John Lavey, Author at Hammock Archive

Three Realistic Expectations for B2B Content Marketing

November 3, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

When it comes to B2B content marketing, every dollar you spend must have a clear purpose. Your investment isn’t just about creating content for content’s sake—it’s about engaging customers, aligning with other marketing efforts and propelling your brand. Here is what you should expect from your investment in B2B content marketing:

Create and sustain conversations to engage and activate. You are investing in conversations. Conversations that start with engaging your customer, and eventually activate them. You can’t get people to take actions if they don’t know who you are. And you can’t engage them if the conversation isn’t needed and valuable to their doing their job better and helping them generate monetary value and achieve savings.
Align with and add a multiplier to other marketing efforts. Content is a growing critical part of how you reach customers and communicate how you can help them save money and grow their business. But it’s not the only tool. It should be aligned with all of your sales efforts, from event attendance to the nurture of relationships across long sales cycles.
Clearly communicate value and achieve market growth over time. It’s unrealistic for startup companies and new brands that haven’t invested in content marketing to drive leads immediately. There is an order of operations that you can’t reverse. You can’t skip steps. And success is a result of sustained effort.

Your investment enables you to:

Participate in and lead desired conversations in your market
Build trust in who you are so you have permission to share your valuable solution
Demonstrate the impact you can make
Experience exponential market growth

Ready to make every dollar count in your B2B marketing strategy, but don’t know where to start? Reach out to us today.

Image: Getty Images

About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here. To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.

Supercharge Your Event Attendance With Content That Works

Posted in Idea Email, by John Lavey

October 6, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

Going to conferences in your industry can be an incredible opportunity, but what content assets and what kind of approach for using this content might help you derive the most value from your investment for in-person events?

Here are five tips to supercharge your event attendance with content that works. If you are at an event to present and/or attend as an exhibitor, here’s how to enhance your team’s expertise with sales enablement content:

Create an e-book that helps tell your story in a highly relevant way that addresses your customers and what they are facing right now. Hitting some of the themes of the show is an outstanding way to frame this content.
Ensure the content specifically addresses pain points and show examples of how you’ve solved that pain for customers like those in attendance.
Distribute in print form (yes, that’s still relevant to some) and provide access to a landing page for attendees to access the content you’ve created, with an opportunity to provide a way for them to learn more about your solution.
If you are presenting, you also want to specifically address the pain points faced by your audience and show what a solution looks like. You would marry up your presentation with the same content you are sharing on the exhibit floor.
Presentations, any collateral and signage at your booth should have a QR code to drive them to your site for a personalized experience.

Don’t think about the content you are sharing as a leave-behind. Think about it as helping your customers with their pain points, showing examples of what success looks like, and making it easy for them to continue in their journey to a solution, with you by their side.

Image: Getty Images

The Radioactive Word in Healthcare Marketing

Posted in Healthcare Idea Email, by John Lavey

September 22, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

One word in healthcare marketing seems to be radioactive: retainer.

Historically, healthcare marketing agencies charged retainers and delivered valuable advisory services for that monthly fee, and then charged for time and materials above and beyond the fee for deliverables (design, content, advertising buys, etc.).

The Great Recession, which started in 2007, upended many business models, and was when we started to see traditional marketing transform into what we know think of as digital marketing (2007 was also the same year the first iPhone was introduced). Our company founder, Rex Hammock, framed this revolutionary change as shifting from reliance on other media channels (via ad agencies and PR firms) to taking control of media creation for direct customer outreach.

With traditional agencies rocked by slashed marketing budgets and a whole new paradigm for reaching customers possible with digital marketing, the idea of charging retainers came under pressure. Plus, the labor market was full of former journalists and marketers who could work freelance for healthcare companies to accomplish their marketing needs.

Plenty of agencies still charge retainers. But many healthcare companies began paying for specific deliverables rather than retaining agencies, especially in content marketing and specialized digital marketing. Retainer became a negative word.

While retainers in the old days may have implied money that wasn’t accountable, there is an increased need today for balancing the delivery of assets with the guidance and expertise (and outside perspective) that come from working with a content agency, not just buying a certain amount of content. I’m curious to know how you view this issue. Feel free to let me know!

Image: Getty Images

5 Success Factors for Today’s Leaner Marketing Operations

Posted in Idea Email, by John Lavey

June 2, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

One trend that influences the solutions we bring is the evolving marketing operations we see with our clients. I’ve been seeing more and more companies develop a leaner marketing team, perhaps even led by a fractional CMO, supported by a team of key outside partners.

That model makes sense, and here are what I see as the five factors that go into making that a successful operation, supporting your growth and communication goals.

A solid marketing plan—It all starts with a plan, supported by company leadership, that articulates all the channels and what will realistically define success for those channels. This plan also helps align partners toward a common goal.
Dashboard for activity and performance—Being able to successfully manage all the marketing channels that support a company’s growth means having visibility into all the activities that are taking place, and performance, too.
A lead strategic partner—One who understands your company, your industry and your audience is best positioned to be the general contractor, with the other marketing functions serving as subcontractors. You might be able to do this role yourself, but a lead partner can support your efforts.
The ability to pivot and iterate—With a dashboard to assess performance, and a strong strategic partner, you can honestly look at what’s working and what’s not working and make decisions to change course.
A commitment to the commitment—Being restless and wavering every time the market looks slightly different, or when you face sales obstacles, is not a good way to run your marketing. You should build a plan to focus on a span of time that looks critically at performance, but trust in the solution you are providing, and don’t just walk away.

Changing marketing operations structures are the new reality. The principles above can guide your approach and help you succeed. Where are you with your marketing operations?

Image: Getty Images

Do You Have Data That Can Be Mined to Create Great Content?

Posted in Healthcare Idea Email, by John Lavey

May 19, 2023

By John Lavey, President and CEO

Helping customers be more successful at solving a problem or pursuing a passion is good marketing. Being able to share information that no one else has access to, or hasn’t taken the time to aggregate in a meaningful way, is particularly powerful.

Some of our clients have access to large data sets that can be mined to share trends, like payer trends related to claims reimbursement. Others have packaged publicly available information in a way that is specifically helpful, such as a monthly update on the status of every state’s CMS waiver.

It’s a valuable asset to be able to inform insights with data sets that can help guide a customer’s decision making, and help them be more informed and more successful. When that data is shared in an engaging format, it positions you as a leader, with real authority in your industry. In some instances, healthcare companies have such valuable information, the communication of that data and those insights can become its own product, and it creates a revenue stream.

For other companies, the key might be focusing on the insights at the core of your expertise. Is there publicly available data you can organize in a way that creates value to your customers? Or do you have access to data that you can share on a recurring basis to capture trends?

If you are focused on establishing yourself as a thought leader in your part of the healthcare industry, or providing helpful content to your customers, consider the golden opportunity provided by data-supported insights.

Image: Getty Images

Are You Fueling the Engine, or Running on Fumes?

Posted in Idea Email, by John Lavey

May 5, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

There is a well-known story about William Wrigley Jr., founder of the chewing gum company.

Wrigley attributed the success of his chewing gum business to its massive investments in advertising. A young accountant for the company asked the boss whether the brand wasn’t well established enough to divert that investment into profits instead of continuing to feed the spend. They happened to be on a train.

Wrigley asked the accountant, “Why doesn’t the railroad remove the engine and let the train travel on its own momentum?”

Today’s equivalent is investments in content marketing. More than 9 in 10 B2B marketers use content marketing as a primary marketing tool, with estimates that it generates three times the number of leads as traditional marketing channels (Demand Metric).

Yet, right now, many companies are being very conservative with their spending, sitting on their hands and holding off on investments in marketing.

It’s as if they decided to “remove the engine” and hope that they can succeed and grow on the power of any momentum generated from prior investments.

We see it differently. We know that removing the engine means losing ground quickly to competitors. In my own business, there was a day when Hammock was known as one of a few firms in Nashville to go to for certain work. Now we have to think about competing against the world, and we have to focus on constant content generation to stay relevant.

How’s the trip going for your business? Are you fueling the engine, or trying to operate on fumes?

Image: Getty Images

4 Reasons Human Writers Can’t Be Replaced by AI Tools Like ChatGPT … Yet

Posted in Idea Email, by John Lavey

April 7, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

I’ve spent much of the last few months, like most people in my industry (and like most people in any industry), trying to make sense of artificial intelligence tools that have the potential to upend or optimize how we work. ChatGPT is the best known, but there are others.

I think AI is a powerful tool. But when I asked one tool, Jasper AI, whether writers were going to be replaced by AI tools, it told me we would not be replaced.

While we might be thinking our robot overlords are being clever, here’s what I can learn from AI on this very topic. Some of the content below was actually assisted by Jasper AI (I also wanted to test my editors to see if they could tell the difference between my writing and a machine’s) and also reflects conversations with colleagues and clients.

AI tools don’t replace the real value that humans bring to content marketing. Writers excel at storytelling, understanding emotions and perspectives, and creating authentic and relatable content. AI tools may be able to mimic these qualities, but they lack the creativity and empathy that human writers possess.
Content marketing is not just about high-quality writing, it’s about communicating and empathizing about a problem, and then sharing human stories of how someone solved that problem.
Successful content requires strategic planning, research and identifying the right target audience. A human writer can use intuition and experience to make these decisions, while AI may be limited by data inputs and algorithms.
AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. There is a power in human experience told through story that is missing with AI. It may be capable of analyzing user behavior data, but it cannot truly empathize with the audience and build a human-to-human relationship.

I think there are lots of ways AI can optimize content successfully for SEO or higher open rates. I think AI and machine learning will be a great tool for the tactical aspects of content marketing. But the strategic value and human storytelling value aren’t yet being replaced.

Image: Getty Images

What Are You Talking About When You Are Talking About Engagement? Plan for Success

Posted in Healthcare Idea Email, by John Lavey

March 17, 2023

By John Lavey, President and CEO

One of the great opportunities when you work with many different healthcare clients is to continue learning. No area has provided more opportunities for our team to learn than what we call “engagement.”

We often think of engagement as a marketing activity. And, in part, it is. Engagement is about activating a patient, opening a channel of communication and then nurturing positive behaviors that drive positive health outcomes.

But engagement is really a bigger discussion—and a more challenging problem—than simply marketing. Healthcare organizations can’t truly improve patient engagement without focusing on health equity. True engagement requires addressing health equity issues throughout your entire organization—not just in your marketing communications.

Individuals from all walks of life—regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identify or disability—must be considered when we’re thinking about patient engagement. For example, mistrust in the healthcare system persists among many Black Americans because of a long history of mistreatment by the healthcare industry. And patients and family members with limited English proficiency often have trouble accessing healthcare services and suffer worse outcomes because of language barriers. Healthcare organizations must first address equity to truly engage patients.

Some of our clients are tackling health equity head on—and finding solutions. I would challenge you to think about engagement and equity more broadly within your organization. It’s not strictly a marketing issue. So, what are you talking about when you are talking about engagement?

Image: Getty Images

There’s Still Value to Creating Content Without a Call to Action

Posted in Idea Email, by John Lavey

February 3, 2023

By John Lavey, CEO/President

One thing worth evaluating in your marketing is the degree to which you expect content to drive leads, and to what extent you view its role as brand support. While some companies rightfully invest in both, others are more confused in what they expect.

My perspective on content marketing (after close to 30 years in the business) is that we shifted about 15 years ago to a harder emphasis on content as a lead-generating tool. There were a couple of significant reasons

The iPhone, which came out in 2007, changed everything. As adoption of this mobile content consumption device proliferated, we had entered a new era. We all saw the opportunity to push content to someone and then, as a result, see them purchase our products or services. We became interested in immediate gratification.
The 2007–2008 financial crisis made marketing budgets evaporate. When content marketing budgets came back, they were often smaller amounts of investment, and marketers wanted to see successful results. The ability to tie those investments to sales became the coin of the realm

There’s nothing wrong at all with lead-generation content, but we lost the habit of, and emphasis on, creating high-quality content that didn’t have a CTA driving the audience to engage in a sales process. In general, we as healthcare marketers stopped creating content that positions our brand as an authority.

There is still a role in high-quality content to support your brand by delivering proprietary research, unique insights and distilling complexities to help your audience make sense of their challenges.

If you’d like to talk to someone about helping you with that kind of content … (Just kidding, no CTA on this one!)

Image: Getty Images

Awareness, Acquisition and Best Practices for Healthcare Marketing

Posted in Healthcare Idea Email, by John Lavey

October 21, 2022

By John Lavey

Most healthcare companies, small or large, are hard at work on marketing to customers, whether those are consumers or B2B customers. But are they raising awareness or acquiring customers? Are they better at one than the other, or are they doing both equally well?

This excellent piece by Christopher Girardi breaks down the differences between efforts to raise awareness and efforts to acquire customers. His post is primarily focused on marketing efforts by health systems and how important it is to do both awareness and acquisition marketing. And, where possible, to blend them.

At Hammock, we have worked with large health systems that are marketing to consumers, as well as small B2B healthcare companies seeking customers—and we have seen separate, but similar, challenges between B2C and B2B players.

Newer, smaller B2B healthcare organizations tend to be anxious to generate leads and keep them coming in, and think of all marketing efforts as sales support. They are focused on acquisition. Some of those companies overestimate awareness of their brand. And they are underinvested in awareness.

Larger organizations, like health systems, often have siloed departments. One department buys all the media to raise awareness, and there are separate efforts to generate leads. There isn’t a lot of coordination between those efforts. What Girardi’s article shows is that acquisition efforts flourish in markets where there has been adequate attention to awareness. And correspondingly, where efforts to raise awareness sometimes fail is in the lost opportunity to drive awareness directly into an acquisition effort.

What is your organization doing on awareness and acquisition? Are you stronger at one than the other? Do you have lost opportunities?

Image: Getty Images