But here are some lessons learned over the past two years that might be useful for other B2B content marketers. This meant drawing a sharp “church/state” line with athenaInsight and avoiding direct promotion of our company and products. Our ongoing series on trends and challenges in opioid prescribing, for example, not only performed well but attracted national news outlets interested in our coverage of this important topic. As a companion to account-based marketing efforts, when we’re looking to feature a thought leader on an industry topic, we’ll often tap the sales team to see if any of our clients or prospects fit the bill. For a recent article on improving the customer experience for patients, we profiled a medical group in active sales discussions that also happened to be driving innovation in personalized marketing. Prepare to rethink KPIs When we launched athenaInsight, we (naturally) obsessed over growth metrics like unique visitors and newsletter sign-ups. As we collaborated with our marketing teams, they began featuring athenaInsight regularly in campaigns. If it sounds like we have it all figured out … we don’t. Once we’ve turned readers into subscribers and earned their trust, how can we thoughtfully guide them to consideration of our products without turning them off? These challenges, and an ever-growing mass of data from our network, should keep us busy and learning for years to come.
John Fox is the executive director of content for athenahealth, a brand that has been a Contently client for years. As his team prepared to hit a milestone, he offered to share some of his most helpful insights with the TCS audience.
In content marketing, anniversaries are precious. Initiatives can be short-lived, subject to the predations of budget czars and the shifting sands of strategy. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I’ve had the pleasure of leading an exciting content initiative at athenahealth, and we just hit our two-year mark. (I’m warding off malevolent forces by knocking on wood as I write this.)
A few years ago, our company realized we were sitting on a treasure trove of data about healthcare in the U.S. We decided to invest in building a robust research team to capture and serve up insights to our B2B clients in medical groups and hospitals. With data flowing daily across our national network—we’ve tracked and reported on the flu and Lyme disease in near-real-time (faster than the CDC) as they hit patients and medical practices across the country. In “Moneyball” fashion, we’ve also used our network data to identify top-performing medical groups and distill their secrets to success.
As a cloud-based service provider competing against legacy software vendors, our network data and insights offer compelling differentiators. So the next question became: How do we mine this marketing advantage and make sure it drives our business goals?
After a period of occasionally blogging about our findings, we launched athenaInsight in 2016 as a data-fueled news hub to get serious about our content marketing. Today, we publish three or four stories per week and have roughly 25,000 unique visitors a month, with an average attention time of three minutes and 35 seconds, which is more than double our industry average. Our content is integrated into marketing campaigns, featured at industry events, and woven into employee orientation. We even got a shout-out in a recent stock analyst report as a “major contributor” to the company’s product portfolio.
We’re still learning, improving, and evolving every day to stay relevant to readers while proving value to our business. But here are some lessons learned over the past two years that might be useful for other B2B content marketers.
Don’t skimp on storytelling
I may be accused of oversimplifying, but I think content marketing is really just great storytelling aligned to explicit business outcomes. Yet, too many companies don’t invest sufficiently in content or regard it as a cheap commodity to pour into their marketing campaigns. They do so at their own risk.
If you trade in run-of-the-mill content, you may score some SEO points at first, but you’ll never break through the noise and connect meaningfully with your audience. For athenaInsight, we hire field-tested reporters who have a nose for great stories and aren’t shy about tackling complex topics or parsing data. With this approach, we’ve reported with original data on trending topics like the opioid crisis, Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, and the rush of IUD visits following the last presidential election. Our in-house designers are visual storytellers who can take in a data dump on chronic health conditions in the U.S. and turn out an interactive tool that demands exploration.
My takeaway: Hire for storytelling chops, train for marketing savvy.
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