Estimated reading time: 3 mins
Content marketing, the practice of offering valuable content to your target audience, enables businesses that sell to pharma companies to attract new clients, demonstrate expertise, and remain competitive. For small to mid-sized businesses that rely heavily on acquiring and retaining individual clients, content marketing is an especially cost-effective way to stay visible to existing customers and attract new interest.
While many businesses recognize the value of content marketing, developing and implementing a successful communication plan can be daunting. One early but high hurdle to overcome is determining what to say. A recent survey of marketers revealed that the biggest challenge they face is the production of content, including coming up with ideas for original pieces.
The good news is that by following a consistent process, you and your team can develop high-impact content that begins to convert prospects into customers.
This series explores 4 steps for creating content for your target audience that provides value and generates demand. In this article, we discuss step 1, strategies for devising effective content marketing ideas.
A Reliable Framework for Generating Compelling Content Marketing Ideas
Behind every article, post, status update, and tweet is an idea, or something that the author wants to convey to his or her audience. The idea is the heart of your content piece and is important to articulate because it will ultimately drive what you say, how you say it, and where you say it.
Deciding what to write about, particularly within a specific industry, can be difficult without having a framework to guide your efforts. This framework should help you determine how your content marketing plan aligns with your business goals and how each specific content piece fits into your overall strategy. The questions below are a useful starting point for coming up with and evaluating ideas:
Overall Business and Campaign Goals
Who is your audience? What is important to them?
What are the pain points or challenges your audience consistently faces?
What is your solution to their pain points?
What is your unique perspective on trending topics?
Piece-Specific Strategy
What is the takeaway?
What do you want your audience to learn and will it have value?
How can you create a need for your product/service with this piece?
What do you want your audience to do after interacting with your content?
What service/capability or product are you promoting?
Developing ideas for effective content marketing requires understanding what is valuable to your audience of prospective clients, what your business can offer prospective clients, and how to generate a need for your particular product or service. The first two points are common questions reputable content marketers will ask when developing content. The last point, generating demand, is a differentiating aspect that can uniquely position your company to offer something no one else does.
Differentiating Your Idea by Generating a Need for Your Business
The strategy of generating the need for your business is one of the core messages in The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. The basic premise behind this book is that salespeople who perform the best go beyond relationship building to challenge buyers.
“Challengers push customers intellectually and come up with innovative, unforeseen solutions to their business problems. They take control of the sale at the very beginning of the sales process (not just in the negotiating stage) by creating a need for each particular buyer for which they have the only solution,” writes Lindsay Kolowich of InsightSquared.
This approach to sales works well with content marketing because producing material useful to your audience offers a forum for articulating what your buyers need and demonstrating how your business understands the issues and is prepared to meet those needs.
The Value of External Help for Developing Content Ideas
Companies that publish effective content often rely on a third party for help with generating content ideas and developing them into high-impact pieces. A company with experience creating content on behalf of clients has in place tools and frameworks for efficiently researching and testing ideas, including gaining insight from key stakeholders within the organization. These processes provide a cost-effective way to quickly produce actionable content that offers value to your audience and generates a need for your business solutions.
Pharma Acumen has deep experience helping businesses that offer products and services to pharma companies create and execute effective content marketing strategies. Through our multiple engagements with clients, we have established a proprietary process for developing content, from the initial planning stage to publishing content pieces and measuring results.
To learn more about how your business can benefit from expert content creation and marketing help, contact Brian.