By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO

The Health:Further conference in Nashville this week has triggered many great discussions about how healthcare can embrace transformation. The conference has featured sessions on moving to a patient-centric, consumer-oriented system; breaking down information silos and creating interoperability; and focusing on wellness and population health to shift some of the high percentage of costs away from disease and end-of-life care.

Other, more customer-centric industries can teach us a lot about healthcare. The best and the brightest from the transportation, technology and fitness industries have shared stories at Health:Further to help point the way.

The media industry’s example should also be on healthcare leaders’ radar. Last week, Disney announced it was pulling all its movies and shows from Netflix to start a Disney-only streaming channel. This led analysts to suggest that media companies like Amazon, HBO and Netflix must continue to create their own content to be successful in the long term, and they are each spending billions a year to do so.

These companies have discovered there’s less value in distributing someone else’s content or relying on someone else’s platform for their content distribution. The same is true for your healthcare marketing content. If you want to add value to your products or services:

1. Create your own content and communicate directly with your customer through platforms you own. Creating content on your own beats being locked into someone else’s medium. There is value in advertising in other media or investing in public relations, but investments in your own content are critical to building your brand and adding value to what you do.
2. Don’t just be a platform for someone else’s content. Using generic content churned out by content factories may help you feature more content on your website, but this mass-produced content cranked out primarily for SEO purposes won’t provide the authentic value that your own unique content can deliver.
3. Have a content strategy. As important as social marketing is, you don’t own these platforms, nor do you have much control over how they are used or monetized, or what other advertising is sold around your content. Your own platform and means of distribution—whether it be email, digital media or print—must be part of an owned content strategy.

Bottomline: If you want your company, its brands and its products to be seen as special, your content strategy can’t merely be a commodity.

Image Credit | iStock

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.