Healthcare organizations are using websites, videos and print materials to market their products and services just as much as other industries, but we might not be using them as well.
For their annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budget and Trends research report, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProf surveyed by email more than 1,400 B2B marketers to compile data on the state of content marketing.
Contenting Marketing Institute Founder Joe Pulizzi and his team pulled data specifically from respondents in healthcare to see how the industry stacked up. A few major differences emerged. You can see all his slides at the end of this post.
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Healthcare spends less on content marketing than other industries and plans on spending less in the future. The healthcare industry is doing less creation of content on social media than other industries and significantly less on blogs. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed working in healthcare reported their institutions used blogs, versus 77 percent over all industries.
Healthcare outsources content creation at a higher rate. Among those surveyed, cost wasn’t the biggest challenge in content marketing – creating enough content was. Fittingly, then, 60 percent of healthcare content is outsourced.
Healthcare marketers believe they are less effective than other industries. Just over one-quarter of healthcare leaders surveyed believed their content marketing was effective. Part of that might be because they use Web traffic as the top metric for measuring content marketing success – a metric other industries don’t rely as heavily on.
Healthcare content marketing is two years behind. “The statistics we have right now, from usage to spending to effectiveness, are about where everyone else was at two years ago,” Pulizzi said.
Healthcare still loves print. Although healthcare organizations produces less social media and blog content, they produce more print content. Forty-seven percent of healthcare organizations represented used print magazines and 43 percent published print newsletters, versus 33 percent in both categories in all industries combined. On the flip side, they also produce more video content and host more in-person events, according to the survey.
