Hospital Content Marketing Hidden Gems: How to Use Market Research to Inform Conversations with Healthcare Leaders

Is your hospital content marketing research-informed? If not, this is your chance to turn things around. 

My partner, Eliciting Insights, just released their study in conjunction with HFMA, Health System Purchase Plans 2023. It has an amazing wealth of insights into the mind of health system executives and how they’ll be engaging with vendors in the near future. While it’s incredibly informative for sales processes and marketing decisions, this type of report is also wildly useful when building a content strategy—if you look at it from one of these four angles.

Timing

One of the key focuses of the report is the purchasing decisions that health system executives will be prioritizing over the next 18 months. This simple fact can inform your content strategy in terms of product focus, which roles you’ll target most heavily, and even the length of upcoming campaigns. 

Topic

Check out the report overview and you’ll find a chart that outlines which areas C-suite executives plan on increasing investment in through the addition of new solutions. This information will be valuable to your sales teams, but it also lets you know where their heads are and where they’ll be focusing their time. 

For example, Patient Access/Experience topped the list while Finance and Back Office Technology are getting a lot less attention. Choose your content themes accordingly. 

Tone

Unsure how loudly you should brag about your best-in-class status or the fact that you offer end-to-end solutions?

The report has revelations including:

• 33% of all Epic clients prefer a best-in-class solution
• 65% of respondents prefer vendors that offer end-to-end solution
• 29% prefer best-in-class even if it means more vendors and integrations. 

Targeting

This survey was conducted across over 320 health system executives split roughly evenly across rev cycle, finance and accounting, and CFO titles—meaning that’s where you should be applying any insights you take away from this. 

If you want to check out the overview, you can pull that here. Benefits include:

• A deeper, more informed understanding of top purchasing priorities among healthcare organizations that will enable vendors to align their offerings to customer needs.
• Insight into how senior hospital and health system leaders think about vendor selection, allowing vendors to better prioritize their product roadmap and establish themselves as trusted partners.
• A more holistic view of emerging trends that will allow vendors to better adapt and innovate in response to evolving market dynamics.
• A better understanding of how health system executives think about bolt-on versus EMR technology.