Healthcare Marketing

Think Bigger Than You Are: Five Keys to Leveraging Data-Driven Research in Marketing

The following is a guest article by Callan Young, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Experity

As marketing leaders, our companies’ data are among our most powerful assets. Whether the data is generated by your customers or through industry research or surveys, data-driven content gives B2B companies the opportunity to take valuable information and translate it into actionable insights. Effectively leveraging data not only benefits your target audience, providing information that can help them make decisions and run their businesses better, but also amplifies your company’s larger goals of serving as a thought leader and expert source in the market it serves. And the possibilities hardly end after the numbers are analyzed; it’s crucial to take a step back and view the resulting information as a set of versatile tools that can be creatively and strategically utilized in your company’s marketing efforts.

By thinking bigger, with a step-by-step plan in place, it’s possible to turn internal data into educational, industry-wide marketing assets that help meaningfully engage with current customers and prospects by providing them with information that helps them improve their businesses. At Experity, we’ve demonstrated this through our Urgent Care Quarterly: a recurring data-driven research report that dives deep into the most pressing topics and trends of interest to the urgent care market through data analysis and expertise. This kind of content positions us as a top educational resource in the space, while helping our customers – and prospects – improve patient care, become more profitable, and streamline operations. The possible benefits of data-driven marketing assets far surpass the piece of content itself, making the process – from initial brainstorming, industry research, data aggregation, and analysis to design and layout – worth well more than the sum of its parts.

When considering data-driven content marketing initiatives at your company, marketing professionals should check off some key steps before, and during, the creation process.

1. Start at the top

Again, it’s crucial to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. How can your company provide insights to the market, to your existing customer base, potential new customers and partners? Could data help you achieve this, and if so, is it data you already have access to or data that you can obtain?

Consider your company’s goals and how this data can be used to fulfill them. If your goal is to serve as the top thought leader in your industry, what kind of data analysis will help you do that? If your goal is to showcase your value proposition to prospects, what kind of insights can best depict that? These are the questions we asked ourselves before landing on the Urgent Care Quarterly reports, as we found that we could provide a unique view of the urgent care industry, because we could aggregate industry insights and share it broadly, and that it could bolster our reputation as credible thought leaders and partners to the urgent care industry.

2. Think like your audience

Once you’ve gained an understanding of your data capabilities, identified your end goals, agreed on the kind of content you plan to create and the framework, it’s important to narrow your vision by stepping into the shoes of your target audience. What are they looking for? What do they value? How can you tie the data into a story that is consumable? This can often be industry data that businesses can use to benchmark their own performance and success versus competitors in the market. For example, based on our conversations with customers and upon assessing the current urgent care landscape in the U.S., we know that clinic owners are interested in industry average visit volumes, frequency of visit types, reimbursement and revenue streams. We update a visit volume tracker on our website weekly so our customers can stay on top of the latest figures and make informed decisions accordingly.

On the reverse, take a look at your data and capabilities, and apply your market expertise to identify information that could help your audience in ways they may not even recognize yet. This year, for example, our fall 2021 industry research report revealed that now is an optimal time to open an urgent care clinic based on our data that shows new clinics are becoming profitable in a few weeks, in contrast to the many months it has historically taken.

3. Be strategic in your timing

When it comes to publishing data analyses or industry research, it’s crucial that you have a close pulse on the state of the market, both present and future, including awareness of major industry changes, events and milestones. These factors can range from high level seasonal trends (in healthcare, with fall/winter comes cold and flu season) to specific milestones (for example, regulatory changes that impact company’s coding or reporting requirements). To stay ahead and stay organized, marketing teams should create an annual content calendar as part of the preparation process that take into consideration both internal and external market milestones. As marketing leaders, you can map out the best topics and timing of content to arm your peers and customers with new insights, and take the necessary steps to share them. If we can put together a report for predictions or what trends looked like the year before, for example, it can help our audience figure out what to expect and what they can do to prepare.

4. Provide actionable insights

This is an opportunity to demonstrate your team’s knowledge of industry trends and position your company’s ability to be a valuable partner to them. Our customers have looked to us for guidance throughout the pandemic as they continue to navigate constant change, and we’ve been able to provide data about patient expectations and trends. Identify  ways that your audience would be able to apply your data to their businesses as they try to turn industry movement into a mechanism for their own success.

5. Optimize, optimize, optimize

Even if you’ve determined your direction, gathered your data, compiled your reports, and distributed them appropriately, there are always new ways to expand its impact. Valuable materials can be recycled and repurposed to maximize their benefits to the customer. For example, your reports may have a later expiration date than you’d think – or even none at all. We’ve seen people downloading research reports years after their initial publication, which is a tell-tale sign you know what your audience needs. Creating content that has a long shelf life makes the heavy lift worthwhile.

Don’t limit distribution of your data to just one vehicle. Along with publishing research reports on your website, use it as fodder for webinars, promote the data in emails and advertisements, share these insights with media, and incorporate it into other marketing content and social media. Even with the report itself, we make sure to create digital and print versions and use each where appropriate. Customers may download the report directly, but we’ve found that prospects like when sales representatives also leave print copies behind during on-site visits or meetings.

Finally, your data is just a series of numbers without your team. Making the most of what you have means utilizing your team’s full range of capabilities. Frontloading the majority of the work by brainstorming and planning what data you want to look at, and how it can be interpreted with the story you can tell is essential, take the time up front to build that out. Then sending team members to execute, get the data, and produce an amazing outcome is far more efficient. Cycles of repulling data, and not having clarity on the message you want to tell can add a lot of additional time to the project. Engaging with your audience deeply on the front end amplifies engagement at the end of your data project. Make sure they will see value in what you are going to produce. We’ve found that customers who we’ve asked for their insights are far more likely to open and read the report when it has been published.

Forcing yourself to think bigger is a challenge from a marketing perspective, but it is the best way to leverage your data and create content that brings novel value to your target audience. With a thoughtful strategy in place, these assets can elevate your position as an expert and reliable source in the market you serve and build brand loyalty – allowing the marketing arm of your company to generate additional value for customers, increase customer retention, and even entice new customers. Regardless of your company’s goals, turning data into insightful, timely content adds value to your company and audience that is well worth the investment.

About the Author: Callan Young has worked as Experity’s SVP of Marketing, driving the company’s strategic marketing and growth plan. She is leading the effort to define the company’s brand, continue the evolution of the value it brings to its customers, and accelerate the company’s growth plans and overall success. Young commands 13+ years of experience in the B2B hyper-growth software space helping companies align their go-to-market plans with their customers’ needs. Prior to joining Experity in 2020, Young served as senior director of growth marketing at Anaplan, a leader in cloud-based planning solutions. Over three years at Anaplan, her team delivered over one billion dollars in pipeline growth, identified market opportunities, and drove strategic innovative global demand campaigns during critical points of Anaplan’s sustained hypergrowth. Young led the company’s global growth marketing and business development organization, consisting of more than 70 marketers and business development representatives. Prior to Anaplan, she was the director of marketing and business development at Great Bay Software, a leading provider of endpoint visibility solutions.

 

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