The Bracken Blog

More of life is moving online and your digital health technology prospects are spending more time with content and less on interaction. The landscape changes so quickly that prospects are hungry for a constant stream of content to serve them in every stage of their buying journey.

But creating content can take a lot of time and effort. How do you keep your digital health content funnel full when you have limited time and resources? Read on for ideas and tips on how to get more ROI from one piece of digital health marketing content.

The Content Challenge, and Why it can be a Love/Hate Relationship

Great content is the best fuel for a successful marketing campaign and strategy. You’re telling a story that your prospective buyers identify with, that can turn them into customers. But there are a lot of steps to creating a great piece of content:

1. Research, interview experts, and get buy-in on a topic
2. Do a keyword analysis to test and refine topic and focus
3. Write the content
4. Go through review and approval cycles
5. Design the content
6. Post the content

You’re exhausted, and it’s time to start the cycle again.

But what if you could create a piece of content, find great ways to repurpose it, and use it many more times, like a great meal that produces a stream of leftovers and snacks?

Best Practices for Your Source Content

The first step is creating a great piece of core content by keeping these best practices in mind:

• Is your topic evergreen? Creating anything that might be too topical and easily dated is not where you will get the most bang for your buck.
• Have a unique editorial slant. How do you differentiate? What is your point of view? Getting clear on this before you start any piece of content is a must.
• Are you clear about who your target is? Who are you writing for? What problems are they looking to solve?
• Does your content need to be global? If so, think about localization ahead of time.
• Can it stand on its own? Each content piece, regardless of length, should convey a complete message.

Now that you have that excellent piece of content, let’s find out how to heat up those leftovers.

Microcontent Is Where It's At 

In today’s world of competitive attention to online information, you have a very small window in which to get a message to your reader. Some say it’s as little as 8 seconds. Hello, microcontent.

Microcontent is text, images, audio, or video that can be consumed in less than 30 seconds.

You can use microcontent to disseminate a complete, short message, or as a teaser to bring readers to a longer piece.

Examples of microcontent:

• Infographics
• Video clips
• Images
• Illustrations
• Graphs
• Memes
• Tips
• Facts
• Listicles

Microcontent is particularly useful in social media, where you have limited space and a very brief time with your reader.

Two Examples of Digital Health Content Repurposing

Example 1: A Video Interview with a Subject Matter Expert Generates Material for Multiple Content Streams

Did you interview one of your executives, a partner, or customer on video? Perhaps you set up a pop up filming booth at an industry conference, had to create this for an upcoming virtual conference, or used it on your website to create compelling web content. Fantastic! Thanks to this one video interview, you now have multiple assets:

• The full, long-form video to host on your website
• 3-5 minute clips from the interview to be discovered on YouTube
• Short, under-60-second soundbites for LinkedIn and Twitter
• The audio from the video for podcast platforms
• The written transcript to be turned into a blog post
• Short quotes from the conversation for social media content
• Social media promotional graphics pointing to the pieces hosted on your website

Example 2: An Internal Marketing Campaign Can Turn an Interview Series or Webinar Into a Great Relationship-Building Tool

Digital health leaders are great interview subjects and getting their thoughts on current industry trends, recent regulatory guidance, or best practices for technology deployment makes for high-value, compelling content.

A great way to fuel your internal marketing efforts and build great relationships at the same time is to invite customers or partners to participate in an interview series or webinar. This one piece will provide source content for loads of microcontent.

Consider fueling your content strategy through conducting an interview series with:

• World experts
• Your internal subject matter experts
• Leaders at your target sales accounts
• Ideal co-marketing and operational partners

Talk about a win-win. You get great content, they get great content, AND you build a great relationship along the way.

Microcontent Tools to Make Your Job Easier

Don’t have a lot of internal design or media resources? Don’t worry. There are tools that can help:

• Parse out your video using great tools like Lumen5
• Turn blog posts into long-form PDFs with by
• Create fast and easy social media templates with Canva
• Turn audio files into transcripts with io

Three Steps to Take Away

Keeping your content funnel full of great digital health marketing content doesn’t have to be an all-consuming chore. In fact, it’s really this simple:

1. Create smart content
2. Find creative ways to reuse that smart content
3. Push it out on multiple channels and in multiple format

Put this plan into action and conquer content in no time.