Makers: Blake Madden, Hospitalogy
David McCarthy
Meet healthcare and health tech creator Blake Madden, founder and creator of Hospitalogy.
Read MoreNotes
The language we market with
David McCarthy
Did the movement to simplify marketing copy and content go too far?
Read MoreThe Differential | #8
David McCarthy
In this edition:
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: A16Z keeps its content engine running. Lyra and Evernorth wrap up their large conferences. And Pearl demonstrates how a brand can use awards to generate awareness.
Data point: Which advocacy and navigation brands talk about themselves the most on the home page—established brands or up-and-coming brands?
NEW - Promptly: Five prompts to spark social content for your clinical leaders.
Differential diagnosis: Generative AI will transform many marketers’ workflows and responsibilities. But is there another impact, especially in B2B healthcare, that’s going unnoticed?
Napkin draft: B2B healthcare marketers’ competition goes beyond just their respective brand and product competitors. So who else should teams monitor?
Four things on marketing tactics: The SERP will change dramatically based on Google’s I/O announcement; LinkedIn and Canva double down on employees as being key channels to drive business; and marketers are “meh” about Meta’s new app.
1:1 Office hours: A free 45-minute session to brainstorm and untangle marketing and content projects.
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed
Andreesen Horowtiz’s engine isn’t slowing. The firm published a landing page the outlines their thesis for merging healthcare and fintech capabilities, and they shared their fifth and final playbook on digital health GTM — selling through channel partnerships. → Read more
Oy! At Lyra Health’s conference, Breakthrough, Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy Kent on Ted Lasso, spoke, in addition to leaders from Zoom and Starbucks. → Read more
Cigna’s health-services brand Evernorth wrapped up their conference, Outcomes, recently. The event focused on “elevating benefit offerings, improving total population health, and unveiling what’s possible through the power of Evernorth.” → Read more
In what seems like a (sub)category-design play, CertifyOS shared an article differentiating provider network management and provider intelligence. → Read more
Abacus Insights’ senior director of solution strategy penned a LinkedIn article on how they differ from other health-data companies. I genuinely appreciate the “on-the-nose-ness” of this. Many brands veil their differentiation messaging too much, in my opinion, forcing prospective buyers to discern differentiators for themselves. → Read more
Pearl Health released their second annual Top 50 Value-Based Care Thinkers list. From an awareness perspective, I appreciate these types of plays. They can attract inbound links and seem to generate a lot of social engagement across different relevant connection networks. (One organic post about the list generated 120-plus engagements and 20 reposts alone.) → Read more
apree health shared its 2023 Workforce Health Index. Much like “state of” reports, indices like these work best, in my opinion, when the angle is unique or hyperspecific and when the data is differentiated. From a content-marketing perspective, these are a gold mine of content breakouts. → Read more
And now, some data on content
Within the healthcare advocacy and navigation category, messaging about customer and consumer centricity is quite prevalent.
But many brands in the space seem to approach that messaging differently, especially on their website's home page, where, often, a brand conveys their value proposition and introduces what's possible.
For example, based on rough observation of some well-known brands in the advocacy and navigation market, older brands tend to talk more about themselves on the home page. They use their brand name more frequently, and they use first-person pronouns more frequently.
Younger brands, meanwhile, take the opposite approach, it appears. They use self-referential language less frequently, focusing more on the customer and their jobs, via second-person language, like "you" and "your."
Promptly
Five Quick prompts for clinical leaders’ LinkedIn content
Like most of B2B marketing, healthcare and digital health marketing is likely evolving from its top-down NFL era into its flatter NBA era: like NBA players, employees have become prominent ambassadors that help build brand equity and, perhaps most importantly, establish trust and new channels with prospects.
Within our healthcare and digital health world, clinical leaders can carry the same appeal that top-tier athletes do. Yet many clinicians struggle to establish a regular habit of sharing their points of view with prospects or even the public at large.
The five prompts below intend to help marketing and operator leaders spark micro-thought-leadership ideas for their respective brand’s clinical leaders.
Social platforms are filled with posts about the failure and inefficiency of the healthcare system. Take a positive-contrarian position: what initiative, policy, technology breakthrough, or modality is working but not getting the attention it deserves?
Healthcare is in a new era of technological innovation. Identify and describe the innovation that excites you most, and compare its possible impact to that of an invention in the past. (The catch: you can't compare it to the iPhone, T-model, or printing press.)
Name the likely winner of the next era of healthcare. What are they doing differently, and what impact has that difference made across the healthcare system?
Few industries involve as many stakeholders as healthcare does. Which stakeholder deserves a louder voice? Why, and what's the potential impact of that?
Imagine you have the power to test a new payment model that rewards innovative, efficient, high-quality care for a particular population. Which population or condition would you target, why, and what does the model look like?
A differential diagnosis
The other side of Generative AI’s impact
TL;DR: The flood of content that generative AI tools will produce may make it even harder for buyers to sift through noise for signals they can trust.
Early takes from marketers on ChatGPT and other generative AI tools — that marketers' productivity can soar and that SEO may be at risk, for example — have been enlightening. However, many of these predictions have focused on the supply side of the B2B buying equation, or the work that marketers themselves are responsible for.
There’s another side of the story that, from my perspective, hasn’t been focused on much. Generative AI tools will almost certainly impact the other side of the equation—the demand side, or the buyer, and add another layer of complexity their already-complex journey.
Within B2B healthcare marketing, effective content signals differentiating expertise and cultivates a sense of trust within the buying team. The blog series that distills a new intricate, technical reimbursement policy into simple takeaways, for example, can be an early origin of a long-standing partnership between an up-and-coming health-tech company and an established enterprise buyer.
But if AI technology can not only level the playing field when it comes to educational content but multiply it, how do B2B healthcare brands still signify their credibility? And how can buying teams discern which brand is a partner they can rely on?
Some content plays and tactics that may be able to help counter these dilutive effects of generative AI are for brands to:
Leverage employees' own brands and channels
Design a hyperspecific, hyperunique narrative that can win in any feed
Double down on technically rich “boring content”
Reimagine what “content” means or can be (e.g., think of content as a product)
Weave in more of your brand’s operating frameworks and proprietary research
Lean on customer stories
Make sense of the buying journey for the buyers
Content will still be an essential lever worth investing in because of its ability to scale. But I suspect that the B2B healthcare brands that plan around the new AI reality now will see more efficient production, acquisition, and retention down the road.
Napkin draft
Who are your actual marketing competitors?
In B2B healthcare marketing, if a brand is aiming to be a community-building thought leader and market educator, it's useful (and sobering) to remember that their marketing competition is broader than their brand or product competitors.
For example, many leads of an enterprise buying team are probably regular readers of:
- CMS and CMMI
- STAT News
- Fierce Healthcare
- Becker's
- Modern Healthcare
- Deloitte
- McKinsey
- ZS
- Willis Towers Watson
- Health Affairs
- NEJM Catalyst
- Individual creators and influencers
With that many voices in the space, a distinct point of view and distribution-focused content strategy are no longer optional in B2B healthcare.
Four things On marketing tactics
It sounds like a broken record, but the search results page experience we’ve known will likely be gone for good, based on what Google announced at their conference. → Read more
Early this summer, LinkedIn is reportedly going to launch a feature that enables brands to promote content through their employees’ profiles.
Marketers may not rush to adopt Meta’s supposed Twitter killer. → Read more
Canva’s latest product launch suggests that they are betting big on employees becoming creators for their employer’s brand. → Read more
Virtual office hours
Free | 1 to 2 team members | 45 minutes
In B2B healthcare, content engines can get stuck fairly quickly. Ideas to engage sophisticated, scrutinizing buying teams are hard to come by, stakeholder reviews can stall projects, and limited resources can threaten output and distribution.
Sometimes, an outside point of view can help uncover new possibilities and solutions.
I’m piloting one free 45-minute brainstorm in June to help 1 to 2 members of a B2B healthcare marketing team “unstuck” their content engine.
We can work together to tailor the agenda, but some potential challenges to cover include:
Topic generation
Content planning, including tools
Content reviews
Content prioritization
Content atomization, or repurposing
Given how casual the conversation aims to be, it’s best for 1 to 2 team members rather than an entire team.
I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.
The Differential | #7
David McCarthy
In this edition:
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: Slack joins the healthcare-marketing chat. Summit Health publishes a best-of-the-year piece of content. Redox demonstrates how to win at content in B2B healthcare. And Andreesen and its portfolio member Thyme Care have an enviably productive quarter.
Data point: For B2B brands, a website is the flagship property. But it performs a lot of functions for the brand. So, how do leaders measure its performance?
NEW - Off the Page interview: For Ashling Lee, who led content at Quartet Health and Season Health, content is all about playing the long game.
Differential diagnosis: Long-form authors have served as a blueprint for the content creation process in B2B healthcare and digital health. It’s time to experiment with new models of creating content.
Napkin draft: What are the ways a marketing program can differentiate its brand’s content?
Four things on marketing tactics: Hubspot ponders whether this content mainstay is on the way out, Gartner shares new email-marketing benchmarks, and ChatGPT may render this type of search a thing of the past.
NEW - 1:1 Office hours: In B2B healthcare marketing, content engines can get stuck, quickly and often, This free, friendly 45-minute session aims to help.
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed
Amid Salesforce’s new moves within healthcare, Slack recently shared a customer success story about OneOncology’s use of the collaboration tool to “drive innovation.” → Read more
Summit Health released its 2023 Healthcare Platform Report in late February. It’s a wonderfully rich piece of content and a perfectly chosen format for this trending, relatively emergent topic. → Read more
Charts have been having a moment for a bit as a content type, and the League, who very openly are courting the Blues, is taking advantage of it. In a new article, the company anchors their new article on several charts to spotlight how “the healthcare data explosion will power CX innovation.” (Side note: I really appreciate how all-in the League is on messaging around the topic of CX. It appears in nearly every single article they’ve written in 2023.) → Read more
The head of platform growth at Turquoise Health published a post on LinkedIn that exemplifies how LinkedIn has become a publishing platform, not a distribution platform. In the post, he compares a hospital list price and a payer list price for a billing code related to pneumonia. The post is educational, relevant, and memorable. Well done. → Read more
For its series on digital health builders (which progressively looks like a book in the making), Andreesen Horowitz’s Jay Rughani teased that Andreesen’s new GTM playbook will focus on selling via channel partners and ecosystems. The firm also recently published an article on how health-tech companies can “show and quantify their magic,” as well as an article about the status of healthcare marketplaces. → Read more
On LinkedIn, brand-refreshed Redox has been advertising its white paper on how to sell into health system, a solid example of a brand educating the market on a topic that aligns with its business, without overtly pitching the business. → Read more
Elevance Health, formerly Anthem, Inc., who is also my employer and the parent company of Carelon, the business that I focus on, released its 2022 report, and accompanying microsite, on advancing whole health. → Read more
In a document-post ad on LinkedIn, OneOncology is advertising its 2022 annual report. The ad is such a wisely chosen format for this type of content. → Read more
Abacus Insights’ CEO joined PwC’s “Next in Health” podcast to discuss how healthcare companies can innovate care-delivery models with interoperable, usable data. → Listen
Oscar Health’s Mario Schlosser promoted a new microsite, authored by him, that breaks down what Oscar does. As usual, the design is beautiful, the copy clear and memorable. But when I put my SEO hat on, I wonder why Oscar did not put this on their own domain to capitalize on the traffic from social and any inbound links. Mario’s post had nearly 200 engagements. → Read more
Cancer care management startup Thyme Care has been active this quarter, to say the least. The Nashville-based company refined its brand design and has earned media in American Journal of Managed Care, MedCityNews, and several podcasts. → Read more
And now, some data on content marketing
For many B2B brands in healthcare and digital health, the website is their flagship property.
It deepens awareness among visitors, can help turn visitors into leads, and, in some cases, can turn leads into customers.
So with a property serving so many different purposes, what metrics are marketing leaders using to measure the performance of their website?
Off the Page
Meet Ashling Lee
For Ashling Lee, playing the long game in content leads to better business results. It's the long game, not the short-term, clickbaity "hacks," that drives value and loyalty.
In her Off the Page interview, Ashling, who's produced content and led content marketing at high-growth brands like POPSUGAR, Virgin, Quartet Health, and Season, shares:
↣ What type of content can help create that value and loyalty
↣ Which brand she thinks plays the long game best
↣ What editorial decisions can corrode value and loyalty
↣ What, operationally, healthcare marketing teams can improve to impact more business outcomes with content
A differential diagnosis
New role models for content creation
TL;DR: Marketers can turn to other “creative” roles in arts and entertainment to model their content production process.
We need new production models for content marketing within B2B healthcare and digital health.
For years, authors and journalists served as a guide for B2B marketers within healthcare and digital health. But they no longer seem like the only instructive models. Algorithm fluctuations, crowded markets, saturated feeds and inboxes, and waning attention spans have changed things.
Whereas merely creating an authoritative piece of content used to be a feat in and of itself, now, it’s likely not enough. The stakes are too high. Every week is a new round of content sweepstakes.
Other roles in arts and entertainment can help us learn new ways to address the challenges and needs marketers have today.
Three roles, in particular, come to mind:
The stand-up comic
The talk-show host
The music producer
Napkin draft
The 10 content-function advantages
If content is a product, then what advantages enable healthcare marketing teams to separate their content product from competitors?
Four things On marketing tactics
Hubspot ponders whether blogging is dead. → Read the article
Generally, there are three different types of searches: informational, navigational, and transactional. One reputable SEO consultant thinks informational searches will diminish because of ChatGPT. → Read the post
In a new report, Gartner published email-marketing benchmarks, which they preview on LinkedIn. The most popular type of email sent, unsurprisingly, were product-discovery emails. The most opened type of emails are also unsurprising but likely disappointing to marketers focused on the top of the funnel. → Read the post
Influencer creators are just young adults promoting D2C brands, right? Right? → See the data
“Unstuck your content engine”
Virtual office hours
Free | 1 to 2 team members | 45 minutes
In B2B healthcare, content engines can get stuck fairly quickly. Ideas to engage sophisticated, scrutinizing buying teams are hard to come by, stakeholder reviews can stall projects, and limited resources can threaten output and distribution.
Sometimes, an outside point of view can help uncover new possibilities and solutions.
I’m piloting one free 45-minute brainstorm in May to help 1 to 2 members of a B2B healthcare marketing team “unstuck” their content engine.
We can work together to tailor the agenda, but some potential challenges to cover include:
Topic generation
Content planning, including tools
Content reviews
Content prioritization
Content atomization, or repurposing
Given how casual the conversation aims to be, it’s best for 1 to 2 team members rather than an entire team.
I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.
The new role models for B2B healthcare content marketers
David McCarthy
We need new production role models for content marketing within B2B healthcare and digital health. These three are good starts.
Read MoreThe Differential | #6
David McCarthy
In this edition:
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: Prealize nails titles for its long-form lead-generation content. Unite Us gives us hope that B2B healthcare marketing can be educational and entertaining. And Modern Health launches two new lead offers.
Data point: Will marketers’ go-to channels in 2023 be the same ones they used the most in 2022?
Differential diagnosis: Creative reviews can go off course quickly. Protecting their agenda can keep them productive and relevant.
What if a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad: There’s lots of space to play creatively with provider enablement as a topic. For example, is there a way to tie it to matches and wheels?
Marketing tactics: Search continues to change, and amid stalling growth, TikTok wants to help its organic content creators.
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed
Predictive analytics company Prealize Health has a knack for sticky, suspenseful titles for their lead-generation offers. I’m into it. Their state of health report for 2023 is titled “In the Aftermath,” and last year’s is titled “The Domino Effect.” These are a good reminder that in technical fields like healthcare analytics, consumer-oriented voices and angles help content stand out. → Read more
The marketing team at Unite Us is doing some progressive podcasts for a brand that focuses on social determinants of health. When was the last time a healthcare brand interviewed Rob Dyrdek, aka Bobby Light? → Read more
Particle Health published its 2023 State of US Healthcare’s National Network Data Exchanges. → Read more
Benefits navigation startup HealthJoy published an infographic preview of its first insights report, detailing “the difference between the type of benefits that members want versus what employers know is needed to drive long-term health outcomes.” → Read more
Urgent-care-marketplace Solv announced new brand illustration to “visualize an aspiration of healthcare as being convenient and easy.” → Read more
Lyra Health is promoting its “Workforce Mental Health Trends for 2023.” It’s a powerful offer, I imagine, and I wonder how a landing page with more conversion-focused copy, such as social proof from early readers or a slideshow illustrating several pages, would affect the conversion rate. → Read more
Ribbon Health launched a consumer survey report on how health plans can use data to unlock better care. → Read more
Reflecting its focus on “whole-person virtual care,” Teladoc is sharing a two-page case study on its multi-condition program for the American Foreign Service Protective Association. → Read more
Rachel Woods, who hosts The Advisory Board’s podcast “Radio Advisory,” launched part 2 of the “What CEOS need to know in 2023” series. To me, the Advisory Board creates compelling content, and it’s nice to see a traditionally conservative brand invest in a podcast with a relatively progressive style like this. → Read more
Modern Health has launched a couple of new lead-generation offers as of late. “Table Talks” is an “exclusive” series geared for leaders at employers to discuss well-being trends in the workplace. And their consumer-facing Daily Pause gives consumers tips and tools to build mental health. → Read more
Jasper Health has started a community for its members with cancer to share their experiences and provide support to one another. This topic has been covered in the past, but I expect to see more brands turn to communities this year. → Read more
On the heels of its rebrand, Hinge Health has hired its first chief marketing officer, who has past experience at Included Health (Ground Rounds). → Read more
And now, some data on content marketing
The healthcare marketplace isn’t the only place that’s likely to shift dramatically in 2023.
Marketers’ favorite channels are likely to fluctuate as well, especially with the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and the financial pinch that may limit use of paid channels.
So which top channels from 2022 will remain at the top of marketers’ go-to list? Which will fall?
A differential diagnosis
Creating purposeful agendas for creative reviews
TL;DR: Be ruthless in what’s in scope during reviews, and encourage team members to align content that they share with your buyer and your current business scenarios or goals.
Creative reviews or workshops, where your team reviews content or plays together, can be a productive setting for brainstorming and learning. They can spur better work in the future, align the team on the brand’s essence, and tacitly signal your risk or experimentation tolerance.
The reviews I’ve found to be most valuable do something different than most. They’re ruthlessly purposeful in the agenda and in the work that’s shared. For example, they discourage sessions from becoming a political show-and-tell (e.g., “Look at this beautiful campaign we launched”), or they tactfully encourage to share what hasn’t worked. In other words, they keep learning front and center.
Protecting the purpose of these sessions can involve some work and consistent, clear communication within the team. Here are some ground rules or expectations that can help keep that purpose in tact:
Focus on your own brand’s own work if there’s a clear lesson to learn. Spend more time on your competitors' work, trade publications (or content competitors), and especially those outside of your market
Beware the “anxiety of influence” when reviewing competitors’ work.
Anchor each session to a specific business scenario your team encounters or will encounter soon (e.g., if you’re about to launch a new feature to your existing customers, spend a session reviewing product or feature launch campaigns)
Treat the session less like an MFA fiction workshop and more like an engineering workshop—work or think backwards to understand why something works or doesn’t
Tie in KPIs, when possible, to determine whether the work is actually successful (We can all learn about new design and content trends, but it may be more beneficial to learn why certain on-trend assets didn't convert)
Apply the lens of your ideal buyer, rather than yourself, when providing feedback on work already in market or when brainstorming new ways to reach your buyer (This is a tough one.)
What if a consumer brand designed a b2B healthcare ad?
Provider enablement has been having a moment for some time now.
As Blake Madden wrote in his January 2023 update of “Breaking Down Physician Enablement Care Platforms, ”Aledade is performing quite well…Pearl Health announced a $75M raise led by a16z and Viking Global Investors. Companies like Lumeris are flying under the radar while producing stellar results in health system and physician enablement. Other firms like Emergence, Third Way Health, and Ease are working in more focused areas of enablement…There’s a ton of positive momentum here, and the future of the physician practice is nigh as robust turnkey solutions grow in prevalence.”
In other words, the space seems competitive, which makes differentiated marketing and brand awareness likely a growing need.
So how would a consumer brand concept the category in a print-like ad to gain the attention of buyers flipping through their preferred trade magazine?
The paths to communicate provider enablement’s value seem unlimited. (I don’t think yet another ad of executives talking in a heavily windowed room is one of them, though.) Here’s a rough concept I played with.
Content, Illustrated
Content can get easily misconstrued outside of marketing teams.
“It’s just blogs, right?” many say. “And ebooks. And maybe some TikTok videos.”
Those are types of content, for sure.
But really, isn’t content, when done right, something much bigger?
On marketing tactics
Gone may be the days of page 1 on Google. → Read the article
Just how popular is the topic of AI today? According to Google Trends, it’s never been searched more. → Read the article
Andreesen Horowitz published a long piece on aligning GTM and product on better segmentation. → Read the article
Microsoft is testing integrating ChatGPT within Bing. → Read the article
TikTok is making it easier for creators to promote their organic content. → Read the article
Twitter Blue subscribers can publish tweets up to 4,000 characters long. → Read the article
Sometimes I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.
Woodstock versus the Super Bowl
David McCarthy
The first Woodstock festival had 400,000 attendees. Last year’s Super Bowl had 112 million viewers in the United States alone.
To me, the ideal project is to create content for Woodstock rather than the Super Bowl.
That point of view approaches blasphemy as a marketer. With the Super Bowl, the reach is historic, the engagement exponential.
But in a setting attempting to reach everyone, who is the content actually for? How progressive can it really be, and what can I, as a marketer, learn from it? And perhaps most importantly, how long will people really remember it for?
Woodstock’s audience is a fraction of the Super Bowl’s. But the creative and the audience-building opportunities, I’d argue, are better.
Unlike the Super Bowl, attendees aren’t seen as a treasure trove of various markets in one place — they’re a community of like-minded people with similar passions. The setting isn’t overmanaged and clinical — it’s organic. The content wouldn’t be for internal agendas — it would be for the audience. And the cultural imprint wouldn’t be a temporary trending topic on social — but rather a long-term movement built from the long tail.
Maybe if I were given the chance at a Super Bowl-like stage, I’d change my mind and abandon my idealism. But I’d have to keep in mind that few remember uncontroversial Super Bowls, whereas most adults across the globe can recall what Woodstock was about and how it changed their life.
The Differential | #5
David McCarthy
In this edition:
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed: What content stood out in late 2022, and how did one beloved startup rebrand?
Data point: Does your brand plan as far in advance as most brands do?
Differential diagnosis: Briefs need to get more granular with and better distinguish objectives.
Napkin draft: Yeah, “narrative altitude” is jargon (that I created). But, like an editorial angle, it can play a big role in the success of content.
Marketing tactics: So search might be different this year…
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed
In what may be one of the first major rebrands among startup darlings from the pandemic, Hinge Health has a new look (and a new product — house calls). Hinge Health dropped its famous orange and adopted green as its primary color, a la Landmark Health and Garner Health. → See the rebrand
One Medical published a (gated) white paper recently on a common theme in healthcare marketing these days: the integration of behavioral health with primary care. According to the newly acquired company, the white paper “explores how integrated behavioral health rooted in primary care is key to supporting employees’ mental and physical well-being.” → Read the paper
Brand agency Prophet touted on LinkedIn how it helped a surgical tech brand clarify its value proposition. The brand promise Prophet recommended is “Transforming surgery.” Working on value propositions, creating a new brand identity, crafting content, these are all difficult tasks, and usually more complex than what most non-marketers expect. However, the number of healthcare brands relying on value propositions around “transformation” and “reimagining” may be leading to parity and diluting the actual value that these brands can deliver. I also don’t know if clients understand the meaning of “reimagining” and “transforming” healthcare. I don’t sometimes. (Full disclosure: I’ve used “transformation,” “reimagine,” “rethink,” and countless others these last couple of years.) → See the case study
Digital cancer care management startup Jasper Health’s content engine is running on all cylinders, it seems. The brand, which has partnered with Walgreen’s and Evernorth, recently launched a member testimonial and, interestingly, a “custom savings and ROI report.” The latter is an interesting lower-funnel piece that has the potential to deliver helpful insights and move the prospect along the sales journey (even better, it does not seem to require setting up a meeting to share the findings, which may be a deterrent) . There’s also a calculator that teases the report’s insights, a brilliant play to reduce form abandonment. But I wonder, how long does it take to turn around and publish? → See the landing page
Employer-focused navigation company Quantum Health continues its marketing push, most recently launching a campaign for its new solution, Quantum Health Access. The campaign has included a video and an announcement/editorial in Med City News. → See the post
Healthcare platform startup League, who has also announced partnerships with Google and Highmark, has hired an editor-in-chief. To me, this signals that they’re pushing their chips into audience building, which I love. Lots of B2B brands talk about audience building; few seem to invest in it the way that League seems to be doing. The new hire comes from Health Evolution and Healthcare IT News. This will be a brand to watch, I think. → See the post
SDOH-focused and apparent Rob Dyrdek fan Unite Us published a report on how “ACOs can meet new health equity requirements” that CMS will effect in January 2023. (Hats off to the team for optimizing the report’s landing page for search, both in the slug and the H1.) → Visit the landing page
Lyra recently penned an editorial or missive, based on recent WHO and US Surgeon General reports, arguing that the employers provide behavioral health screening, coaching, and care as well as cultural changes. Titled “The New Employee Contract,” it’s a bold narrative, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been giving more prominence on Lyra’s digital properties. → Read the article
Several weeks ago, Rock Health created a “pocket guide to value-based care.” The brand routinely publishes solid, educational content, often with a memorable hook (usually in the title). To me, what’s effective with this piece is Rock Health’s categorization of the content. “Value-based care” is a highly prevalent, highly searched topic (Moz reports up to 500 searches a month), and the topic is represented in numerous books already. Few existing pieces on the topic out there seem digestible or memorable, at least to a non-operator, like me. → Read the article
Morgan Health-backed health insurance company Centivo launched a LinkedIn newsletter, Centiments. In several months, the newsletter, whose focus is “advancing the conversation around health plan innovation, has acquired more than 5,000 subscribers. And thus far, it’s not mincing words or shying away from competition. Its newsletter titles thus far: “The Health Plan Innovation Conversation,” “Risk and Reward: Challenging the Health Plan Status Quo,” and “Impacts of the Affordability Crisis.” → Visit the newsletter home
Nothing new here: Health Tech Nerds has published a string of deep-dives over the last couple of months for its community, including a bookmark-worthy exploration of Medicaid’s “functions and structures” (with editorial support from Casey Langwith, Dr. Lindsey Leininger, and Duncan Reece). → Read the article (available to community members)
And now, some data on content marketing
Digital may have made year-long planning a relic of the past. (I can’t even imagine that.)
Today’s marketers seem to embrace agility (or be forced to adopt it): according to HubSpot, most marketing teams plan their work one to four months in advance.
A differential diagnosis
defining better marketing objectives
TL;DR: In campaign briefs or during project conversations, distinguish between message objectives and business, or performance, objectives.
Campaign briefs and conversations about marketing projects can benefit from a change.
In the “objective” field of many briefs I’ve seen over the years, I see guidance like this: “Educate the market about an upcoming CMS reimbursement mandate.” “Differentiate our product from the others.” “Communicate the value of our product.”
These, and others like it, are not objectives, in my opinion, They don’t tell me what the business or the project must, measurably, accomplish in order to be successful. If achieved, they alone don’t translate into business value. I don’t know why it’s important to the business.
But they still are useful. They can clarify the tone of voice, the structure, and the psychology of the content.
So, add them to briefs, debate them in planning sessions. But don’t forget to add a broader, measurable business objective, too.
Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays
On Narrative Altitude
Narrative altitude is the “height” or vertical point of view your story or messaging assumes. (It’s also a term that I’ve completely made up, because that’s what we marketers like to do.)
Ideally, it aligns with your intended audience’s role and their immediate perspective of their business and the market (or the perspective that their desired role assumes).
Whereas point of view often can imply a horizontal angle on a topic (e.g., “organic search is an underrated channel for brand building” or “paid search is the only channel for growth”), narrative altitude is about how much the content zooms in on the trees or conversely, how much the content zooms out on the forest, so to speak.
To me, the altitudes can differ for every company, for every category, and for every industry.
However, some general principles apply across those dimensions.
For example, generally, lower-altitude content is more tactical, specific, and prescriptive because up-and-coming individual contributors or managers, who tend to focus on tactical execution, are the intended audience.
Alternatively, higher-altitude content is more abstract, strategic, and even philosophical. (In its worst form, it’s a victim of Steven Pinker’s concept of “the Curse of Knowledge,” which he defined in his book The Sense of Style as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else to not know something that you know.”)
Narrative altitude at this height focuses more on the “forest,” enabling senior leaders to see their business, their market, and their industry as a whole in new ways. The usual consulting firms (e.g., McKinsey, ZS, and Willis Towers) excel in this space. The Advisory Board develops content at this altitude frequently, with a prime example being their campaigns and their content on “systemness” in healthcare.
Content, Illustrated
Is there such thing as a linear or even logical sales journey? I’m not so sure. To me, it seems different for every prospect.
But the best content — from the top of the funnel to conversion — helps it move more linearly and more quickly.
On marketing tactics
To me, “small” stories can be hugely effective when they are ruthlessly focused on a job that the intended audience has to do well (but may not know how to yet). Reforge’s summer article on writing an executive summary is exactly that for me. → Read the article
SEO advisor Eli Schwartz makes several intriguing forecasts for 2023, including that Google will deprioritize the value of inbound links and invest in visual results, that TikTok indexes webpages, and that Amazon launches a search engine with organic results. → Read the article
Citing Consumer Trends Survey, Scott Galloway highlights that Gen Z and Millennials choose TikTok over TV and streaming when asked to choose their preference. → Read the article
Sometimes I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.
On narrative altitude
David McCarthy
In the mid-2010s, HubSpot, a marketing platform company (among other things), became a marketing juggernaut. Their blog dominated organic search. Their newsletter was save-worthy every week. And their lead magnets, like ebooks, were authoritative guides for nimble marketing teams needing help navigating the ever-changing marketing landscape.
As a result, the HubSpot brand become inextricably linked with “inbound marketing,” a GTM strategy that’s still dominant today.
And much of their success in content marketing ties to one thing: narrative altitude.
What is narrative altitude?
Narrative altitude is the “height” or vertical point of view your story or messaging assumes.
Ideally, it aligns with your intended audience’s role and their immediate perspective of their business and the market (or the perspective that their desired role assumes).
Whereas point of view often implies a horizontal angle on a topic (e.g., “organic search is an underrated channel for brand building”), narrative altitude is about how much the content zooms in on the trees or conversely, how much the content zooms out on the forest, so to speak, .
What are the different altitudes?
To me, the altitudes can differ for every company, for every category, and for every industry.
However, some general principles apply across those dimensions.
For example, generally, lower-altitude content is more tactical, specific, and prescriptive because up-and-coming individual contributors or managers, who tend to focus on tactical execution, are the intended audience.
This is where HubSpot flourished. Their “How to” content covered seemingly every valuable question a marketing manager or contributor had about their role or their projects. In many ways, HubSpot became, at that time, the de facto digital-marketing education that many managers and directors of today grew up on.
Alternatively, higher-altitude content is more abstract, strategic, and even philosophical. (In its worst form, it’s a victim of Steven Pinker’s concept of “the Curse of Knowledge,” which he defined in his book The Sense of Style as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else to not know something that you know.”)
Narrative altitude at this height focuses more on the “forest,” enabling senior leaders to see their business, their market, and their industry as a whole in new ways. The usual consultancy firms (e.g., McKinsey, ZS, and Willis Towers) excel in this space. The Advisory Board develops content at this altitude frequently, with a prime example being their campaigns and their content on “systemness” in healthcare.
Learning about narrative altitude the hard way
I learned about the importance of audience-altitude alignment painfully.
In the late 2010s, CMS launched a complex, ever-changing mandate for providers that tied to my employer’s product portfolio. This is the sweet spot that marketers crave: a high need for education among our target market and a direct connection to our value proposition.
Our team didn’t fail, but we didn’t succeed either. (We “meh’d,” which may be worse.)
In the lead magnet we developed to attract midsize-health-system prospects, our altitude was too low for the senior leaders we were targeting.
Instead of focusing on the CMS program’s effects on their health system (and the opportunity), we focused on tactical excellence, such as how to prepare to comply.
Our team still generated leads from that piece of content, and we continue to see requests come in for it. But generally, the leads were not within the inner circle of the buying team. They were the individuals that the buying team would buy for.
Using Jobs to be Done to Calibrate Narrative Altitude
What’s been most helpful to me to check for audience-altitude alignment is applying the Jobs to Be Done framework to my target audience’s role.
Unlike personas and brand-messaging platforms, Jobs to Be Done ports me into a specific role’s day to day. To me, that granularity leads to richer, more-tailored content. (It’s also easier to develop.).
Completing a role-based Jobs to Be Done framework within B2B healthcare is not simple, though. It’s rare, if not impossible, to interview senior leadership at large B2B healthcare companies to complete the framework. In those cases, job descriptions, quotes from conferences, and, occasionally, social media profiles and posts can help fill in the framework and reveal how an individual views their specific purpose in an organization and in an industry.
In the role-based Jobs to Be Done framework, I typically adopt dimensions that product leaders often use:
Desired outcome(s)
Prompt/context for the desired outcome
Measurements for the outcome
Current method(s) to achieve outcome
Gaps or challenges preventing the outcome
Current pain points
Within the framework, few data points are as valuable as the metrics that the individual owns or contributes to. For example, using this framework for marketing audiences, we’ll likely discover that a chief marketing officer will worry less about SEO page authority or daily CPC and instead care more about organic audience growth and monetization potential.
Channel-Narrative Fit is an X-Factor
HubSpot mastered aligning their narrative altitude with their audience. But that practice alone didn’t generate the business outcomes that marketers still laud (and emulate) today.
They also excelled because they aligned narrative to channel, namely SEO.
HubSpot content became synonymous with “How to” content. Coincidentally, search volumes for marketing strategies and tactics, including “how to” phrases, grew as marketing managers turned to search engines for ideas. (To illustrate the size of the “how to” content opportunity, “how to repost instagram” gets nearly 12,000 searches per month.)
The company found a perfect overlap between channel and narrative. Enviable marketing growth ensued.
Now, HubSpot has a domain authority of 93 (Facebook is a 96), has acquired 550M inbound links (a key driver of domain authority), and has nearly 1M ranking keywords, 10% of which are in the top three SERP results, even for very non-funnel keywords like “famous quotes.”
Narrative as a building block for growth
According to some sources, HubSpot, which launched sixteen years ago, now has roughly a third of the marketing-automation market share. Its revenue exceeds $1 billion, and it serves more than 100,000 organizations.
Narrative altitude is by no means solely responsible for this. Growth like this required immaculate timing, product-market fit, vulnerable incumbents, and, from a marketing perspective, wise, long-term channel investment.
But optimizing their content’s point of view was likely a key decision that helped build the brand’s audience, a foundational requirement for historic growth. It’s hard to imagine HubSpot becoming most small- and medium-sized businesses platform of choice without it.
P.S.
Some brands whose narrative altitude I admire:
Drift - Potentially realizing that they could not compete on SEO as an early-stage company with HubSpot or Intercom, their “MQL is Dead”narrative, which played on their subcategory (“conversational marketing”), was a perfect message and height to reach marketing and even sales leaders via social and WOM.
Product Marketing Alliance - Much like HubSpot did for content and inbound marketing, they saw a major gap in educational content for a growing marketing function—product marketing. And they’ve seemed to rely on HubSpot’s playbook for distribution: educational articles, certification courses, and events.
Refine Labs - Seeing LinkedIn as a publishing platform—not a distribution platform, they created a surround-sound strategy to deploy educational narratives on advertising/PPC for marketing contributors.
The Differential | #4
David McCarthy
Quantum Health accelerates. Jellyvision pens a wonderful retention asset. Carelon launches an interactive SDOH map. What could a navigation ad look like if it aimed to genuinely depict support? What’s missing from B2B healthcare landing pages and social ads?
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed
Navigation company Quantum Health recently hired a new chief communications officer, and their marketing efforts seem to reflect that momentum. The company is hosting a webcast with SHRM on the value of navigation, and they were recently featured on the Nasdaq. See the landing page
Evernorth, Cigna’s health-services arm, continues ramping up its content program, lately by sharing break-out-session content from its recent event, Outcomes+. The most recent session focuses on healthcare delivery transformation. Watch the session
Jellyvision, a beloved Chicago-based company that provides benefits education/engagement/enrollment programs, published a unique bottom-funnel article on why a former client returned. It may not break any engagement records for the brand, but I love this as a bottom-funnel and retention play. Read the article
Cohere Health, a startup focused on UM, including prior auth, has launched a newsletter, titled UM Connects. Cohere is competing with a few incumbents, so it will be interesting to see whether and how they differentiate their content. See the landing page
Provider-analytics company Care Journey is offering a certification course on value-based care. I’m always shocked more healthcare brands don’t offer this, given the benefits, likely potential additional revenue, word-of-mouth referrals, free publicity on attendees’ LinkedIn profiles, and the ability to instill in the market the brand’s narrative (e.g., “inbound marketing”). Care Journey is an absolute content powerhouse. See the certification landing page
On a similar note about newsletters, data-platform company Innovacer has launched a LinkedIn newsletter, “Innovation Accelerator.” The newsletter thus far has focused largely on Innovacer’s accomplishments and products and, somewhat surprisingly explicitly, urged healthcare leaders to ignore Salesforce’s CRM because it’s not a healthcare-native solution. See the newsletter
Perhaps too often in B2B healthcare marketing, we think of lead magnet content as solely ebooks and white papers. Big Health pulled a trick out of other industries’ playbook: they created a calculator to “measure the impact of your mental health benefits.” (I’m curious how it’s performing; the first four questions are lead-generation/qualification questions.) See the quiz landing page
Speaking of interactive content, Carelon, Elevance Health’s health-services brand, launched an interactive map that assesses SDOH at the community level. Visitors can filter for insights on food insecurity, housing, education, transportation, and other factors. I will be interested to see how many links a piece of content like this acquires over the next few months. (Note: Carelon is my employer.) See the map
And now, some data on healthcare content marketing
A differential diagnosis
Ignore Optum’s landing pages. Steal from Allbirds.
TL;DR: In B2B healthcare campaigns, landing pages for lead magnets and demos need a major revamp and should reflect the potential value of a conversion. Consumer brands, not market leaders in healthcare, are the touchstones to pull from.
For B2B healthcare brands, whose contracts can be worth six or seven figures, a lead from a qualified account can be worth four or five. And yet landing pages, the conversion asset that often yields those leads, very rarely reflect that value. And they very rarely do the work to convince some of the most educated, opinionated, and suspicious buyers to exchange their contact information for your content or conversion offer.
Usually, in B2B, you’ll see the following:
a generic hero
a paragraph of copy and bullets
a form
a button with suboptimal CTA copy (“Submit”)
With only those elements, I’m not sure it’s fair to expect a consistent conversion rate. Maybe if you had a category-defining product or a brand whose direct traffic keeps going up and up. But in today’s landscape, that seems less and less likely.
Whose landing pages work hard for their leads? In my opinion, consumer brands, ironically, and DTC especially. Brands whose products cost a thousandth of a B2B healthcare product and whose customers churn like crazy blend aesthetics and consumer psychology to not only get an email address, but to get a visitor to take out their credit card.
A landing page for a $90 pair of washable wool gym shoes has a number of elements that can apply to a healthcare brand’s landing page. Some elements that I would borrow:
Multiple images or views of the lead magnet
Benefits and features of the lead magnet
Use cases for the lead magnet
Testimonials or reviews from early readers or internal experts
Data on how many downloads there have been (if higher than baseline)
Data on what roles (e.g., CEO) have downloaded the magnet already
A caveat: a beautiful landing page that addresses every visitor’s barriers may not exceed averages if the offer is subpar. Like a product launch, Eevery campaign, in my opinion, starts with the offer.
Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays
How to test a social ad’s scroll-stopping potential
For B2B healthcare marketing teams, creating a good social ad—one that drives clicks or conversions efficiently—always takes a surprising amount of work.
The offer has to be right, to start, and the ad’s design and copy have to look and sound like the brand, too.
But it’s not uncommon for teams to overlook a question when designing it: can the ad win in a social feed?
The question becomes particularly important if your target audience is not a follower (and haven’t raised their hand to see your content—yet.)
The ad has to have "scroll stopping" potential, too. Here's a quick, rough way to test that internally.
If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad
I’m not convinced that the trend in healthcare marketing to use joyful, in-the-moment people in imagery is the only option.
Other emotions can be powerful, too, I think. Research has shown eliciting sadness is effective at triggering the memory, for example. And I have to think that after the years we’ve had recently, solidarity and comfort are too, so I took a swing at creating a category-awareness ad for a navigation product, anchoring on those two qualities or emotions.
On marketing tactics
Google has finished up its most recent Core update. It may be too early to see its impact on organic traffic and SERP rankings, but the update again seems to favor high-quality content that serves search intent, rather than the brand’s intent. It also seems to reward better page experiences. Get the details
Gartner reports that most marketing teams are not fully realizing their tech stack’s value or capabilities. Read more
Organic reach on Facebook and Instagram is, unsurprisingly, dropping significantly. I imagine a recession would prompt Meta to drive organic reach down even more. Dive into the data
Sometimes I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.