensions.

For example, generally, lower-altitude content is more tactical, specific, and prescriptive because up-and-coming individual contributors or managers, who tend to focus on tactical execution, are the intended audience.

This is where HubSpot flourished. Their “How to” content covered seemingly every valuable question a marketing manager or contributor had about their role or their projects. In many ways, HubSpot became, at that time, the de facto digital-marketing education that many managers and directors of today grew up on.

Alternatively, higher-altitude content is more abstract, strategic, and even philosophical. (In its worst form, it’s a victim of Steven Pinker’s concept of “the Curse of Knowledge,” which he defined in his book The Sense of Style as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else to not know something that you know.”)

Narrative altitude at this height focuses more on the “forest,” enabling senior leaders to see their business, their market, and their industry as a whole in new ways. The usual consultancy firms (e.g., McKinsey, ZS, and Willis Towers) excel in this space. The Advisory Board develops content at this altitude frequently, with a prime example being their campaigns and their content on “systemness” in healthcare.

Learning about narrative altitude the hard way

I learned about the importance of audience-altitude alignment painfully.

In the late 2010s, CMS launched a complex, ever-changing mandate for providers that tied to my employer’s product portfolio. This is the sweet spot that marketers crave: a high need for education among our target market and a direct connection to our value proposition.

Our team didn’t fail, but we didn’t succeed either. (We “meh’d,” which may be worse.)

In the lead magnet we developed to attract midsize-health-system prospects, our altitude was too low for the senior leaders we were targeting.

Instead of focusing on the CMS program’s effects on their health system (and the opportunity), we focused on tactical excellence, such as how to prepare to comply.

Our team still generated leads from that piece of content, and we continue to see requests come in for it. But generally, the leads were not within the inner circle of the buying team. They were the individuals that the buying team would buy for.

Using Jobs to be Done to Calibrate Narrative Altitude

What’s been most helpful to me to check for audience-altitude alignment is applying the Jobs to Be Done framework to my target audience’s role.

Unlike personas and brand-messaging platforms, Jobs to Be Done ports me into a specific role’s day to day. To me, that granularity leads to richer, more-tailored content. (It’s also easier to develop.).

Completing a role-based Jobs to Be Done framework within B2B healthcare is not simple, though. It’s rare, if not impossible, to interview senior leadership at large B2B healthcare companies to complete the framework. In those cases, job descriptions, quotes from conferences, and, occasionally, social media profiles and posts can help fill in the framework and reveal how an individual views their specific purpose in an organization and in an industry.

In the role-based Jobs to Be Done framework, I typically adopt dimensions that product leaders often use:

• Desired outcome(s)

• Prompt/context for the desired outcome

• Measurements for the outcome

• Current method(s) to achieve outcome

• Gaps or challenges preventing the outcome

• Current pain points

Within the framework, few data points are as valuable as the metrics that the individual owns or contributes to. For example, using this framework for marketing audiences, we’ll likely discover that a chief marketing officer will worry less about SEO page authority or daily CPC and instead care more about organic audience growth and monetization potential.

Channel-Narrative Fit is an X-Factor

HubSpot mastered aligning their narrative altitude with their audience. But that practice alone didn’t generate the business outcomes that marketers still laud (and emulate) today.

They also excelled because they aligned narrative to channel, namely SEO.

HubSpot content became synonymous with “How to” content. Coincidentally, search volumes for marketing strategies and tactics, including “how to” phrases, grew as marketing managers turned to search engines for ideas. (To illustrate the size of the “how to” content opportunity, “how to repost instagram” gets nearly 12,000 searches per month.)

The company found a perfect overlap between channel and narrative. Enviable marketing growth ensued.

Now, HubSpot has a domain authority of 93 (Facebook is a 96), has acquired 550M inbound links (a key driver of domain authority), and has nearly 1M ranking keywords, 10% of which are in the top three SERP results, even for very non-funnel keywords like “famous quotes.”

Narrative as a building block for growth

According to some sources, HubSpot, which launched sixteen years ago, now has roughly a third of the marketing-automation market share. Its revenue exceeds $1 billion, and it serves more than 100,000 organizations.

Narrative altitude is by no means solely responsible for this. Growth like this required immaculate timing, product-market fit, vulnerable incumbents, and, from a marketing perspective, wise, long-term channel investment.

But optimizing their content’s point of view was likely a key decision that helped build the brand’s audience, a foundational requirement for historic growth. It’s hard to imagine HubSpot becoming most small- and medium-sized businesses platform of choice without it.

P.S.

Some brands whose narrative altitude I admire:

• Drift - Potentially realizing that they could not compete on SEO as an early-stage company with HubSpot or Intercom, their “MQL is Dead”narrative, which played on their subcategory (“conversational marketing”), was a perfect message and height to reach marketing and even sales leaders via social and WOM.

• Product Marketing Alliance - Much like HubSpot did for content and inbound marketing, they saw a major gap in educational content for a growing marketing function—product marketing. And they’ve seemed to rely on HubSpot’s playbook for distribution: educational articles, certification courses, and events.

• Refine Labs - Seeing LinkedIn as a publishing platform—not a distribution platform, they created a surround-sound strategy to deploy educational narratives on advertising/PPC for marketing contributors.

The Differential | #4

Quantum Health accelerates. Jellyvision pens a wonderful retention asset. Carelon launches an interactive SDOH map. What could a navigation ad look like if it aimed to genuinely depict support? What’s missing from B2B healthcare landing pages and social ads?

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

• Navigation company Quantum Health recently hired a new chief communications officer, and their marketing efforts seem to reflect that momentum. The company is hosting a webcast with SHRM on the value of navigation, and they were recently featured on the Nasdaq. See the landing page

• Evernorth, Cigna’s health-services arm, continues ramping up its content program, lately by sharing break-out-session content from its recent event, Outcomes+. The most recent session focuses on healthcare delivery transformation. Watch the session

• Jellyvision, a beloved Chicago-based company that provides benefits education/engagement/enrollment programs, published a unique bottom-funnel article on why a former client returned. It may not break any engagement records for the brand, but I love this as a bottom-funnel and retention play. Read the article

• Cohere Health, a startup focused on UM, including prior auth, has launched a newsletter, titled UM Connects. Cohere is competing with a few incumbents, so it will be interesting to see whether and how they differentiate their content. See the landing page

• Provider-analytics company Care Journey is offering a certification course on value-based care. I’m always shocked more healthcare brands don’t offer this, given the benefits, likely potential additional revenue, word-of-mouth referrals, free publicity on attendees’ LinkedIn profiles, and the ability to instill in the market the brand’s narrative (e.g., “inbound marketing”). Care Journey is an absolute content powerhouse. See the certification landing page

• On a similar note about newsletters, data-platform company Innovacer has launched a LinkedIn newsletter, “Innovation Accelerator.” The newsletter thus far has focused largely on Innovacer’s accomplishments and products and, somewhat surprisingly explicitly, urged healthcare leaders to ignore Salesforce’s CRM because it’s not a healthcare-native solution. See the newsletter

• Perhaps too often in B2B healthcare marketing, we think of lead magnet content as solely ebooks and white papers. Big Health pulled a trick out of other industries’ playbook: they created a calculator to “measure the impact of your mental health benefits.” (I’m curious how it’s performing; the first four questions are lead-generation/qualification questions.) See the quiz landing page

• Speaking of interactive content, Carelon, Elevance Health’s health-services brand, launched an interactive map that assesses SDOH at the community level. Visitors can filter for insights on food insecurity, housing, education, transportation, and other factors. I will be interested to see how many links a piece of content like this acquires over the next few months. (Note: Carelon is my employer.) See the map

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And now, some data on healthcare content marketing

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A differential diagnosis

Ignore Optum’s landing pages. Steal from Allbirds.

TL;DR: In B2B healthcare campaigns, landing pages for lead magnets and demos need a major revamp and should reflect the potential value of a conversion. Consumer brands, not market leaders in healthcare, are the touchstones to pull from.

For B2B healthcare brands, whose contracts can be worth six or seven figures, a lead from a qualified account can be worth four or five. And yet landing pages, the conversion asset that often yields those leads, very rarely reflect that value. And they very rarely do the work to convince some of the most educated, opinionated, and suspicious buyers to exchange their contact information for your content or conversion offer.

Usually, in B2B, you’ll see the following:

• a generic hero

• a paragraph of copy and bullets

• a form

• a button with suboptimal CTA copy (“Submit”)

With only those elements, I’m not sure it’s fair to expect a consistent conversion rate. Maybe if you had a category-defining product or a brand whose direct traffic keeps going up and up. But in today’s landscape, that seems less and less likely.

Whose landing pages work hard for their leads? In my opinion, consumer brands, ironically, and DTC especially. Brands whose products cost a thousandth of a B2B healthcare product and whose customers churn like crazy blend aesthetics and consumer psychology to not only get an email address, but to get a visitor to take out their credit card.

A landing page for a $90 pair of washable wool gym shoes has a number of elements that can apply to a healthcare brand’s landing page. Some elements that I would borrow:

• Multiple images or views of the lead magnet

• Benefits and features of the lead magnet

• Use cases for the lead magnet

• Testimonials or reviews from early readers or internal experts

• Data on how many downloads there have been (if higher than baseline)

• Data on what roles (e.g., CEO) have downloaded the magnet already

A caveat: a beautiful landing page that addresses every visitor’s barriers may not exceed averages if the offer is subpar. Like a product launch, Eevery campaign, in my opinion, starts with the offer.

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Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays

How to test a social ad’s scroll-stopping potential

For B2B healthcare marketing teams, creating a good social ad—one that drives clicks or conversions efficiently—always takes a surprising amount of work.

The offer has to be right, to start, and the ad’s design and copy have to look and sound like the brand, too.

But it’s not uncommon for teams to overlook a question when designing it: can the ad win in a social feed?

The question becomes particularly important if your target audience is not a follower (and haven’t raised their hand to see your content—yet.)

The ad has to have "scroll stopping" potential, too. Here's a quick, rough way to test that internally.

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If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

I’m not convinced that the trend in healthcare marketing to use joyful, in-the-moment people in imagery is the only option.

Other emotions can be powerful, too, I think. Research has shown eliciting sadness is effective at triggering the memory, for example. And I have to think that after the years we’ve had recently, solidarity and comfort are too, so I took a swing at creating a category-awareness ad for a navigation product, anchoring on those two qualities or emotions.

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On marketing tactics

• Google has finished up its most recent Core update. It may be too early to see its impact on organic traffic and SERP rankings, but the update again seems to favor high-quality content that serves search intent, rather than the brand’s intent. It also seems to reward better page experiences. Get the details

• Gartner reports that most marketing teams are not fully realizing their tech stack’s value or capabilities. Read more

• Organic reach on Facebook and Instagram is, unsurprisingly, dropping significantly. I imagine a recession would prompt Meta to drive organic reach down even more. Dive into the data

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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.

The Differential | #3

If you could price your best piece of content, would you price it as high as The Catalyst for Payment Reform does? / Boring, sense-making content makes a case for its place in marketing team’s priorities. / Transcarent’s earned media is boosting their digital visibility—when will they pass incumbents? / What if a book publisher advertised a MedPAC policy book? / And Lionel Richie shows up in a healthcare ad, because, of course.

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

• Optum continues its regular presence in NEJM Catalyst, most recently publishing an editorial outlining a roadmap for the future of home and community care. Read the article

• The Catalyst for Payment Reform launched a toolkit for referenced-based pricing. It costs $299. According to the landing page, the toolkit “contains evaluation questions and detailed specifications to meet the needs of employer-purchasers considering or reviewing reference-based pricing (RBP) solutions.” You know a brand is confident in its content when it charges the cost of a textbook. Kidding aside, I think this introduces a good question for marketing teams to consider when thinking through their next premium piece of content: What could your brand sell it for? Maybe a question like that can help determine which ideas are potentially most valuable to prospects. $ee the landing page

• In the last Differential, I highlighted a “white paper” from Teladoc. This past week, they promoted a case study on their work with Friday Health Plans. The case study has the essentials: client profile, executive summary, testimonial, and impact. But what I wished to see was an exploration of Friday’s consideration set and their decision-making process—why did they choose not only Teladoc, but Teladoc’s category? In my perspective, with case study results almost always being exceptional, the decision-making section is where the seller can differentiate and enable the prospect to truly see themselves in the client’s shoes. Check out the case study

• A recent Devoted Health ad stars Lionel Richie. No clay sculptures were featured, sadly. See the ad

• Vera Whole Health may be keeping long-form content (and the careers of English and journalism majors) alive on its own. On LinkedIn, the brand is promoting its ebook The Definitive Guide to Evaluating On-Site Clinics, which I touch on later. Check out the ebook

• BrightMD published a six-page listicle introduction to its asynchronous telehealth solution. Read the intro

• Lyra launched an epic of a 4,500-word evergreen article titled “A New Approach to the Outdated EAP.” The article seemingly sets out to do two things: establish Lyra’s approach to EAP as the future of EAP and rank the heck out of “EAP.” With the latter aim, they’re being quite intentional, offering jump links to different sections whose subheads are packed with “EAP” and searches related to the topic. I’m not sure a brand can skyscrape existing articles on an established topic and establish a new strategic narrative (I don’t know the space well enough), but I applaud the effort and their investment in an evergreen page like this, which ties so closely to their business. Scroll the article

• Homeward CEO, Jennifer Schneider, MD, MS, was interviewed on McKnight’s Home Care podcast, and she’s earned lots of media, it seems, over the past couple months. Before joining Homeward, Dr. Schneider was the chief medical officer and later the president of Livongo. I wonder if she and her team are following a PR and earned media playbook similar to Glenn Tullman’s.  Listen to the podcast

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And now, some data on healthcare content marketing

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A differential diagnosis

The case for boring, sense-making content

TL;DR: Category buyer guides and brand starter guides still have a place in B2B marketing team’s content strategies. And they’re arguably more important than ever in B2B healthcare.

Buyer guides aren’t sexy content. Marketing leaders probably won’t feature them when presenting to senior leadership or the board, and they likely won’t find a place at the top of marketers’ portfolios.

I understand why. Generally, these guides don’t generate a reliable volume of leads, they can have high CPC, and they aren’t brand-awareness builders. They don’t, ostensibly, establish a narrative for your brand either.

But in B2B healthcare, they can have value in accelerating pipeline and perhaps bypassing or getting ahead of the RFP process.

Here’s why I think that: to buyers, the B2B healthcare marketplace has become a cortisol-triggering, endless catalogue of options. Buyers face a deluge of point solutions, aggregators, and other tools to choose from. And with those potential products comes an endless amount of feature sets, case studies, benchmarks and data points, and product collateral, which can be hard to sort through.

Unsurprisingly, Gartner reports that “buyers, overwhelmed by information, are struggling to make purchase decisions…55% of customers say that making informed trade-offs between vendors and their capabilities is difficult based on the information encountered during the buying process.”

Category buying and brand starter guides, coupled with a “sense-making approach” from growth teams, have the potential to distill the noise, make sense of the marketplace, and cultivate ever-important trust. Not bad accomplishments for some boring pieces of content.

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Name that healthcare brand!

Which brand’s voice does the following title sound like most? (The answer is in the end notes at the bottom of the page.)

Health Care’s Tectonic Shift – What Payors Must Know to Succeed

1. Optum

2. Accolade

3. Teladoc

4. CareCentrix

5. All of the above, because everyone sounds the same

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Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays

Let’s atomize an ebook

In the last note I sent, I asked whether the “stand-up comic approach” to content deserved some consideration instead of the traditional “content atomization” approach, especially for leaner marketing teams, who may not have the luxury of campaigns that miss the mark.

In the former, a team tests out topics, messaging, and content bites in smaller “settings” before aggregating it into something longer or higher value, like an ebook or a course, which often requires more dollars to distribute.

In the latter, the process is, generally, reversed: the more-substantial content asset gets built first and then broken apart into smaller pieces.

Teams may be able to employ both strategies simultaneously. And if a team is confident in its audience insights and market understanding, atomization may still be the easiest approach—especially if your longer pieces of content are hyperfocused, well-organized, and educational.

The ebook from Vera I note above is a great example of that. The asset is structured and consistent, which streamlines repurposing. And it’s focused on educating rather than selling, which improves the chances that atomized elements will see solid engagement.

Here’s a quick draft of how the ebook can get atomized.

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If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

I’m always curious why we healthcare marketing teams don’t promote long-form content more often like book publishers promote their biggest-bet books. To me, the desired actions for both seem the same—exchange something, like an email address or twenty dollars, to page through the work. So that got me thinking, what could an ad for a dry MedPAC PDF look like?

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On marketing tactics

• I’m just catching Social Insider’s study from the spring on the best type of content for LinkedIn. Read the study

• I whole heartedly agree. ABM isn’t just retargeting prospects with display. Read the article

• Gartner is reporting that in 2022, CMOs are allocating more than half of digital spend to paid channels. Almost 30% is going to paid search, digital display, and digital video advertising, a figure that really surprises me.  Page through the study

• Growth and experimentation agency CXL poses a curious question: which is more meaningful to a business: big-bet experiments or focused optimization? Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios breaks the differences down between the two strategies, using a familiar trope: the tortoise and the hare. Read the article

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Answer to “Name that brand!”

CareCentrix, Walgreen’s latest investment. (Also accepted—”All of the above.)

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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.

The Differential | #2

Long-form content is having a Kate Bush-like summer. Is A16Z laying the groundwork for a book on building healthcare companies? And why The Bear may not always be the best analogy for marketing teams’ content strategy.

Some B2B healthcare marketing headlines

• A16Z’s Vineeta Agarwala and Jay Rughani published another (wonderful) playbook. In their latest, they focused on two-sided networks in healthcare. Is it only a matter of time before they aggregate the articles into a book, like their colleague Andrew Chen did recently? Read/listen to the playbook.

• Is long-form content back? Vera Whole Health, along with Castlight, published a 28-page guide (that they estimate can be read in 30 minutes!) on advanced primary care services. (As competition heats up and companies need to accelerate their pipeline, I do wonder whether we’ll see a resurgence of long-form content as a lead-generation tactic. I’m not sure that’s always the route to go, but it will be interesting to see.) Visit the landing page.

• Health Tech Nerds continues to push out wonderful content on a predictable schedule, which is an incredibly hard thing to do. See their latest content.

• Joining the long-form trend is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, who recently published “The Playbook: Digital Healthcare Edition, Phase 1.” It’s a wonderful piece of content. Their landing page may be the real MVP, atomizing individual chapters from the ebook into solution-specific guides and encouraging distribution. See the landing page.

• In what seems like a rare very-top-of-funnel play for a B2B healthcare company, Included Health published an article on great leadership. I see the connection to Included’s value proposition, persona target, and solution portfolio, but rarely do I see enterprise marketing teams in healthcare extend their content efforts this early in the funnel, flywheel, etc. Based on the keyword repetition, it seems like an SEO play as well. Read the article.

• Ginger continues to impress. They seemingly see the value of LinkedIn organic for brand awareness, publishing nonhyperlinked, copy-only messages (very comparable to their parent, Headspace) that speaks to their audience (in this case, members or employees) rather than screaming about their brand and their product. Hats off to their social and content teams for doing organic B2B social in a refreshingly non-B2B-healthcare way. See an example.

• On LinkedIn, Teladoc Health is advertising a “white paper.” Titled “Primary care reimagined” (elsewhere it’s titled “The promise of virtual care”), the eight-page white paper is more a sales brochure, with solution/brand-focused copy. If I’m reading its file code correctly, the white paper was published in 2021, so it’s been in market for some time. (With how bottom-funnel this piece turns out to be, I wonder if Teladoc has ever developed a definitive mid-funnel guide on their category. A missed opportunity if they haven’t.) Check out the white paper.

• Solv is hosting a kind of webinar I applaud—an educational one with a hyper-specific topic: how to calculate patient lifetime value. From my perspective, too often webinars try to tackle a topic with the scope of a Great American Novel (e.g., “How to transform healthcare”). To keep the literary analogy going, those with the scope of a short story, like Solv’s, may not generate as many leads but, in my opinion, produce better content, uncover more reliable buyer intent, and likely have better conversion rates. See the landing page.

• Sage Growth Partners announced a partnership with Slice of Healthcare, a healthcare news and media company. From an audience-building perspective, this partnership will be interesting to watch. Read the story.

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And now, some data on content marketing

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A differential diagnosis

The stand-up comic’s approach to content marketing, or the anti-atomization practice

TL;DR: Instead of writing long-form pieces and then atomizing them into smaller pieces, what if we started first with smaller assets (to test them) and then combine them once the market’s validated the content’s value?

Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong, or at the very least, maybe we’ve been ignoring another way.

For years, we’ve heard that to run a content program efficiently, you first create a longer, premium piece of content and then atomize it across different channels. Chapters, H2s, images, and quotes all get diced up and repurposed. H2 sections become blog articles. Images become Instagram posts. Quotes become testimonials. It’s like marketing team’s version of The Bear.

But maybe we could have borrowed from stand-up comics rather than butchers: test out new material in smaller or discrete settings before packaging the best work up for a larger audience.

For example, instead of spending weeks (months?) on a campaign promoting an ebook or a cornerstone article, what if you “leaked” potential parts of it to gauge your audience’s response to it first? Does that decrease the risks of a campaign and a GTM lag?

Here’s how I would think about running this experiment:

1. Speak with your customers or customer-facing teams to learn what education or topic may resonate and help the market right now. (Or conduct your keyword and industry research on your own.)

2. Solidify your company’s angle or narrative on the topic, and unfold three pillars (or message buckets) that your business excels at to support that narrative.

3. Draft three longer LinkedIn posts for each pillar, and design three images or slideshow videos that reflect key principles or data points in them. Treat them as separate assets rather than combining them.

4. Launch them as organic posts, and sponsor them if you want to ensure more-targeted results (i.e., to exclude non-qualified engagement, like employees).

5. If the posts perform as good or better, aggregate them and fill in gaps for that section. If they don’t, tweak the content for future posts or move to other pillars.

6. Repeat until your team has confidence that your audience will respond well to it or has enough data to suggest moving to a different topic.

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Name that healthcare brand!

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Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays

Apps to make testimonial videos for ~$120 remotely

“We don’t have a budget for video.” “We don’t have production time.” “It has to be premium quality, and we don’t have the team or tools for that.”

These are common concerns I hear that prevent teams from considering video marketing, especially around client and member testimonials.

Generally, I tend to disagree with them for a couple reasons. First, I usually don’t see the value in an expensive, high-production video when clients, members/patients, and employees can churn within a matter of months and when products (and thus messaging) get repositioned frequently. Second, with social video engagement rising exponentially, I’m actually not confident audiences expect production quality that rivals network-TV ads. While that level of quality signals credibility (and capital), to me, interesting, timely, and helpful content trumps pristine production quality.

That got me thinking, though: what are some tools you can use to affordably create a solid testimonial or member experience video, remotely?

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If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

I often wonder whether virtual-care brands are using the right photos to memorably reflect the value prop of virtual immediate care. (I mean, I rarely launch a virtual-care app in a sundrenched sitting room that Rejuvenation furnished.)

What would their ads look like if they mixed it up and aimed for authenticity, like B2C brands tend to do?

I didn’t hit the mark at all here, but it was fun thinking through ideas and searching through Canva’s limited library.

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On marketing tactics

• I highlighted Metadata a few weeks ago, but I have to again: I find their customer-testimony video to be incredibly effective for brand awareness. Talk about voice of the customer. Scroll down the page to watch.

• With its cancelled-meeting candle, Loom owns the merch award of the week. (Apparently, though, candles are not immune to inflation.) Chuckle at the candle.

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A brief disclaimer

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

The Differential | #1

An ambitious rebrand, a massive audience acquisition, a timely, masterclass of a survey, and a plead to experiment more on LinkedIn.

Some B2B healthcare marketing headlines

• Optum, unsurprisingly, is doing what nearly every marketing team wants to do: become a media company. The Minnesota-based services organization is teaming up with Red Ventures “to combine consumer healthcare news and information with online pharmacy and telehealth services. The joint venture, RVO Health, supports UnitedHealth Group's plan to build consumer brand awareness around its Optum healthcare services subsidiary.” Read more.

• Sword Health, a provider of virtual and digital physical therapy, rebranded. And with their new brand identity, they’ve also expanded their ambition: “At this pivotal moment in Sword Health’s journey, our ambition is to provide the new gold standard in care and pain treatment for our patients. To set the benchmark by which all other pain treatments are compared. To get people back to really living their lives.” Read more.

• Promoted on paid LinkedIn a year after the product launched (note: I would love to see that CTR and CPL), Ginger’s ebook “Extending Vital Mental Health Benefits to Teens” covers how the Headspace acquisition’s virtual care model “improves access and outcomes for working parents and their families.” (Ginger has a savvy content marketing team. They wonderfully cover many of the routine mid-funnel and bottom-funnel content questions/needs buyers have that senior execs may not consider to be “the most creative” ideas, my favorite being their “Ginger Starter Guide,” an aesthetically pleasing, super-high-intent asset.) Learn more.

• Health Tech Nerds and OMERS Ventures conducted a joint survey with more than 150 healthcare startup operators and investors “for perspectives on changing conditions” economically and their impact on the private health tech market. Read the survey.

• Pareto Intelligence launched an interactive analysis on risk adjustment transfer payments. I understand about two percent of what the analysis finds, but I’d bet that with the right amplification, this piece garners the company numerous valuable backlinks, a critical element for SEO. Open the report.

• Evernorth, Cigna’s healthcare services brand, is revving up its marketing engine. It recently published in article in Wall Street Journal. It’s begun to dabble in retargeting via display (but it only accounts for 0.22% of their traffic, according to SimilarWeb). And their library has grown considerably, covering topics on biosimiliars, gene therapy, diabetes management, and behavioral health. (Marketing hiring at the services brand seems to be picking up as well.) Visit the library.

• Transcarent released a new episode of its podcast/video panel, Titans of Healthcare. In the latest, Glen Tullman of Transcarent; Lee Shapiro of 7wire Ventures Ventures; Jennifer Schneider, MD, CEO of Homeward; Naomi Allen of Brightline; and Jared Taylor of Slice of Healthcare discussed how to deliver “enjoyable health and care experiences to aspects of health care that are costly, confusing, complex, and underserved in today's system.” Listen to/watch the episode.

• Optum, with help from The Advisory Board, is leading a Becker’s webinar on seeing the whole picture for whole-person health. Visit the landing page.

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And now, some data on content marketing

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A Differential diagnosis

LinkedIn campaign testing

TL;DR: Create three to four ad variations for each LinkedIn campaign.

For B2B healthcare and health tech companies, LinkedIn is a common-sense social platform to build visibility. It’s the social platform I would recommend healthcare companies spend time on (for now), especially since the platform, thanks to adjustments to its algorithm, has evolved into essentially a micro-blogging space.

But in my experience, most B2B healthcare marketing teams are not experimenting enough on the platform. Not enough experimentation with organic content and especially not enough with sponsored updates and campaigns, where you can target a group of specific companies.

In an industry where interviewing enterprise buying teams is painfully difficult, at least in my experience, LinkedIn sponsored posts and campaigns can be a decent proxy for market research. You can get feedback relatively quickly, on everything from value proposition messaging to campaigns promoting a premium piece of content.

What can you experiment with? A lot. For example, if you were promoting a new voice-of-the-customer report and wanted to learn which ad image types generated the highest click-through rate, you could use these ad variations:

• Ad 1 - Feature a lifestyle image

• Ad 2 - Feature a thumbnail of the report

• Ad 3 - Feature profile pictures of featured speakers/customers/authors

• Ad 4 - Use text only

The options can be limitless, but be sure to choose only one variation at a time (e.g., avoid testing new copy with every new image).

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Napkin drafts of marketing plays

An outline to rank high for “Cancer care Navigation”

Cancer care coordination and navigation is having a much-deserved moment.

In late June, CMS announced its new Enhancing Oncology Model, and in its July 4 issue, Modern Healthcare’s cover story, “Telehealth provides extra layer of oncology care,” addressed the topic as well.

This momentum may prompt a sprint among marketing teams to “own” the topic; a pillar page on the subject could be a worthwhile long-term play for a company in that space.

Here’s a very rough outline I would work with to rank for that keyword phrase, with the goal of providing a unique point of view in each section rather than copying the messaging from pages that currently rank:

Some on-page tactics I would also consider:

• Aim for 1,000-plus words, and write for a reader at the high school level

• Feature quotes from experts at ASCO, American Cancer Society, and Oncology Nursing Society; ask them to link to the article from their website

• Include any proprietary data your brand is open to sharing

• Add images (with metadata optimized for search) or featured quotes for every scroll

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If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

Nike (and their agency of choice) has designed some of the most iconic ads in history. What if they designed one for home healthcare?

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On Marketing tactics

• Very brief ads on LinkedIn drive the best results, right? Metadata’s new research suggests otherwise. See the study.

• The new play in SEO? It’s no longer the skyscrape technique. It’s “information gain.” Read more.

• SEO isn’t the most leveraged channel in B2B healthcare content (sometimes for good reasons), but pillar pages are still a strong play for the topics that businesses want to be associated with. See examples.

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Finally, a brief disclaimer

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

What if consumer brands designed B2B healthcare ads?