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An organization’s customers are its greatest competitive weapon. If you subscribe to this belief, how brands create and grow customers determines the long-term success of business. For medical practice marketing teams, one of the ways to advance customers – in a way that also strategically enables building a brand – is through branded content.

The Power of Content Marketing To Move Customers Forward

Content marketing is an application of brand value that takes what a medical practice stands for and delivers it as the brand’s wisdom, insights and vision to a prospective or current patient, allied healthcare professional or other stakeholder. It does this through easily accessible content that contributes to moving people forward in their lives. Through this branded content, the medical practice brand can become a personal transformation tool for its audiences.

Using Your Medical Practice Blog for Brand Building And Customer Building

At Trajectory, we’ve developed the content marketing strategy – and developed the branded content – alongside many medical practice marketing teams (including here for ID Care, the nation’s 2nd largest independent infectious disease practice). Blogs are an important tactic in the content marketing arsenal. And while they’re certainly not new, it’s worth reiterating how this form of content marketing can (and should) help brands create and align with their B2C and B2B audiences.

A strategically-driven blog can help medical practice marketing teams accomplish a number of important goals, while also helping customers achieve their important goals. These include:

1. Break down the traditional barriers between the medical practice, its physicians and patients
2. Deepen brand/patient interactions beyond a point-in-time transaction
3. Educate patients around your medical practice philosophy (beyond its conditions and treatments)
4. Engage prospective and current patients in value-building conversations
5. Move patients beyond the reach of competitors by forming customer bonds that competitors can’t match
6. Enable smaller medical practice brands to leapfrog larger brands with deeper forms of meaning and connection
7. Build trust through openness
8. Introduce and acquaint patients with new services in the pipeline
9. Compel patients to share with one another by way of the medical practice brand
10. Tap into patient intelligence and perspective
11. Express your passion for what you do
12. Focus physicians and staff on customer needs and wants
13. Discover patient pain points

Positioning The Customer To Win

The goal of every brand, regardless of whether B2C or B2B, is to position the customer to win. By making a customer strategically better off, through carefully crafted enabling and empowering capabilities unique to the brand. In this case, the medical practice. As the customer moves forward the medical practice brand moves forward, too. The customer wins, and so does the brand. This is what content marketing should do, by:

• uniting a brand and its customers around a common goal, where each gains an ally
• replacing “buyer-seller” (and brand as persuasion) with team effort, and brand as mutual enabler
• creating new avenues and opportunities to circumvent (or disrupt) incumbent brands
• building a team of equals where the end product (a customer who’s strategically better off) helps advance the brand to market spaces where competitors can’t follow

Give More, Get More

We know that consumers today are rewarding brands that they consider to be meaningful – to help them to lead more fulfilled lives. Medical practices have every right to reap this reward by offering practical support and inspiration on how to get there.

Some brands choose to shout louder or talk longer. As if consumers can’t wait to hear you talk about you. But a more rewarding model for building brands can be described in four words – Give More, Get More. Branded content marketing is one small component of this. Have a plan. Be genuine to your brand. Know your audiences. Lead with their needs. Facilitate interactions and participation. Keep at it. Give more, and you’ll get more.

Since 1999, our hybrid brand consultancy / marketing agency has worked across the health and wellness industry, helping clients to build better brand-led businesses. Let’s talk about how we can do the same for you. Reach out for a no-obligation consultation.