By John Lavey, CEO/President

In our work creating content marketing to support clients, we’ve noticed two common challenges for technology companies: 1) effectively communicating their story to buyers who are inundated with other vendors pitching solutions and 2) focusing on what matters most to the buyer. 
 
A recent survey offers insights into what buyers of technology solutions value, as well as what those buyers consider to be deal breakers. The deal breakers contain some interesting results that align with our experience. The most significant deal breaker is: 
 
Lack of transparency into the fulfillment process 
 
Tech companies excel at showcasing product features and benefits. Some are even great at talking about how they can solve key problems for customers. However, many fall short in clearly communicating how they implement or install their solution and how they onboard the client. 
 
Again and again, we see this lack of transparency into how tech providers will implement their platform and serve the customer. Companies whose customers recognize their strength in this area still tend to miss the opportunity to communicate this in sales presentations and marketing discussions. 
 
How well are you communicating the thing that your customer needs to know?

 

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.

 

 

 

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

 

 

 

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:

  1. 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. 

  2. Ensure the content specifically addresses pain points and show examples of how you’ve solved that pain for customers like those in attendance.
      
  3. 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.

  4. 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. 

  5. 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



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.

 

 

By Jeff Walter, Senior Editor and Writer

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines evergreen, in the non-botanical sense, as “retaining freshness or interest: perennial” and “universally and continually relevant: not limited in applicability to a particular event or date.” As a noun, an evergreen can be “something that retains its freshness, interest, or popularity.”

You probably have a lot of evergreens in your marketing arsenal … or forest (to stick with the metaphor). Time-tested wisdom never goes out of style, and it’s always in demand.

If you’re continually struggling to generate fresh new content, maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself. Consider whether it might make sense to revisit some of the information, observations and insights your organization has shared in the past. If it has been a while, it might be time to dust them off, update or otherwise adapt them if appropriate, and share them again with a receptive audience.

Your newer customers, and potential ones, might never have been exposed to these ideas and would benefit from them—especially if they fall into the category of thought leadership, education or inspiration, as opposed to pure sales.

Another option is to repurpose materials. A blog post from a few years ago might be distilled into an arresting infographic, for example, or a dated PowerPoint presentation might be converted into an entertaining and current video. It’s possible that you’re too close to the subject and could benefit from a fresh set of eyes that can see new possibilities in existing content—and can help you discover new ways to keep it relevant.

The ongoing creation of new content will always be critical, of course, but the “evergreen” approach can supplement and round out what you do.

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.

 

 

By Jeff Walter, Senior Editor and Writer

Regardless of your industry, your organization is brimming with knowledge on a range of topics. The best, brightest and most experienced of these might well be considered subject matter experts (SMEs). What intelligence and insights they might share! But are they doing so?

We’re not suggesting that you give away any trade secrets. But useful facts and astute observations from your people, whether that information is recently acquired or from the “vaults,” may be a hidden asset that your organization has yet to exploit to its full potential. You might use it, for example, to establish your industry credentials, arouse consumer (or B2B) interest in your brand and potentially drive traffic to your proverbial door, or keep existing customers engaged and tuned in to your brand and what it’s been up to lately. Your SMEs can play an important role in fostering loyalty over the long haul.

E-books, white papers, blog posts, videos, webinars, social media, virtual events, infographics and other content culled from your experiences can educate and inform without being overtly sales-oriented. This content can target as broad or narrow a base as you desire to reach.

Your SMEs’ wisdom—your institutional knowledge—is a resource you can tap to produce compelling content that shines a bright light on your brand, without explicitly angling for the sale. When you share what you know, others can draw useful lessons from it that will increase your long-term value to them and help you nurture lasting relationships.

 

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.

 

 

team on tandem bike
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.

  1. 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. 

  2. 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. 

  3. 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. 

  4. 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. 

  5. 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

 



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.

 

 

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

 



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.

 

 

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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

 



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.

 

 

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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

 



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.

 

 

By Jeff Walter, Senior Editor

There is a reason you’re in the business you’re in, and it’s not just to sell products and services. This reason runs deeper than even the best mission statement you might compose. Chances are, you get a little emotional thinking about it. Your passion helped you get where you are … and it will keep motivating you to get where you still want to go.

But you didn’t reach this point on passion alone. You’ve done the legwork: the self-education, the research, the outreach, the preparation, the partnering and collaboration that are necessary to do what you do at a high level. You’ve made agonizing decisions, confronted daunting challenges, celebrated victories large and small. You quite likely have faced the challenge of selling others on your dream and your vision, be they partners or investors or employees.

It all makes for a heck of a story. How well are you telling it?

Consider that your customers, like you, are interested in more than just products and services. Perhaps they love a good story, especially one that makes them feel good about the product or service they are buying. What else might you and your organization offer them beyond overt sales-oriented marketing?

There’s the vision, the origin, the journey so far. There’s the experience: the hard-earned wisdom you’ve accrued along the way. What anecdotes and insights, old or new, might benefit your customers while helping you connect with them on a more personal level? From the organizational level to the frontline individuals who personify the team, from behind-the-scenes glimpses to inspirational customer features, there are numerous little stories to be told, even as the big story is still being written.

Blog posts, videos and other digital content that captures why you do what you do can get other people fired up about it as well. We’d welcome the opportunity to help you share your story.

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.