Many brands fancy themselves content marketers with inbound lead generation and nurture strategies. There’s a proliferation of content developed with intent to move customers through the decision journey, from awareness to purchase. Some do this better than others.
One healthcare brand that has shown a particular knack for strong content and nurture marketing is Cardinal Health. And no, they’re not an Inprela client.
So how do you #crushit like Cardinal Health with content? The answers offer solid pointers for other brands.
Be pervasive. If you want your brand to be top of mind with customers and prospects, your brand needs to show up when, where and how your customers spend their time online.
Nearly every week I run into some form of content from Cardinal Health. Videos, infographics, survey reports, webinars and dozens of articles. The channels I’ve seen them use to promote the content include trade press, LinkedIn Sponsored Content, email marketing and programmatic advertising.
They show up in my inbox, in the trade journals I read, in my LinkedIn newsfeed and I’ve been to their website, so their programmatic and retargeting ads surface when I’m surfing the web, even on non-industry websites. I wasn’t thinking of them before, but I am now. Simply put, the brand is unavoidable. Pervasiveness? Check.
Beyond reviewing data and analytics, consider interviewing or surveying your customers to figure out where they go for information online and what topics will resonate. Also talk to internal colleagues who directly interact with customers on a regular basis, like customer service, to learn about pain points and frequently asked questions to plan your content.
Be relevant. It’s one thing to show up; it’s another to be relevant. Relevancy requires speaking to topics your audience cares about. The closer you get to addressing a need or a pain point, the stronger your content will be.
One of Cardinal Health’s offerings is supply chain consulting services to help hospitals increase efficiency and cut costs. I don’t have visibility to their strategy, but it’s a pretty safe bet that their target audience is VPs of supply chain and the C-suite (i.e. hospital leaders who care a lot about efficiency and cost containment to support quality care).
Below are some of Cardinal Health’s headlines on supply chain. Do you find them relevant to the audience?
- Supply chain survey results: Better supply chain management leads to better quality of care
- Three ways to ensure your supply chain data is used to drive meaningful change
- Curbing supply chain costs in healthcare
We sure do.
Deliver filtered content. Cardinal Health wisely created a distinct landing page – outside of its main website – for publishing content relevant to a supply chain audience. One place to see all resources that help solve customers’ challenges. Brilliant.
Visitors arrive at Cardinal Health’s landing page once they consume a piece of supply chain-related content in a trade journal, or on LinkedIn, and are enticed with a strong call to action – a.k.a. more relevant content that meets the reader’s need. This is a basic tenet of content marketing, but I see many companies fail to publish related content in way it can be easily found. An intuitive and solid reader experience should be your goal. Don’t send your prospects to your home page and expect them to patiently click and search for the content they went there to see. You will lose them.
Capture interest and nurture it. Gate your strongest, most robust pieces of content (e.g. white paper, industry report) on your landing page, as Cardinal Health does, so you can build a database of prospective customers. The database can be used to fuel your marketing automation and/or email marketing program/s. While not every brand needs or is ready for marketing automation, it can simplify the process of moving prospects through the funnel from awareness to action. You can track buyer behavior and serve up more filtered content that meets their need. If you’re wondering whether marketing automation is right for you, email us at connect@inprela.com. We’re happy to provide an assessment.
Enable meaningful measurement. At the same time organizations are increasing investments in content, there’s a lack of consistent and meaningful measurement of content performance. The gaps? In many cases, strong calls to action are non-existent, tagged links are not being consistently and effectively deployed, buyer engagement platforms are falling short (e.g. content is too product-focused, conversion opportunities don’t exist and/or there’s no place to publish gated and other thought leadership content), and meaningful metrics are not being captured and shared across all parties responsible for developing and deploying content.
At a minimum, you should know which channels you’re activating are responsible for delivering the highest volume of quality traffic to your website, and how many leads marketing is responsible for generating. Quality traffic can be identified by length of visit and conversion rates. Ideally, you want to know which marketing activities and which pieces of content are delivering the best CPC (cost per click), and CPL (cost per lead).
Replicate success. To recap, Cardinal Health is really nailing their content and nurture marketing by showing up so often it’s hard to avoid them, with strong content that speaks to audience need states. Then, they’re baiting readers with more content, presented in a visitor-friendly way.
Have you achieved the level of pervasiveness Cardinal Health has? Are you getting a return on your content marketing investment? Do you even know if you are?
I don’t know what Cardinal Health is spending on marketing, but with smart digital targeting, pervasiveness doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. At Inprela, we focus on media with niche targeting opportunities, so we can reach exactly the right people with minimal waste.
If you’re ready to make your content work harder for you, drop us a note at connect@inprela.com. We can perform a brief assessment of your brand’s pervasiveness and present a scalable roadmap to help you deliver quick wins.
