Traditional sales tactics and digital marketing alone aren’t enough to connect with challenging B2B healthcare prospects. Networking and relationship building will add to your success, but you’ll need more than that. Reaching key stakeholders in this field requires smart alignment between your marketing and sales teams. And one of the most essential ways they can collaborate is to create content that can be used by both teams.
Putting content at your sales team’s fingertips becomes even more important when you factor in the infamously long healthcare SaaS sales cycle. It’s not unheard of for sales to take more than a year to close. That may sound discouraging, but by sending prospects valuable content throughout the cycle, your sales reps can build strong, lasting relationships based on trust.
Here are a few tips on using content marketing for your healthcare SaaS sales team:
Create Multi-Use Content Assets
With so much competition in healthcare SaaS sales, a strategic approach to healthcare content marketing is key. That means using resources wisely and being intentional about each content asset you create. Producing multi-use content assets that can be used for various audiences across many different channels is a great way to accomplish this. With only minor adjustments, your brand can create content at scale without starting from scratch each time.
Let’s say you want to create an FAQ page to educate prospects and reduce customer service calls. Your team can identify 20 frequently asked questions and create a dedicated page on your website. Each of those 20 questions could then be used to create a multitude of content assets — blog posts, social media content, email copy, webinars, sales scripts and more. Always think about ways to repurpose content to make the most of your resources.
The key to successfully repurposing content is to personalize whenever possible. This is especially true for healthcare content marketing. Today, health tech selection committees include many stakeholders with a variety of agendas and priorities — from clinicians to hospital executives, department heads and administrators. A white paper covering the usefulness of your software for nurses wouldn’t necessarily appeal to an administrator. However, with a few minor adjustments, that white paper could be personalized for administrators.
It’s best practice to create a content library that’s easily accessible to both your sales and marketing teams. Your content library should be well-organized by buyer persona, industry, asset type (case study, blog post, video) and any other segmentation that’s useful. This will help your sales team easily select a content asset that speaks to the prospect’s pain points and aligns with their stage in the buyer’s journey.
Create Content That Starts Sales Conversations
Your prospects don’t want another sales pitch that comes from an anonymous brand address. They want to feel like your sales team is speaking directly to them, acknowledging their pain points and offering to help. Sales content should aim to build relationships and nurture leads through the buyer’s journey.
This is why it’s so important to create content that appears to come from a real person. Buyers expect a personalized experience. They should feel like they could reply to your message and get a response from an actual person.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to create a personalized experience for your audience and start sales conversations. In fact, two-thirds of customers have made a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing message. A great way to get started is for your emails to appear to come directly from a sales rep. The tone and cadence of your email copy should be conversational and should end with the rep’s signature. Another personal touch is adding a calendar link to book a one-on-one call. These tactics all create opportunities for your audience to connect with your brand and sales team.
Your marketing team should also help your sales reps use social media to its full potential. That includes crafting social content that both your brand accounts and sales reps can use. Doing so will not only help your reps to build trust with their networks, it can also amplify the reach of your content by up to eight times while generating up to six times more engagement with your target audience. Your social content shouldn’t read like a sales pitch. Instead, approach it as an opportunity to educate and delight your audience.
Another effective way to start sales conversations is to produce blog posts that appear to be (or actually are!) written by your sales reps. The reps can then let their prospects know about the new content via social media or an email blast. This can help your sales team build trust with prospects and establishes them as thought leaders in the industry. If your audience feels that a sales rep is knowledgeable and understands their pain points, they’re much more likely to engage.
Automate Your Healthcare Content Marketing
Marketing and sales automation involves using software to automate activities that your teams perform repetitively. When done right, automation can boost the efficiency of your marketing and sales efforts and provide a personal touch.
The key to successful automation is a solid inbound marketing strategy. Your inbound activities should provide your software with valuable insights. For example, automation tools should have access to prospect data such as page activity, social media engagement and email clicks. Knowing what content your prospects have interacted with is crucial to delivering the best messaging via automation.
Email workflows are an excellent way for your sales team to get started with automation. Identify which behaviors — such as downloading gated content or visiting a certain webpage — should trigger an email campaign. The series of emails sent should be tailored to your prospect’s interests. For example, if a contact downloads your white paper on AI in healthcare, your email should contain helpful content related to that topic and links to additional resources.
Automated lead scoring is another way to improve efficiency and assist with creating personalized sales content. Lead scoring is the process of assigning positive and negative values to contacts in order to qualify them as a lead. Once a contact becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL), your CRM notifies a sales rep.
For example, if your brand wants to target large healthcare organizations, you would assign a positive value to contacts who work at hospitals with a high number of employees and a negative value to contacts who work at small clinics. Marketing and sales teams should work closely together to determine assigned values and the criteria that need to be met for a lead to qualify as an SQL. HubSpot is arguably the most effective lead-scoring software and will automatically assign scores once the criteria have been established.
Chatbots are another automation tool that can be used to nurture leads and assist visitors on your website and social media pages. Bots can ask your visitors what they’re looking for and deliver content directly into the chatbox. They can also notify your audience about new blog posts, send reminders about events and even schedule calls with sales reps.
Your prospects are unlikely to forget personalized content that speaks to their pain points and offers support and solutions. Delivering a personalized content experience is key to rising above the competition and capturing your audience’s attention. With an effective content strategy, your healthcare SaaS sales team can connect with key stakeholders and reach company sales goals. See how working with an experienced healthcare marketing agency can help.
