Why Content Marketing Is So Important In Healthcare

Caid Christiansen• August, 11 2015

In a landmark 2013 study across 6,000 reps, 600 companies, and 700 customer stakeholders, best practice insight and technology company CEB found something interesting. They found that in a B2B setting, solution selling no longer works. In fact, their research showed that 57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier.

You read that right: almost two-thirds of the B2B buying process is complete before anyone ever talks to one of your salespeople! 

I know what you’re thinking: you’re in healthcare, not in an enterprise B2B setting. That may be true, but the B2B sales process and the physician selection process have more in common than you might think.

Don’t believe us? Consider this. A survey released last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that more patients are using online doctor reviews to choose a physician. In the survey, 35% of respondents reported selecting a physician based on good reviews, while 37% avoided a physician based on bad reviews.

Though patients traditionally relied on word-of-mouth referrals to select physicians, the rise of the “self-teaching patient” means that increasingly, “supporting data”–reviews, online content, social media, and other online resources–plays an important role in solidifying a patient’s ultimate selection.

So, just as B2B buyers are already more than halfway through the buying process before they ever contact someone at the company they’re buying from, so too do many patients decide what hospital to go to or which physician to see before they even step foot in the hospital.

This is frightening. Unlike a large enterprise, your local clinic or regional hospital likely doesn’t have a full-time sales staff devoted to sourcing and recruiting more patients. Healthcare just doesn’t work that way. That means that you must resort to other methods of bringing in new patients and facilitating the creation of new relationships.

If you can’t be a part of every face-to-face conversation or online interaction–and you can’t–the best thing you can do is put out as much supporting data for potential patients as possible. Think about the B2B sales cycle again for a moment. The most competitive companies know that the sales cycle starts long before a prospect ever picks up the phone; they push the decision-making process along by publishing helpful content and populating prospects’ search process with useful information.

In the same way, healthcare providers can use content to help the “purchasing” decision of patients selecting a physician, hospital, or clinic. Encourage patients to publish online reviews–and monitor those review sites so you can respond whenever something contentious comes up. Run a tight ship and build positive experiences so patients want to come back. Publish content that helps your demographic. You don’t have to be WebMD (nor should you)–you just have to create enough useful content that potential patients are encouraged to come to you instead of that other doctor down the street.

In the online selection process, would you rather go to a physician with loads of online reviews, a site full of useful content, and a clear desire to help patients online and off, or a physician who’s practically invisible in that pre-selection process?

We know which side we fall on. And that is why content marketing is so important in healthcare.