In today’s episode, Jenny shares her top tips for establishing a strong and streamlined content marketing foundation, including audience strategy, production, and distribution. She starts off discussing Hedy & Hopp’s own content marketing approach, including her tips for simplified content production and how to use a “pillar content” strategy to maximize your time and effort. She then shares how a multi-channel distribution strategy can reach the right audiences in the right channels, even for complex organizations with a variety of content topics and personas. Jenny also shares tips for how to tag and organize content within a CRM to enable more automated “right persona, right content” approaches, and helps you think about segmenting your content strategy based on the type of care your audience is seeking. She wraps up with some tips for what to consider as you go into a website redesign or CRM implementation in 2024.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast.. I am Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We are a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We’re based in the Midwest, but work with providers and payers and innovators all across the country in the healthcare space.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about content marketing strategy. Hedy & Hopp, our own marketing has really ramped up and we’ve gotten a lot more organized. It’s very easy whenever you’re an agency and you do a lot of content marketing for your clients to kind of not do as much work for yourself, but starting in 2023 and then really the second half of 2023, really doubled down, become much more process oriented.
And I’ve had a non insignificant number of people reach out to me and say like, how have you done it? We need to do this for our organization. We have to stand up some content marketing plans. We just don’t really know where to go from a strategy [00:01:00] perspective. And I think there’s a lot of things that we do as content marketers that we just take for granted.
So I thought I’d talk about that today and share some easy tips and insights. So, first, as we started thinking about our content marketing strategy as an organization, we’ve already identified the personas, like who are we trying to talk to? How do we want our voice to be known within the industry and within our, the world of the prospects and the influencers.
So we’ve done a lot of that work. I want to talk a little bit more about the production and the sharing of that content. So the first thing we did is we determined what is going to be our pillar piece of content each week. And for us, it’s the podcast. We have put a lot of energy into making this podcast what it is.
It’s been a great way for us to be introduced to just some amazing people across the country. We were named the number one healthcare marketing agency podcast for 2023. Thank you Swaay.Health for that award. So it was pretty easy, no brainer for us to make that [00:02:00] pillar for our content each week. One thing that I would lean on and encourage each of you as you’re thinking about what should our content pillar be, is I’d really encourage you to really think about video.
Think about what can you do with minimal production costs with the resources you already have available to you. Gone are the days where you have to do 30,000 production shoots for every piece of content. Of course, there’s still commercial productions you’ll need to do that will require high value as far as like the expenses of the number of people involved, but for podcasts or social media content, I just record this using Zoom, super easy.
I have a couple of different audio setups that I use every week. So simpler is easier because you’re much more likely to stick to it. And people respond when it’s simple, it feels more organic. So that’s our foundation. And then after you have that foundation, you have to think about distribution. What are all the different ways that you can repurpose that content based off of where your prospects or [00:03:00] your individuals you need to reach, where are they spending their time?
So for us, we had a couple of clear things. We have a really vibrant YouTube channel. We get tons and tons of views every year. We’ve been creating content really since like 2017. So we take the recording of this podcast and of course it’s released on normal podcast channels, but we also repurpose it and put it on YouTube.
We have a process where we then create a variety of different social media sharing components where we’re integrating some of the video or highlighting some key content pieces we want to share on socials and then we’re also sharing it through email. So we have a couple of different touch points based off of how the prospect likes to receive information, right?
It’s really kind of taking it where the people you’re trying to reach are spending their time, can be really simple. So then I already hear you saying like, but Jenny, we have a really complex system. Let’s say it’s [00:04:00] a children’s hospital and you have a lot of different either cute services or specialty service lines that you really need to focus on.
We have a variety of different personas. Let’s say you have a persona for a parent of a child who receives regular services at the system, but maybe it’s allergies like asthma related and they just come in regularly, or maybe it’s more of an acute care situation or it’s a shorter term stay. If you’re creating personas within your CRM system, you then can opt into a variety of service line updates within your CRM.
So then that content can be aggregated automatically through an email campaign that is sent out regularly. You also could have it be by service line with distribution channels within each of them. I’ll say, for example, if I am a mom that is coming in on a regular basis for services, let’s say on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, I would be interested in a lot of different categorical updates [00:05:00] about your system versus if I was a mom that really just was going to be there for a short period of time, and hopefully I wouldn’t see you again, right?
The cadence, the frequency, all of those things would be different. And so you really don’t have to make content marketing super complex. The best place to start is who are we talking to? What are the key questions they’re trying to answer the information we’re trying to convey to them and how can we systematize it?
You have so many things going on within your organization – most systems have fewer people today on their marketing teams than they did a couple of years ago – so how can we systematize this and know where and how we’re creating content and then really make sure the distribution is reaching those people in a meaningful way?
As you’re thinking about website updates for next year, maybe a website redo for next year, maybe you’re launching and rolling out a CRM, I really want to encourage you to pause for a minute. Think about those personas and then think [00:06:00] about the content categories that each persona would be interested in.
Because if you do that work upfront, there’s a lot of backend things that you can do from a tagging and filtering perspective that will make it much easier to distribute the content to the people that need it the most. So I hope that was helpful. This is the kind of strategy work that Hedy & Hopp loves doing, so if you’re currently in the middle of figuring out how you’re going to reach more people or the right people with the right message and just really trying to ramp up your content strategy, give us a call. We’d love to brainstorm.
So until next time thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of Hedy & Hopp’s “We Are, Marketing Happy” and we’ll see you next week.
