by Mardi Larson | Jun 21, 2023 | Blog
When I served as Content Marketing Director for a telehealth startup, I learned a lot. Mostly, I discovered it’s possible to write great content for people’s enjoyment, education, and readability, while also writing for search engines like Google. This was during the pandemic, and telehealth was taking off in a big way as a crucial and safe solution for patients to connect with their providers.
At the time, everybody was searching for answers about telehealth – office managers at independent physician practices, IT leaders at the largest health systems in America, and consumers of all ages, from teens to seniors. It was this big telehealth pivot that provided new insights about creating readable-yet-searchable content.
I recognized it’s possible to address human readability while ensuring high-ranking content. In fact, it’s not only doable, but also necessary so that people searching for answers can find helpful, readable content.
Earlier in my career, I was told you couldn’t do both — that writing for humans and Google were mutually exclusive. That’s not true, and content creators can deliver engaging and easy-to-understand content for readers that is optimized for search engines to drive traffic to your website and raise awareness for your brand. The trick is generating high-value information that answers the top-of-mind questions from your target audience and provides easy-to-understand content incorporating relevant keywords in the storytelling. To achieve this content “holy grail,” writers should have a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices, especially for on-page SEO must-dos.
When you balance SEO with the reader experience, you can generate powerful results. All this is truer with thought leadership communications, in which content strategies aim to establish a company or brand as an expert – and “trusted authority.”
Here are some tips to help writers create content for both humans and Google:
- Survey Your Target Audience:If you can, conduct a quick survey of your target audience to ascertain their most urgent, burning questions. If you can’t, get with those closest to your customer/prospect organizations – such as sales leaders or customer success experts — and interview them to learn what they believe the top-of-mind questions might be. Answering these questions can drive your content plan.
- Create a Working Title: Draft a working headline that strategically differentiates your company or brand and succinctly articulates the storyline you believe is essential to tell your target audience. Headlines are powerful as they deliver — in a short bit of copy — the strategic intent of the story. As you write working titles, know they can and usually will improve, especially with feedback from content reviewers and experts included along the way in your collaborative review process.
- Conduct Keyword Research:Good writers conduct thorough keyword research using tools like MozPro, SEMRush, and others to identify the keywords and phrases readers most frequently use to search for answers online. Doing keyword research for content is different than for paid ads, where you may look at the competition and identify costs for purchasing those keywords. For organic content, SEO research is inspiring because you can see which keywords are popular and used most often for searches, as well as which may hold “white space” and could be ownable. This should be conducted for each strategic piece of content. This research helps ensure the content you are creating is relevant and of value — optimized for search engines people use every second of every day. It’s essential to limit to 1-2 keywords or phrases that make the most sense per each content piece, given the strategic intent of your storyline and your working title. This research phase also can change your working title and probably should!
- Naturally, Incorporate Keywords. Use keywords in the content, but use them strategically and sparingly. Keywords should fit naturally in the heading, subheadings, and the first 100 words of the piece. Make sure you incorporate the keywords in a way that helps both the human reader and the search engine. After all, when we are all Googling, we want to be served up the most trusted and easy-to-review content that answers our questions. Remember to use keywords in the file names of images you post with the copy, in the alt text, and the meta tag.
- Think About the Reader’s Experience. As you pull your content together, focus on creating an engaging, informative, and easy-to-understand story. Use visuals like photos, infographics, and even videos embedded within the content for a superior reader experience. Keep it tight, though, as nobody has time to read 2,500 words. Go for the sweet spot of 800-1200 words, if you can.
- Optimize for Search. Google rewards those who do this best! Your content should have internal and external links to trusted sites. Ensure that the content is well-structured and easy to navigate.
- Deliver High Value. Make sure your content is valuable and informative for readers. You will know when you read it and when you write it. And if you are creating Thought Leadership content, infuse a bold point of view with authenticity. As you read your first draft, ask yourself, is this insightful and useful information? Will a reader enjoy reading this? Does this content make an impact?
As content creators today, we should think about humans and about the search engines like Google that can ultimately deliver your content to a broader readership (of humans). Addressing both forces will result in online content best worthy of answering questions from top searches and telling an engaging story.
by Mardi Larson | Apr 12, 2023 | Blog
The first-to-market companies who see a problem or need and develop tech to expertly solve it, aren’t always the ones that win in the marketplace. Why? Because they often are so focused on doing the good work that they miss the opportunity to broadcast their success to the world. They fail to achieve recognition and get the credit they are due as first-movers and capture mindshare, while others flood the market with similar technology, bigger budgets and gain market share.
That’s why thought leadership marketing and communications strategies are crucial to startups and first-to-market disruptors to give a startup street cred and drive online awareness in the marketplace.
Thought leadership will continue to be crucial strategy in the B2B tech space. It’s a go-to strategy anytime technology is transforming, modernizing and disrupting. This is happening in a lot of industries right now — especially in healthcare — where the pandemic has ignited long-overdue, massive digital transformation, from the back office to the OR and to connective home care to life sciences.
In working with a range of healthcare tech companies from startups to publicly traded entities, our recommended thought leadership campaigns include strategies to drive credibility and massive awareness with targeted audiences and the general public. Campaigns typically include strategic news/content, analyst relations, collaborations, awards, high-profile speaking engagements and, of course, focused efforts to secure earned media coverage for client thought leaders and subject matter experts through interviews, podcasts, webinars, and contributed byline articles.
Many of our clients have seen a white space opportunity — such as a chronic challenge in healthcare — and have solved it with tech. That’s leadership! Creating thought leaders within the client organizations who can share their expertise, amplify and broadcast their solution stories, and even help other peers by sharing their learning, is powerful.
Here are some thought leadership strategy tips to consider:
Analyst Relations
We all know these firms by name – Gartner, IDC, Forrester, CBInsights, Frost & Sullivan, KLAS, and Constellation Research, among many others. They provide consultative services and publish helpful reports that are distributed to their paid client base to help organizations understand the latest technology solutions, where and why to apply these solutions, who the tech vendors are, how they stack up and who to consider in a technology purchase decision. The job of industry analyst is challenging – they have to stay on top of all the many players in several niche areas, even as new players pop up every nanosecond.
- Tip #1: analysts and their teams take introductory briefing calls to get to know new vendors, which is a smart first step to being included in an upcoming report – earned analyst relations (AR) exposure.
- Tip #2: understand your prospects and which firms they rely on the most as analyst firms can play niche roles. For example, KLAS is among the top trusted resource in healthcare!
Collaborations
As consumers, we see these regularly in the mass market. Right now the hottest collaborations include Cheetos and Kentucky Fried Chicken…Sharpie and Nike…Lego and the streaming series Stranger Things. The formula behind this idea is 1 plus 1 equal more than the sum of the parts, and that brands and businesses can borrow the credibility and equity of each other, shape an exciting and creative story, capture media attention and drive awareness and buzz.
That principle holds true in B2B marketing and communications too. Beyond the obvious – a vendor and a client coming together to tell their success story — we’ve seen creative forces come together for webinars, high-profile speaking engagements and social media and PR campaigns. One of the best examples was in 2011 when Ford and Toyota – two thought leaders in the newly disruptive automotive tech space – teamed up to innovate on hybrid cars. In healthcare, two thought leaders in a specific movement, say value-based care and AI tech — that aren’t in direct competition for the same geography or niche application space, could join forces to help drive the change. Again, 1+1=3!
- Tip #1: be creative and look for alignment to execute a mutually beneficial, cohesive collaboration and together tell a powerful industry-changing story.
- Tip #2: if you come together for a webinar or speaking engagement, don’t stop there! Be sure to repurpose that high-value content, maximizing it across as many paid, earned, social, and owned (PESO) channels as possible. So drawing from the webinar content, consider doing a co-bylined blog post or contributed article, an exclusive co-interview with a media outlet, and social posts tagging each other.
Recognition
Submit your thought leadership work for awards which are not only feel-good recognition for the team, but also lend credibility and generate earned coverage and online buzz. Awards from prestigious organizations like Inc., Fortune, CNN, Forbes and Fast Company and industry-specific awards from the likes of Modern Healthcare or Fierce Healthcare offer high-profile cache and elevate a company’s brand.
- Tip #1: tell a story in your award application in a way that people will enjoy reading. Recently creating application content, I ran into a question – describe your company to a Martian– which I thought was a stellar approach to demystify the company’s technology story. It forced us to tell the story in new ways and that content made its way back into other channels like the website, sales collateral and more.
- Tip #2: showcase real-world impact, especially with data, stats and metrics, to round out your application story.
As long as technology continues to advance – AI, ML, VR, G5/6G and more – and startups keep disrupting industries, thought leadership strategies will be an integral part of any successful PR program. From what we can tell, that’s not easing up any time soon.
