Did you know your target market's attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish? Research from Microsoft Corporation found the average adult attention span in the year 2000 was 12-seconds, by 2013 it was only 8-seconds. Since goldfish have an attention span of about 9-seconds, they win!
So, how do healthcare SaaS marketing teams combat this short attention span when trying to promote in-depth content?
There are several things you can do to leverage marathon - rather than sprint - distance out of your content marketing strategy. Here are some of the basics.
The idea of separate sales and marketing departments worked for decades, and then the inbound marketing era was upon us. Now, divergences between these departments are detrimental to your brand. It yields inconsistent information, potentially conflicting messages, and a sales team that appears behind the times.
By integrating sales and marketing, you'll get way ahead of the game when it comes to creating and promoting targeted information. You'll also garner the trust of prospects and clients when forward-thinking sales reps intuitively meet them where they're at in the buyer cycle.
Proof: Dell EMC completely integrated its marketing and sales teams to propel new, powerful campaigns forward - and Dell EMC's worth more than Nike, Facebook, or Starbucks.
Who is your content speaking to? Do you even know? Are you aware of how it lands - - or how it doesn't? Getting personal and forging human-to-human connections and engagement is key to the success of healthcare SaaS marketing.
If you haven't spent time in the touchy-feely, marketing persona world, it's time to do so. If you're uncomfortable with that because the same people who create your software are now marketing it, perhaps it's time to hire professionals. As we've posted before, You Are Not Your Best Customer.
Proof: Optum. This mega-healthcare IT company started a social media campaign called, "5in5." Prospect/client engagement levels soared, causing Optum to create a dedicated website to continue forging alliances - - and making valuable human connections that drive more personalized content/campaign creation.
The irony about goldfish-sized attention spans is that Google favors long-format content marketing when it comes to SEO punch. Long-format content - blogs that are 700+ words, eBooks and whitepapers, webinars, guides, in-depth tutorials, and full-size infographics have the kind of meaty, in-depth content that drives SEO search results.
However, most prospects aren't going to read that long stuff right off the bat. Instead, you create the "Mother Piece," so to speak, and then you start developing off-key, short- and mini-content pieces, optimize the heck out of them, and blast them away into social media land.
Now, prospects get highly informative and targeted content they can scan in 8-ish seconds, directing them to the long-format piece once they're hooked.
Proof: Xerox catapulted their reputation as healthcare IT experts by learning how to curate the industry's best long- and short-format content, writing their own strongly opinionated pieces, and getting serious leverage on strongly sponsored pages (Forbes and The Week, for example). Xerox's formal global advertising and media manager, Jay Bartlett, said, "This is...the notion that content and social go hand-in-glove. We married the two...help[ing] us utilize word-of-mouth marketing to help with our repositioning."
Don't think of content posting as a one-and-done endeavor. Rather, invest in different genres of high-quality, long-format, healthcare SaaS marketing content that begets a plethora of goldfish-attention-span-length blasts. Then, promote those via social media channels for major content mileage.
