Top content marketing trends

How are you approaching content marketing? Here are some anticipated trends and tips on how you can build them into your marketing strategy.

As healthcare marketers, our industry is facing changes and encountering a lot of unknowns including price pressures in pharma, dealing with the uncertainties of Brexit, and stressing over cybersecurity for medical devices, just to name a few. As we anticipate a year of change, we're sharing some of the top content marketing trends we expect to see to help you with your marketing strategies.

1. Consumers will continue to access the internet via mobile devices over desktop

It's no secret, consumers access their email accounts via a mobile device and so do healthcare professionals. Most healthcare professionals are on their feet treating patients, so you'll need to get your marketing message in front of them with an effective display ad, an engaging email, or an advertisement in a medical journal that is optimized for mobile. (Google evaluates mobile sites separately from websites and penalizes those that do not load quickly with Accelerated Mobile Pages.)

To improve your rank and user engagement, add structured data and relevant content to your site that Google can crawl. Make references to studies in medical journals and link to white papers that can be backlinked.

2. User-generated content is key for gaining trust and creating sales

User-generated content boosts authenticity and 90% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support.

To get more user-generated content, you need to ask for it. Pharma companies already engage KOLs when developing new drugs to generate advocacy buzz and gain market feedback. You can also use services such as Reevoo to ask HCPs to leave a review that links to your company page or request testimonials from your most satisfied KOL and use them in your marketing efforts. Creating a community platform to answer questions can also serve as a reliable source of information — and as a bonus, the content is crawlable and can send qualified traffic to your site.

3. Repurposing content is essential

With so many ways to spend your marketing dollars this year, you can stretch your budget by republishing and reformatting content rather than creating all-new material. Take a look at everything you created last year—advertisements placed in medical journals, presentations made at healthcare conferences, white papers, and blog posts—and see what can be repurposed with a few slight tweaks. Doing so will save you time and money and will send a uniform message to consumers across all your channels.

4. Well-written, target-centric content helps to cut through the noise

Facebook estimates that about 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared daily. Most companies have their own social media feeds populated with tons of content, so HCPs naturally filter out what isn't relevant to them.

You can differentiate yourself by creating high-quality, target-focused content that will grab your audience’s attention. Make sure every word you write is relevant, personalized, easy to read, and to the point. As you gain a reputation for creating tailored content that has value to your target audience, you'll gain loyal followers who keep coming back for more. As a bonus, your marketing campaigns will be more efficient as ROI increases.

What emerging trends in content marketing do you plan to build your content strategy around?