Content marketing helps companies establish credibility and nurture relationships throughout lengthy B2B healthcare sales cycles. But for your content to truly be successful, it must resonate with diverse buying team members and address the nuances of complex decision-making processes.
So, how can you choose topics that attract, connect with, and engage multiple stakeholders? To hit the mark with blog topic selection, consider how each post supports your overarching business goals and SaaS content marketing plan. Here’s what a blog topic should help you achieve.
Appearing at the top of relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) helps you gain exposure to prospects and drive high-quality traffic. To reach this coveted spot, identify topics that provide opportunities to incorporate meaningful keywords with high traffic volume and achievable ranking difficulty into the blog content.
As search engine algorithms evolve, however, keyword research is no longer the be-all-end-all to search engine optimization (SEO). Google’s EEAT guidelines show how the search engine prioritizes experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness when ranking content. Your blog topics should enable you to demonstrate these criteria.
So far, so good. But here’s the catch. AI-generated overviews and search engines’ tendency to feature quick answers at “position zero” (e.g., featured snippets) means you must offer short answers while demonstrating expertise. Choose topics that allow you to provide fast, unique insights on subjects your audience cares about to give them a taste of your deep expertise, enticing them to click through to your site.
Effective SaaS content marketing addresses audiences’ needs throughout the buying process. Most of your blog topics should focus on concerns at the top or middle of the marketing funnel and fulfill these functions:
Your content should provide meaningful insights that help move your audience through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. The key here is to balance showcasing your solution with addressing users’ pain points to provide value without missing opportunities to convert.
Pro Tip: Examine where blog topics can support the overarching marketing strategy across your site. You can find topic inspiration by examining your product feature pages.
An EHR provider offering secure telehealth features, for example, might discuss the value of telehealth for audiences in the awareness stage. Then, they might compare approaches to managing telehealth security to address prospects’ concerns in the consideration stage, priming readers to see their solution favorably when viewing the product page.
Address Multiple Buying Group Members
A strong content marketing strategy should help you appeal to multiple buyers. To do so, your blog topics should address the needs of each member of a typical buying team involved in various stages of the decision-making process (e.g., IT leaders, CFOs, and administrators).
Many SaaS companies make the mistake of addressing only the primary decision-maker (e.g., the CIO) and ignoring those who hold the purse strings. Yet, the CFO or other financial leadership will also be a key influencer in most decisions. Be sure to address their interests and priorities with your content (e.g., a blog post on making a business case or calculating the ROI of a tech investment).
Create buyer personas and identify topics that each would care about at various buyer journey stages. Then, support your SaaS content marketing strategy with personalization techniques and automation tools to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
Pillar pages aggregate several blog posts with related keywords related to one core topic to create a long-form guide. This authoritative piece parallels how people seek insights, delivers in-depth information to meet search engines’ criteria, provides internal linking opportunities to support SEO, and helps search engines understand your content.
What should a pillar page cover? Start by identifying a broad topical theme rather than specific keywords. This theme should be general enough to require multiple blog posts but not so extensive that it’s impossible to cover. An “ultimate guide” pillar page linking to and from these articles can often boost your SEO.
Craft an outline to determine the collection of blog posts (i.e., a content cluster) to cover the theme comprehensively. Also consider analyzing existing content and identifying blog posts that are already performing well. Then, add a few angles and expand the content into a pillar page.
The EEAT framework rewards content that reflects real-world experience and authority because visitors are more likely to engage with helpful and credible content. As such, you should identify blog topics that offer opportunities for your team to provide unique insights and showcase your company’s expertise.
A subject matter expert (SME) can provide unique perspectives and specialized knowledge to help your content stand out and resonate with prospects in a sea of AI-generated content. Include your team in content planning to identify practical and trustworthy topics to create unique, insightful blog posts.
Ask SMEs what they hear prospects and customers talk about in the field or at conferences. Their input can help you anticipate prospects' questions and identify blog topics to address their concerns. Additionally, a more technical perspective may help answer audiences’ questions further down the marketing funnel (e.g., an IT leader evaluating a solution’s interoperability).
Another way to drive traffic to landing pages and turn visitors into leads is to review your content offers and work backward from your overarching SaaS content marketing strategy to identify suitable blog topics.
A surgical scheduling vendor with an on-demand webinar on improving room turnover speed, for example, might create a blog post on improving OR utilization and include a call to action for readers to sign up for the webinar. This enables the vendor to not only educate readers and drive webinar participation but also capture prospect information.
Considering related offers can also help you prioritize blog topics to focus your resources. You might choose one over another because you can pair it with gated content (e.g., a white paper, case study, ROI calculator, or demo) to engage the audience and generate leads.
Developing high-quality content is resource intensive. Your strategy should make the most of available vehicles and channels to reach your audience and maximize SaaS content marketing ROI. From the content creation perspective, that means selecting blog topics with high potential for longevity or repurposing.
What does that look like in practice? Consider blog types that are easy to adjust with new information. For instance, you can easily update blogs highlighting annual statistics on an issue or featuring “best of” lists. By keeping the same blog URL, you maintain all the backlinks and “SEO juice” accumulated over time, while providing the most up-to-date information to help you achieve higher search engine rankings.
An ideal blog topic allows you to version the content into other formats. Think about creating multiple short videos to drive engagement, infographics to encourage sharing, and snippets to post on social media. You can also reverse the process by gathering high-performing social media posts or videos and consolidating them into a blog post.
An effective content marketing strategy can guide you in selecting blog topics that fill messaging gaps, address multiple buying team members, educate them about their challenges, and provide the information they need at each customer lifecycle stage to progress down your marketing funnel.
With deep knowledge of healthcare tech buyers and more than a decade of SaaS content marketing experience, Spot On has helped countless healthcare SaaS companies develop and execute effective healthcare content marketing strategies. Book a meeting to see how we can help you audit your content, fill gaps, and create an entire funnel of targeted, in-demand content to achieve your business goals.
