5 Ways Evidence-Based Listening Positively Impacts Your Budget and Marketing Spend

I cut my content marketing teeth in combat sports—and that’s where I learned a deep appreciation for efficiency. 

I was about 10 years into my career in hospital SaaS when I started training Brazilian jiu jitsu—something that completely zeroed me in on opportunities to do more with less effort, practice precision, and conserve resources wherever necessary. These are all goals I hear regularly from hospital tech marketing leaders, so efficiency and precision are foundational in my approach to hospital tech content marketing…especially when it comes to budgets. 

And the most effective budget saver? Evidence-Based Listening (EBL). So to help you find new ways to get more out of your budget and make a positive impact on your marketing spend, let’s walk through a few ways listening early (and listening often) can help you improve your results. 

What is evidence-based listening for hospital technology companies? 

First, let’s define Evidence-Based Listening in the hospital & health system content marketing space. 

EBL is using proven, “customer-driven” inputs to inform your content campaigns, topics, distribution methods, content types, sales tactics—essentially your entire content strategy. This is in contrast to “vendor-driven” inputs like the creativity and ideas of your marketing team, subject matter experts, executive leadership, and even competitor content strategies. The latter can be very useful input, but it can also steer you away from the results you’re looking for. 

Customer-driven inputs start with asking questions and letting the your target market shape your content strategy. I see it as happening at four different levels:

• Market: This is through first- or second-party market research. It can include custom research for a content marketing campaign or lean on existing research about the buying habits and attitudes of hospital & health system decision makers. (This report on hospital perspectives on AI is another example.) 
• Prospect: Listening to prospects requires some sophistication in your use of data, but gathering zero- and first-party data, especially through website behavior, can be wildly useful in refining your content results. Your sales team’s experiences also fall under this category. 
• Customer: From voice-of-the-customer exercises, to user groups, and interviews, listening at the customer level can be incredibly powerful.

You’ll apply these differently depending on your goals and the maturity of your content marketing program, but all of them should be up for consideration. 

How listening supports budget and revenue health for hospital tech vendors

Listening is a shortcut. You invest a little up front to improve results and cut opportunity costs in the future. Here’s what I mean… 

Create highly effective content earlier

Never underestimate how much money you can burn and time you can waste on misguided (though well-intentioned) content. 

And this isn’t just what you might pay a writer to create content that underperforms. If your leadership is burning time creating content that falls flat, that’s not only a loss of their hours worked (have you heard the story of the $20K white paper?), it’s also the dual issue of the business problems they could have been addressing and time lost to competitors who better understand the importance of strategic content. 

EBL can be used to create content that connects, refine buyer personas, and identify the events and platforms that will be most effective for distribution, advertising, and sales focus as early as possible in your content journey. 

Create less content

If you’re not familiar with it, jiu jitsu is a game of leverage—finding ways to get the biggest results out of minimal force. 

This is why, even as a writer, I’m always trying to get my clients to produce the minimum amount of content possible to reach their goals. Why go through the trial and error of four solution guides when you could produce a highly-targeted, highly effective one right out of the gate? 

I’ve seen enterprise healthcare tech vendors burn surprising amounts of money on content when they could’ve invested a fraction on a listening exercise and seen better, faster results. 

If you ground your content and distribution tactics in the pain points, language, and habits of hospitals & health systems (through EBL), you can get more out of less content effort. 

Prove ROI faster

Your leadership likely (hopefully) wants to know that their content investment is worth it. There’s no better way to do this than starting straight at the source—the minds of hospital & health system decision makers. 

It’s amazing what you can learn from even a short exercise—it could be a small shift in how you refer to a pain point that resonates, learning that you have to make a case for cutting ties with an existing vendor (before you discuss your value prop), or a find out about a use of your product category that you didn’t realize was all that important. These are the kind of shifts that move sales and maximize return on content investment over time.  

Recruit Sales as advocates

Content marketing programs thrive when you have champions throughout the org—and one of your greatest potential allies is your sales team. 

Why? Because they get to see, up close, how content enables prospect conversations. I’ve seen salespeople come back raving about how the story in a well-planned case study relayed the value prop to a hospital executive in a way that they’d struggled with. 

When communication is strong and flows in both directions, sales loves content marketing and content marketing is consistently learning from sales. 

Connect directly with business results

I debated listing this first, because all content should tie back to business results. The nice thing about evidence-based listening, is that it essentially forces this connection. 

Have a goal of growth in the mid-sized hospital market? It’s time to create content based on their specific needs. Want to improve your net promoter score with rural hospitals? A content experience that’s in-step with hospital needs at every stage of the content journey (from awareness to loyalty), is an incredible asset in business growth. 

(Side note: This is also the easiest way to make a business case for more content investment.)

So if you’re looking for a way to employ evidence-based listening in your healthcare tech content, I always suggest an exercise like this. But if you’re looking for something different, grab some time here and we can talk out some ideas.