So you’ve decided to embark on an inbound marketing strategy for your healthcare business. Congratulations! Inbound marketing is a perfect fit for the healthcare industry. However, given the highly regulated nature of your industry, there are a few unique challenges you may face along the way. Here are some best practices that can help you quickly get your team up and running and producing the content that will have customers flocking to your products and services.
In healthcare organizations particularly, it can be difficult to tackle inbound marketing as a lone wolf. There are simply too many moving pieces for one person to do it all by themselves. Your best bet is to assemble a team of professionals who can take on the following specialized roles:
Don’t think of this list as required headcount, but rather as core competencies your team needs. Depending on the size of your organization, a single individual may be able to take on multiple roles. Be aware that if you are missing any of these competencies, you may be hamstringing your efforts.
When creating the content that will form the basis for your inbound strategy, care must be taken to meet all relevant regulations, from patient information privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to FDA requirements for fair balance disclosures.
For these reasons, it’s critical to make sure compliance is top of mind at every stage of your strategy. To start, make sure everyone on your team is trained in your organization’s policies.
Put some thought into processes and workflows so you are accommodating whatever approvals may be needed. You might even want to consider adding these stakeholders as peripheral members of your inbound marketing team:
It can be helpful to get all of these people—your core and peripheral team members as well as any other internal stakeholders—together in a room to talk about what you’re creating and what goals you need to achieve. By obtaining buy-in from everyone at the start of your strategy, you’ll make things easier for everyone down the road.
Across your team, each member will have their own perspective on how to move forward—and that’s terrific. The challenge is to make sure you are all moving forward in the same direction.
Everyone you bring to your team needs to be fully aligned around the philosophy of inbound marketing: It’s not a campaign, a channel or even a tactic. It’s the driver behind your organization’s entire marketing strategy. It’s an all-encompassing approach to reaching your audiences wherever they are. And it’s 100 percent focused on delivering content that is meaningful to your audiences, that helps them solve a problem and that ultimately helps them make the decision to buy from you.
Once you have your team assembled, with responsibilities and workflows clearly mapped out, you’re ready to begin developing and executing your bold ideas. Consider downloading our free eBook, Inbound Marketing: Buy-In, Budgets & Best Practices, for more helpful tips.
