Estimated reading time: 8 mins
Content marketing can be a highly-effective strategy for business development, but without including certain elements, your articles will fail to gain the audience needed to educate your prospective clients and generate demand for your product or service.
The good news is that by following the guidelines in this article, you can create successful content for your audience.
Pharma Content Marketing: Steps for Success
This series covers the process of creating successful content marketing to attract pharmaceutical companies and turn them into clients for your business. In the first post, we discussed how to develop ideas that resonate with your target audience. The second post covered the benefits of determining your key takeaway and the process for turning ideas into main points.
This article covers step 3 of an effective content marketing process: the nuts and bolts of creating good content.
What is Good Content?
Good content is, at its core, effective content. What characteristics make a content piece effective? In our experience working with clients to establish content marketing strategies and through our efforts to produce content, we’ve discovered that effective content shares these 5 key characteristics:
Findable
Readable
Engaging
Compelling
Measurable
These characteristics provide a helpful rubric for developing content that is valuable to your audience and supports the twin goals of (1) educating prospective clients and (2) generating demand for your product/service.
Let’s dig a little deeper into each key trait.
1. Findable
In order for your piece to attract an audience, it must be findable. That’s where good search engine optimization (SEO) practices come into play. Articles that are properly optimized for search engine rankings will reap the benefits of more organic traffic over a longer period of time.
The beauty of SEO is that any business can do it and still compete well with the bigger budgets of large companies. “The biggest advantage of online marketing is that it levels the playing field for small businesses. The highest rank doesn't go to the company with the most money, but instead goes to the business that understands and deploys effective SEO techniques,” writes Jeff Gilden, Forbes.
At a minimum, each piece you create should have:
Clearly-delineated target keywords
A properly tagged title (h1) of at least 30 characters
A meta description of 100-160 characters
Appropriate categories and tags
Image alt text that describes the image
Images optimized for loading speed
Several outbound links citing sources used
It’s important to note that SEO is a long-term strategy that begins bearing fruit after several months. As your content library grows and matures, your site’s domain authority (or how trustworthy your site is in the eyes of Google) will increase and newer pieces will achieve higher rankings more quickly than your initial efforts did. You will receive more backlinks (external websites pointing to your site) and earn more social shares which, in turn, will improve your website’s search engine ranking.
“Relevant, valuable content will continue to earn links over time, regardless of when it is published. This in turn improves the ranking of the individual webpage, moving it closer to the first page of search results. At the same time, any new content you subsequently create, which your audience finds relevant and valuable, will grow in a similar way. Together, all your content will help multiply growth in your brand’s total search rank,” writes Michael Brenner.
2. Readable
Articles should have good structure and flow well. Investing time into organizing your article will enable readers to easily identify and understand your main point and supporting material.
Early in the content creation process, you should determine what format or type of article you are planning to write. Different article types are organized differently depending upon what you are planning to convey and who your target audience is.
According to BuzzSumo, the leading tool for analyzing content social performance, these formats perform the best in B2B content marketing:
Research Content
eBooks and Guides
Updated Reference Content
Trending & Hashtag/Newsjacking Content
‘How to’ and Practical Content
Curated and list content
Product Launch Content
Tools
Case Studies
No matter which format you use, several elements are essential for organizing your piece and enhancing the reader’s experience:
Headers/Subheaders: Using headers and subheaders breaks up text, lets your reader scan your article, and helps organize information. Using header tags also improves your article’s optimization for search results.
Short sentences and paragraphs: Short sentences and paragraphs are more aesthetically pleasing and avoid assaulting your reader with a wall of indiscernible text.
Highly-relevant images and graphics: Research has shown that articles with images receive 94% more traffic than those without images. In the age of Instagram, Pinterest, and other visual platforms, an excellent article cannot stand on its own. To maximize your article’s reach, include at least one image for every 350 words.
Bulleted points or lists: Even if you’re not writing a list-based article, using lists within an article helps to break up text and organize bits of information.
Poor organization harms your article’s readability no matter its topic or value-add. Take for instance this article which has no headers, paragraphs, or other organizing features:
Without breaking up the text, it’s difficult to make sense of the article. This discourages people from reading and generally lends to a poor reader experience.
Compare the wall of text above to the text as we revised it:
Simply adding spacing between paragraphs and headers vastly improved the readability of this article. Adding additional components like images would improve the readability even more.
“The number one rule to having content that is easy to follow is to create content that is readable. Unlike print material, online web typography needs to be organized in a clear hierarchy so that it’s easy to read through. Since online readers prefer ‘scannable’ content; headings, subheadings, lists, and bullet points must be present to ensure that your reader stays on the page,” writes Christina Matthew.
3. Engaging
Content that is properly optimized and well-organized will not generate value for your business unless it is also engaging. This means creating content that your target audience will find useful, relevant, or interesting.
Identifying Pain Points
One of the strategies for ensuring that your content is engaging is to determine your target audience’s pain points or problems and how your business solves those problems. Dan Shewan, Wordstream, helpfully organizes pain points into four main categories: financial, productivity, process, and support. He notes that “[viewing] customer pain points in these categories allows you to start thinking about how to position your company or product as a solution to your prospects’ problems.”
Determining pain points, particularly around the solutions you offer, often requires getting the insight of clients and prospective clients. This can be done directly by asking your target audience what problems they’re facing, or indirectly by monitoring your audience’s online activity (particularly comments/interactions with social media and articles).
Another place to look, particularly for pain points pharma companies are facing, is in trade publications. This allows you to access both the thought process of the editorial staff in selecting relevant articles and the thoughts of the community who read and interact with articles.
“Publication groups and forums offer participants the opportunity to engage each other in online conversations that would otherwise likely never take place. These conversations give insight into what is really keeping decision-makers awake at night and should spark thinking around the best way to solve those challenges,” writes Tami Wessley.
Useful Tactics for Evaluating Engagement Potential
Before you publish your content, spending time analyzing current industry trends can help you better tailor your piece for your target audience. There are several metrics to look at when evaluating trends, including:
Traffic
Social Shares
Backlinks
Keyword Search Volume
Using information derived from this research is also a good way to identify any gaps in the content available to your target audience. If your competition has not developed effective content backed by a good solution to an industry pain point, you have the opportunity to take advantage of that gap.
Third-Party-Generated Insights
Another important source of intelligence when identifying pain points is third party research. Our team recently worked with a client to develop insights regarding whether they should expand into a certain market. By obtaining feedback directly from key stakeholders within that industry, we provided the information necessary for our client to make an informed decision.
Part of this process included determining pain points for the client’s target audience and what solutions the client had to address those pain points.
4. Compelling
Even the most engaging content will fail unless it is compelling. This includes ensuring that your content is both actionable and shareable.
Actionable Content
Content that is actionable includes a call to action (CTA), whether “hard” (i.e. clearly angling for a sale) or “soft” (i.e. asking for contact information). “With a call to action, your readers know exactly what to do next. This makes your content logical and also doubles your chances of return on leads,” writes Christina Matthew.
Shareable Content
Making your content easily shareable is essential for increasing social engagement. If your audience has to copy and paste your content’s link to share it with someone, they are much less likely to do so.
Instead, use icons for the social media networks most popular with your audience. This makes sharing as easy as clicking on the icon.
5. Measurable
Content marketing efforts must be measurable in order to demonstrate their return on investment (ROI), identify any adjustments needed, and plan for ongoing content development.
Measuring the success of your content involves three key steps:
Determining what to measure
Measuring content marketing data
Deriving actionable information from data
These steps will help you “identify what’s working, discover areas where improvements can be made, and determine where to scale back to concentrate on more impactful efforts,” writes Jodi Harris.
1. Determining what to measure
The metrics you apply to your content marketing will depend upon what your goals are. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, leads generated, conversion rates, and direct sales are particularly important to track and measure.
There are a number of other KPIs that can be measured. Establishing which core KPIs to measure will depend on what your company’s goals are. The chart below, adapted from the Content Marketing Institute, provides options for what to track based on which goals have priority.
2. Measuring content marketing data
Once you have determined what KPIs will provide you with the most insight on your content’s performance, you’ll need to establish a timeframe for ongoing analysis. A good place to start is to monitor content marketing efforts on a monthly basis.
It’s also important to make data easy-to-understand. A spreadsheet, like the one Pharma Acumen uses with clients (below), enables you to see relevant KPIs in one place and makes it easier to analyze trends.
3. Deriving actionable information from data
Having all the metrics in the world won’t help your content marketing efforts unless you know what to do with those metrics. Understanding what actions to take based on the data you’ve collected requires a consistent approach to ensure that you can effectively analyze each campaign’s performance in relation to company goals.
Here are some questions to consider when determining what actions to take based on your marketing data:
On what pieces of content did visitors spend the most time? Why? How can we apply these success measures to current and future content?
Which content has the highest and lowest exit rate? How can we encourage visitors to view multiple pages per visit?
Which forms generate the most submissions? Why? How can we apply this strategy to other forms?
Actionable insights provide the information needed to replicate success with effective content marketing pieces and avoid failure with content pieces that don’t perform well. Routine monitoring and analysis of the KPIs most important to your business will help ensure that your content marketing practices are on the right track.
Conclusion: Bringing it All Together
As we’ve seen, effective content must be carefully planned so that it is findable, readable, engaging, compelling, and measurable. However, the pharma industry has been slow to adopt these best practices, with many companies either not creating content at all or not creating effective content. This opens up a remarkable, untapped opportunity for businesses that offer products and services to pharma companies.
The team at Pharma Acumen has discovered that one hurdle to successful content marketing is lack of necessary inhouse resources. That’s why we’ve developed a proprietary process for content marketing that leverages your company’s expertise to develop content for your target audience.
If you’d like to learn more about how we have helped other clients attract new business through content marketing, contact Brian.
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