The VP of marketing of a hospital financial decision support SaaS company approached me with a content program at level 0. They were an established industry player, had a product that was getting results for their customers and deep internal knowledge, but none of this was reflected in their content presence.
They were losing RFPs to new entrants and prospects were generally unaware of their existence. Sales had stagnated and all new leads were coming from peer-to-peer referrals from hospital executives and personal relationships with their sales teams.
Goals
- Get on a content publishing schedule that freed leadership up from content creation and review
- Establish a content presence that supported a functioning sales pipeline
- Create a self-service sales content bank to support rep development and results
- Feed sales team better-qualified leads who already understood the company value prop and key differentiators in financial decision making and insights for hospital leaders
- Making use of an expensive CRM and email marketing software that were sitting idol
Value-based Content Marketing: Application
I decided that we would have to extract key differentiating thought leadership from internal SMEs and translate them into content campaigns. I interview C-suite leadership to:
- Establish differentiators
- Identify target personas and pain points
- Outline tone of voice, brand pillars, and key content types
We leveraged information from my market research partner to identify the core brand issue of low brand awareness. I also additionally identified distribution as a key content challenge that was stalling funnel efforts.
On the sales side, sales leadership brought me in to augment their personal training and development program. This involved creating an easy-to-access content bank. This bank was housed in Salesforce and allowed them to pull…
- Case studies
- Videos
- White papers
- Digital and print materials for virtual and in-person conferences including HFMA (regional and national conferences), Becker’s, and ANI
I created all content, created and maintained the Salesforce bank, and helped train reps on access and use. All content was self-service and easily integrated into emails to prospects on hospital buying groups.
Content Marketing Upgrade Results
- Established weekly blogs and monthly newsletters for prospects and customers
- Ranked second on Google for key thought leadership SEO term through regular publishing of themed blogs
- Doubled email open rates from 20% to 40%
- Received glowing feedback from sales team on effectiveness of videos, case studies, conference materials, and other refreshed collateral
- Built case study that was instrumental in closing their first deal in 2 years
- Leveraged partner webinars for email and case study distribution to support ABM efforts as aligned with sales team