5 Opportunity Costs of Immature Content Marketing in Enterprise Healthcare Tech

Letting your content marketing program fester in immaturity can cost you lost deals, wasted salaries, and a ton of market trust. 

Layoffs. They’re a common theme during my discovery and onboarding process with marketing leaders. Either we need to see results soon because of company cuts or a key team member gets let go as we’re ramping up. 

This happens because most people wait too long to get going on content marketing. 

Content can go a long way in supporting business goals and making a case for why cuts to marketing aren’t a great idea—but an effective content marketing program takes time to build. Most enterprise healthcare tech vendors wait entirely too long to get started. 

Today, I’m going to detail some of the common opportunity costs that I run across with vendors who’ve procrastinated on content marketing program maturity. (You can pop open a new window to learn more about that here.) Hopefully it will help you avoid having to send someone like me the dreaded “I’ve been let go, I’m passing you on to someone else in the organization” email. 

1. The Cost of Your Sales Team’s Time and Effort

A mature content marketing program will strive for alignment with sales—ideally with the goal of reducing friction in the buyer’s journey, providing truly qualified leads, and shortening sales cycles.. 

When content is created on an ad-hoc basis or marketing is siloed off from sales, the sales process remains high-effort, producing a rocky content experience for your prospects and inconsistent sales results. Organizations in this situation often rely on word of mouth or try to counter the problem by hiring more sales people, expecting them to build deep connections with multiple members of the healthcare buying committee by hand—but this kind of connection only thrives with targeted, strategic content based on buyer pain points. (Learn how a sales content library can help your team build out these relationships.)

2. Lost Deals and Diminishing Customer Clarity

I had a client who, before working with me on sales content, lost an RFP because of a misunderstanding around uptime. Their competitor’s uptime was actually lower but it was also the only number they’d ever heard. So by the time the sales team was in play, the health system’s trust had already been decided. 

Mature content marketing answers customer questions before they ask—creating clarity and shaping the conversation in your favor. Drag your feet here and the opportunity cost will often show up in the form of lost deals. 

3. Tanking Customer Lifetime Value

Content marketing has massive potential in customer marketing, but it’s underutilized by most healthcare tech vendors. 

From upselling and cross-selling, to brand advocacy, and simply getting in front of alternative vendors, content marketing is a powerful tool in both maintaining and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). (Learn more about content and CLV here.)

The opportunity cost of ignoring content marketing on the customer side is measured in creeping customer churn metrics and overly manual account management processes. 

4. Market Myopia

One of the most painful aspects of content marketing in healthcare tech is also one of the most valuable. 

Getting traction and connecting with pain points takes time, experimentation, market research, and a willingness to frame your value prop and branding around top-ranking pain points—but this work is actually an exercise in understanding what moves your market to trust you, use your solutions, and recommend them to other healthcare leaders. 

The risk of opportunity cost here is falling out of step with the nuanced changes in healthcare, leaving your branding, sales, and marketing disconnected from the reality and needs of the healthcare decision makers you serve. 

(The antidote is simplifying your content marketing and turning your content into an extension of your value prop through Value-Based Content Marketing.)

5. Investor Mistrust

Software investors want to see that you understand your market, that you’ve connected the dots between a tangible problem and your solution, and that you have a unique and viable competitive advantage. A mature content program will speak to both your market and potential investors. If you find your leadership is reluctant to answer the hard questions around content marketing, it’s a red flag that they’re also not ready to properly answer these questions for investors. 

A lack of effort in content has growing opportunity cost, especially if investors have options with vendors who’ve done deeper work in determining white space and pain points through industry-relevant market research. (Learn more about applying market research to your content marketing program here.)

Reduce the Opportunity Cost of Your Content Program

Thankfully, progress in content marketing can be simple—if you find the right fit for your needs. Early-stage content programs in healthcare tech need on-demand, flexible support that’s built for their needs and aligned with their goals. 
To learn more about how I can fill gaps in your program and help you begin to layoff-proof your marketing department, grab some time for a phone call this week.