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Notes

The Differential | #3

David McCarthy

If you could price your best piece of content, would you price it as high as The Catalyst for Payment Reform does? / Boring, sense-making content makes a case for its place in marketing team’s priorities. / Transcarent’s earned media is boosting their digital visibility—when will they pass incumbents? / What if a book publisher advertised a MedPAC policy book? / And Lionel Richie shows up in a healthcare ad, because, of course.

B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed

  • Optum continues its regular presence in NEJM Catalyst, most recently publishing an editorial outlining a roadmap for the future of home and community care. Read the article

  • The Catalyst for Payment Reform launched a toolkit for referenced-based pricing. It costs $299. According to the landing page, the toolkit “contains evaluation questions and detailed specifications to meet the needs of employer-purchasers considering or reviewing reference-based pricing (RBP) solutions.” You know a brand is confident in its content when it charges the cost of a textbook. Kidding aside, I think this introduces a good question for marketing teams to consider when thinking through their next premium piece of content: What could your brand sell it for? Maybe a question like that can help determine which ideas are potentially most valuable to prospects. $ee the landing page

  • In the last Differential, I highlighted a “white paper” from Teladoc. This past week, they promoted a case study on their work with Friday Health Plans. The case study has the essentials: client profile, executive summary, testimonial, and impact. But what I wished to see was an exploration of Friday’s consideration set and their decision-making process—why did they choose not only Teladoc, but Teladoc’s category? In my perspective, with case study results almost always being exceptional, the decision-making section is where the seller can differentiate and enable the prospect to truly see themselves in the client’s shoes. Check out the case study

  • A recent Devoted Health ad stars Lionel Richie. No clay sculptures were featured, sadly. See the ad

  • Vera Whole Health may be keeping long-form content (and the careers of English and journalism majors) alive on its own. On LinkedIn, the brand is promoting its ebook The Definitive Guide to Evaluating On-Site Clinics, which I touch on later. Check out the ebook

  • BrightMD published a six-page listicle introduction to its asynchronous telehealth solution. Read the intro

  • Lyra launched an epic of a 4,500-word evergreen article titled “A New Approach to the Outdated EAP.” The article seemingly sets out to do two things: establish Lyra’s approach to EAP as the future of EAP and rank the heck out of “EAP.” With the latter aim, they’re being quite intentional, offering jump links to different sections whose subheads are packed with “EAP” and searches related to the topic. I’m not sure a brand can skyscrape existing articles on an established topic and establish a new strategic narrative (I don’t know the space well enough), but I applaud the effort and their investment in an evergreen page like this, which ties so closely to their business. Scroll the article

  • Homeward CEO, Jennifer Schneider, MD, MS, was interviewed on McKnight’s Home Care podcast, and she’s earned lots of media, it seems, over the past couple months. Before joining Homeward, Dr. Schneider was the chief medical officer and later the president of Livongo. I wonder if she and her team are following a PR and earned media playbook similar to Glenn Tullman’s.  Listen to the podcast

And now, some data on healthcare content marketing

A differential diagnosis

The case for boring, sense-making content

TL;DR: Category buyer guides and brand starter guides still have a place in B2B marketing team’s content strategies. And they’re arguably more important than ever in B2B healthcare.

Buyer guides aren’t sexy content. Marketing leaders probably won’t feature them when presenting to senior leadership or the board, and they likely won’t find a place at the top of marketers’ portfolios.

I understand why. Generally, these guides don’t generate a reliable volume of leads, they can have high CPC, and they aren’t brand-awareness builders. They don’t, ostensibly, establish a narrative for your brand either.

But in B2B healthcare, they can have value in accelerating pipeline and perhaps bypassing or getting ahead of the RFP process.

Here’s why I think that: to buyers, the B2B healthcare marketplace has become a cortisol-triggering, endless catalogue of options. Buyers face a deluge of point solutions, aggregators, and other tools to choose from. And with those potential products comes an endless amount of feature sets, case studies, benchmarks and data points, and product collateral, which can be hard to sort through.

Unsurprisingly, Gartner reports that “buyers, overwhelmed by information, are struggling to make purchase decisions…55% of customers say that making informed trade-offs between vendors and their capabilities is difficult based on the information encountered during the buying process.”

Category buying and brand starter guides, coupled with a “sense-making approach” from growth teams, have the potential to distill the noise, make sense of the marketplace, and cultivate ever-important trust. Not bad accomplishments for some boring pieces of content.

Name that healthcare brand!

Which brand’s voice does the following title sound like most? (The answer is in the end notes at the bottom of the page.)

Health Care’s Tectonic Shift – What Payors Must Know to Succeed

  1. Optum

  2. Accolade

  3. Teladoc

  4. CareCentrix

  5. All of the above, because everyone sounds the same

Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays

Let’s atomize an ebook

In the last note I sent, I asked whether the “stand-up comic approach” to content deserved some consideration instead of the traditional “content atomization” approach, especially for leaner marketing teams, who may not have the luxury of campaigns that miss the mark.

In the former, a team tests out topics, messaging, and content bites in smaller “settings” before aggregating it into something longer or higher value, like an ebook or a course, which often requires more dollars to distribute.

In the latter, the process is, generally, reversed: the more-substantial content asset gets built first and then broken apart into smaller pieces.

Teams may be able to employ both strategies simultaneously. And if a team is confident in its audience insights and market understanding, atomization may still be the easiest approach—especially if your longer pieces of content are hyperfocused, well-organized, and educational.

The ebook from Vera I note above is a great example of that. The asset is structured and consistent, which streamlines repurposing. And it’s focused on educating rather than selling, which improves the chances that atomized elements will see solid engagement.

Here’s a quick draft of how the ebook can get atomized.

If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

I’m always curious why we healthcare marketing teams don’t promote long-form content more often like book publishers promote their biggest-bet books. To me, the desired actions for both seem the same—exchange something, like an email address or twenty dollars, to page through the work. So that got me thinking, what could an ad for a dry MedPAC PDF look like?

On marketing tactics

  • I’m just catching Social Insider’s study from the spring on the best type of content for LinkedIn. Read the study

  • I whole heartedly agree. ABM isn’t just retargeting prospects with display. Read the article

  • Gartner is reporting that in 2022, CMOs are allocating more than half of digital spend to paid channels. Almost 30% is going to paid search, digital display, and digital video advertising, a figure that really surprises me.  Page through the study

  • Growth and experimentation agency CXL poses a curious question: which is more meaningful to a business: big-bet experiments or focused optimization? Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios breaks the differences down between the two strategies, using a familiar trope: the tortoise and the hare. Read the article

Answer to “Name that brand!”

CareCentrix, Walgreen’s latest investment. (Also accepted—”All of the above.)

Sometimes I post on LinkedIn, too

Let’s connect

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 | #2

David McCarthy

Long-form content is having a Kate Bush-like summer. Is A16Z laying the groundwork for a book on building healthcare companies? And why The Bear may not always be the best analogy for marketing teams’ content strategy.

Some B2B healthcare marketing headlines

  • A16Z’s Vineeta Agarwala and Jay Rughani published another (wonderful) playbook. In their latest, they focused on two-sided networks in healthcare. Is it only a matter of time before they aggregate the articles into a book, like their colleague Andrew Chen did recently? Read/listen to the playbook.

  • Is long-form content back? Vera Whole Health, along with Castlight, published a 28-page guide (that they estimate can be read in 30 minutes!) on advanced primary care services. (As competition heats up and companies need to accelerate their pipeline, I do wonder whether we’ll see a resurgence of long-form content as a lead-generation tactic. I’m not sure that’s always the route to go, but it will be interesting to see.) Visit the landing page.

  • Health Tech Nerds continues to push out wonderful content on a predictable schedule, which is an incredibly hard thing to do. See their latest content.

  • Joining the long-form trend is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, who recently published “The Playbook: Digital Healthcare Edition, Phase 1.” It’s a wonderful piece of content. Their landing page may be the real MVP, atomizing individual chapters from the ebook into solution-specific guides and encouraging distribution. See the landing page.

  • In what seems like a rare very-top-of-funnel play for a B2B healthcare company, Included Health published an article on great leadership. I see the connection to Included’s value proposition, persona target, and solution portfolio, but rarely do I see enterprise marketing teams in healthcare extend their content efforts this early in the funnel, flywheel, etc. Based on the keyword repetition, it seems like an SEO play as well. Read the article.

  • Ginger continues to impress. They seemingly see the value of LinkedIn organic for brand awareness, publishing nonhyperlinked, copy-only messages (very comparable to their parent, Headspace) that speaks to their audience (in this case, members or employees) rather than screaming about their brand and their product. Hats off to their social and content teams for doing organic B2B social in a refreshingly non-B2B-healthcare way. See an example.

  • On LinkedIn, Teladoc Health is advertising a “white paper.” Titled “Primary care reimagined” (elsewhere it’s titled “The promise of virtual care”), the eight-page white paper is more a sales brochure, with solution/brand-focused copy. If I’m reading its file code correctly, the white paper was published in 2021, so it’s been in market for some time. (With how bottom-funnel this piece turns out to be, I wonder if Teladoc has ever developed a definitive mid-funnel guide on their category. A missed opportunity if they haven’t.) Check out the white paper.

  • Solv is hosting a kind of webinar I applaud—an educational one with a hyper-specific topic: how to calculate patient lifetime value. From my perspective, too often webinars try to tackle a topic with the scope of a Great American Novel (e.g., “How to transform healthcare”). To keep the literary analogy going, those with the scope of a short story, like Solv’s, may not generate as many leads but, in my opinion, produce better content, uncover more reliable buyer intent, and likely have better conversion rates. See the landing page.

  • Sage Growth Partners announced a partnership with Slice of Healthcare, a healthcare news and media company. From an audience-building perspective, this partnership will be interesting to watch. Read the story.

And now, some data on content marketing

A differential diagnosis

The stand-up comic’s approach to content marketing, or the anti-atomization practice

TL;DR: Instead of writing long-form pieces and then atomizing them into smaller pieces, what if we started first with smaller assets (to test them) and then combine them once the market’s validated the content’s value?

Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong, or at the very least, maybe we’ve been ignoring another way.

For years, we’ve heard that to run a content program efficiently, you first create a longer, premium piece of content and then atomize it across different channels. Chapters, H2s, images, and quotes all get diced up and repurposed. H2 sections become blog articles. Images become Instagram posts. Quotes become testimonials. It’s like marketing team’s version of The Bear.

But maybe we could have borrowed from stand-up comics rather than butchers: test out new material in smaller or discrete settings before packaging the best work up for a larger audience.

For example, instead of spending weeks (months?) on a campaign promoting an ebook or a cornerstone article, what if you “leaked” potential parts of it to gauge your audience’s response to it first? Does that decrease the risks of a campaign and a GTM lag?

Here’s how I would think about running this experiment:

  1. Speak with your customers or customer-facing teams to learn what education or topic may resonate and help the market right now. (Or conduct your keyword and industry research on your own.)

  2. Solidify your company’s angle or narrative on the topic, and unfold three pillars (or message buckets) that your business excels at to support that narrative.

  3. Draft three longer LinkedIn posts for each pillar, and design three images or slideshow videos that reflect key principles or data points in them. Treat them as separate assets rather than combining them.

  4. Launch them as organic posts, and sponsor them if you want to ensure more-targeted results (i.e., to exclude non-qualified engagement, like employees).

  5. If the posts perform as good or better, aggregate them and fill in gaps for that section. If they don’t, tweak the content for future posts or move to other pillars.

  6. Repeat until your team has confidence that your audience will respond well to it or has enough data to suggest moving to a different topic.

Name that healthcare brand!

Napkin drafts of B2B healthcare marketing plays

Apps to make testimonial videos for ~$120 remotely

“We don’t have a budget for video.” “We don’t have production time.” “It has to be premium quality, and we don’t have the team or tools for that.”

These are common concerns I hear that prevent teams from considering video marketing, especially around client and member testimonials.

Generally, I tend to disagree with them for a couple reasons. First, I usually don’t see the value in an expensive, high-production video when clients, members/patients, and employees can churn within a matter of months and when products (and thus messaging) get repositioned frequently. Second, with social video engagement rising exponentially, I’m actually not confident audiences expect production quality that rivals network-TV ads. While that level of quality signals credibility (and capital), to me, interesting, timely, and helpful content trumps pristine production quality.

That got me thinking, though: what are some tools you can use to affordably create a solid testimonial or member experience video, remotely?

If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

I often wonder whether virtual-care brands are using the right photos to memorably reflect the value prop of virtual immediate care. (I mean, I rarely launch a virtual-care app in a sundrenched sitting room that Rejuvenation furnished.)

What would their ads look like if they mixed it up and aimed for authenticity, like B2C brands tend to do?

I didn’t hit the mark at all here, but it was fun thinking through ideas and searching through Canva’s limited library.

On marketing tactics

  • I highlighted Metadata a few weeks ago, but I have to again: I find their customer-testimony video to be incredibly effective for brand awareness. Talk about voice of the customer. Scroll down the page to watch.

  • With its cancelled-meeting candle, Loom owns the merch award of the week. (Apparently, though, candles are not immune to inflation.) Chuckle at the candle.

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 | #1

David McCarthy

An ambitious rebrand, a massive audience acquisition, a timely, masterclass of a survey, and a plead to experiment more on LinkedIn.

Some B2B healthcare marketing headlines

  • Optum, unsurprisingly, is doing what nearly every marketing team wants to do: become a media company. The Minnesota-based services organization is teaming up with Red Ventures “to combine consumer healthcare news and information with online pharmacy and telehealth services. The joint venture, RVO Health, supports UnitedHealth Group's plan to build consumer brand awareness around its Optum healthcare services subsidiary.” Read more.

  • Sword Health, a provider of virtual and digital physical therapy, rebranded. And with their new brand identity, they’ve also expanded their ambition: “At this pivotal moment in Sword Health’s journey, our ambition is to provide the new gold standard in care and pain treatment for our patients. To set the benchmark by which all other pain treatments are compared. To get people back to really living their lives.” Read more.

  • Promoted on paid LinkedIn a year after the product launched (note: I would love to see that CTR and CPL), Ginger’s ebook “Extending Vital Mental Health Benefits to Teens” covers how the Headspace acquisition’s virtual care model “improves access and outcomes for working parents and their families.” (Ginger has a savvy content marketing team. They wonderfully cover many of the routine mid-funnel and bottom-funnel content questions/needs buyers have that senior execs may not consider to be “the most creative” ideas, my favorite being their “Ginger Starter Guide,” an aesthetically pleasing, super-high-intent asset.) Learn more.

  • Health Tech Nerds and OMERS Ventures conducted a joint survey with more than 150 healthcare startup operators and investors “for perspectives on changing conditions” economically and their impact on the private health tech market. Read the survey.

  • Pareto Intelligence launched an interactive analysis on risk adjustment transfer payments. I understand about two percent of what the analysis finds, but I’d bet that with the right amplification, this piece garners the company numerous valuable backlinks, a critical element for SEO. Open the report.

  • Evernorth, Cigna’s healthcare services brand, is revving up its marketing engine. It recently published in article in Wall Street Journal. It’s begun to dabble in retargeting via display (but it only accounts for 0.22% of their traffic, according to SimilarWeb). And their library has grown considerably, covering topics on biosimiliars, gene therapy, diabetes management, and behavioral health. (Marketing hiring at the services brand seems to be picking up as well.) Visit the library.

  • Transcarent released a new episode of its podcast/video panel, Titans of Healthcare. In the latest, Glen Tullman of Transcarent; Lee Shapiro of 7wire Ventures Ventures; Jennifer Schneider, MD, CEO of Homeward; Naomi Allen of Brightline; and Jared Taylor of Slice of Healthcare discussed how to deliver “enjoyable health and care experiences to aspects of health care that are costly, confusing, complex, and underserved in today's system.” Listen to/watch the episode.

  • Optum, with help from The Advisory Board, is leading a Becker’s webinar on seeing the whole picture for whole-person health. Visit the landing page.

And now, some data on content marketing

A Differential diagnosis

LinkedIn campaign testing

TL;DR: Create three to four ad variations for each LinkedIn campaign.

For B2B healthcare and health tech companies, LinkedIn is a common-sense social platform to build visibility. It’s the social platform I would recommend healthcare companies spend time on (for now), especially since the platform, thanks to adjustments to its algorithm, has evolved into essentially a micro-blogging space.

But in my experience, most B2B healthcare marketing teams are not experimenting enough on the platform. Not enough experimentation with organic content and especially not enough with sponsored updates and campaigns, where you can target a group of specific companies.

In an industry where interviewing enterprise buying teams is painfully difficult, at least in my experience, LinkedIn sponsored posts and campaigns can be a decent proxy for market research. You can get feedback relatively quickly, on everything from value proposition messaging to campaigns promoting a premium piece of content.

What can you experiment with? A lot. For example, if you were promoting a new voice-of-the-customer report and wanted to learn which ad image types generated the highest click-through rate, you could use these ad variations:

  • Ad 1 - Feature a lifestyle image

  • Ad 2 - Feature a thumbnail of the report

  • Ad 3 - Feature profile pictures of featured speakers/customers/authors

  • Ad 4 - Use text only

The options can be limitless, but be sure to choose only one variation at a time (e.g., avoid testing new copy with every new image).

Napkin drafts of marketing plays

An outline to rank high for “Cancer care Navigation”

Cancer care coordination and navigation is having a much-deserved moment.

In late June, CMS announced its new Enhancing Oncology Model, and in its July 4 issue, Modern Healthcare’s cover story, “Telehealth provides extra layer of oncology care,” addressed the topic as well.

This momentum may prompt a sprint among marketing teams to “own” the topic; a pillar page on the subject could be a worthwhile long-term play for a company in that space.

Here’s a very rough outline I would work with to rank for that keyword phrase, with the goal of providing a unique point of view in each section rather than copying the messaging from pages that currently rank:

Some on-page tactics I would also consider:

  • Aim for 1,000-plus words, and write for a reader at the high school level

  • Feature quotes from experts at ASCO, American Cancer Society, and Oncology Nursing Society; ask them to link to the article from their website

  • Include any proprietary data your brand is open to sharing

  • Add images (with metadata optimized for search) or featured quotes for every scroll

If a consumer brand designed a B2B healthcare ad

Nike (and their agency of choice) has designed some of the most iconic ads in history. What if they designed one for home healthcare?

On Marketing tactics

  • Very brief ads on LinkedIn drive the best results, right? Metadata’s new research suggests otherwise. See the study.

  • The new play in SEO? It’s no longer the skyscrape technique. It’s “information gain.” Read more.

  • SEO isn’t the most leveraged channel in B2B healthcare content (sometimes for good reasons), but pillar pages are still a strong play for the topics that businesses want to be associated with. See examples.

Finally, a brief disclaimer

I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.