Prove Marketing as a Revenue Center: 5 Ways to Increase HIT Customer Lifetime Value with Content

Need to prove that marketing is a revenue center and not just a cost? You’ve got multiple options to leverage content—and one of the metrics with the most potential to move via content is customer lifetime value (CLV). It’s a relatively simple metric to track, but most HIT vendors are underutilizing content in their customer marketing. 

Before we get into just how to increase CLV, let’s go over the calculation. 

Calculating Customer Lifetime Value in Healthcare Tech

You can calculate CLV at the company level or at a segment level—so you might find value in segmenting out categories like payers, hospitals, or community health centers. 

There are some good calculators out there. Some factor in customer acquisition costs.  Others do a better job of addressing churn rate. Whether you use a calculator or run the numbers on your own, make sure you stick to one consistent method when making changes to how you use content in your customer marketing program. 

How Content Marketing can Increase CLV

The heart of increasing CLV through your content marketing program lies in defining value, relating it, and consistently improving it. This can manifest in multiple ways. 

Upselling and Cross Selling

Healthcare buyers should be your first source of new business. On the content side, this requires customer marketing that pushes awareness of the additional solutions you offer and how those solutions solve their healthcare challenges. The most successful healthcare SaaS clients I work with put significant effort into ongoing customer education around their solutions. Never assume that your customers know anything beyond the solution they’re paying for. Healthcare leaders are busy and are seldom, if ever combing through your website unprompted. 

On the sales side, your reps should have access to a sales content library—one specifically built to speak to existing customers. While you can repurpose some prospect materials, your reps should have materials that address product synergies and that leverage your positive reputation within their organization.   

Your customer newsletter, blog, thought leadership, and even ads and social content should be factors in your work to upsell and cross sell. 

Optimizing User Results

HIT users have a pesky way of falling into less-than-optimal patterns when using technology.

They find workarounds, fall into old habits, miss out on features, and get poor advice from coworkers. (When I worked revenue cycle software, I can’t tell you how many times I ran across someone in a hospital that was completely ignoring the most valuable features they had access to.) 

This is where customer marketing comes in. Your content should connect the dots between ongoing challenges and the features and functionality you offer. It should keep users up to date on new and retiring features. It should provide examples of success from their peers that they can emulate. 

Newsletters can be useful, but don’t forget user groups (great for distributing content), and even physical guides. The goal is to make sure you never give them a good excuse for even considering another vendor and cutting your CLV numbers short. 

Paving the Road to Thought Leadership

Your customers want to be seen as thought leaders and their partnership with you should support them in that goal. I’ve seen really nice success here with customer round tables. Healthcare leaders have such incredible knowledge, and it benefits them to share with their peers and be seen as capable of making good decisions in their vendor partnerships. 

But they will not come to you. I once worked with a client who used content to not only attract customer leadership to be round table participants but also to spin those round tables off into more content. (Check out the case study here.)

Making Loyalty and Advocacy Easy

You know the coveted funnel levels of customer loyalty and advocacy? It’s next to impossible to get there without strong customer marketing content. Loyalty is where you see real jumps in CLV, and advocacy is where your customers start helping you bring on additional loyal buyers. 

For example, CFO buyers trust referrals from their peers. Considering that referrals move buyers, you should make it as easy as possible for your customers to recommend your solutions. Your customer marketing should consistently encourage them to talk with their peers and coworkers about the value you offer their organization. Use content to remind them regularly and make their jobs as advocates easier while increasing customer retention and lifetime value. 

Start a Value Conversation that Moves CLV

Content marketing that moves CLV metrics starts well before a deal is signed. 

The conversation around value in healthcare is complex, but it’s one you can crack with Value-Based Content Marketing. You can learn more about that here—and if you’re looking to identify the small tweaks to your content marketing program that could be holding you back from tangible results, grab some time for a quick conversation here. 

Megan Williams

Healthcare Content Marketing Consultant/Writer/MBA