Compare LocutusHealth to Other Healthcare Content Marketing Options

 

💠“I could have saved $25K if I’d talked to you first.”

💠“We’ve been paying our agency thousands of dollars a month for over a year—and all we have are a bunch of leads that aren’t even in our market.”

💠“This white paper ended up costing us $20K.” 

 

The opportunity cost of healthcare content can be incredibly high—and that’s what makes it so hard to take the next step in your content program’s growth journey.

Marketing leaders who’ve already made all the mistakes—trying to save money with generic agencies and writers, or wasting the time of internal resources on work they weren’t hired or trained to do—they know I’m a smart choice.

To save you all that time and frustration, here’s a look at the pros and cons I’ve run across in client work, talking with prospects, and what I’ve seen from my network across four different options:

💠An internal content team

💠Working with a generalist

💠Hiring an agency

💠Stick with the status quo

 

 

Option 1: An Internal Content Team

Pros:

💠Complete control over your content program and future growth

💠Opportunity to refine a highly tailored voice and develop strong writers

💠Stable and controlled impact to budget

Cons:

💠High risk of isolation and group think, no external input or perspective

💠Content can fall to leadership—pulling them away from higher-value strategic work in a volatile healthcare environment

💠Chances of procrastinating and getting stuck in a stale style are high (a growing risk if your competitors are taking advantage of content)

💠Challenging to scale

How vendors use my work:

This isn’t an either-or situation. My clients have used me to counter the downsides of internal teams by bringing me in to:

• Identify and fill gaps in their content program
• Accomplish goals like refreshing their approach to conferences
• Keep them going when they lose writers or strategists
• Quickly ramp up production for new initiatives like product launches
• Counter competitors without the risk of commitment to an FTE

This has been especially useful for my horizontal tech clients. I once had a marketing VP of marketing approach me because she had a great internal team that had performed well in other verticals—but they just couldn’t get the tone right for healthcare. It’s honestly very rare to find creative resources that are strong generalists and who can also execute on the balance of empathy and business perspective needed to connect with healthcare leaders.

Option 2: Working with a Generalist Strategist/Writer

Pros:

💠Easy to find

💠Costs stay low

Cons:

💠Highly likely they don’t understand how to talk to healthcare leaders—let alone understanding the nuances in communicating with different roles and personas in the healthcare buying group. (Learn more about approaching the clinical and financial buyers in healthcare)

💠Astronomically high opportunity cost overall because of the high likelihood of treading content water

💠Incredibly high risk of publishing content for the sake of content

💠Strategists are likely easily distracted by vanity metrics and don’t have the patience or vision for the longer enterprise healthcare tech buying cycle

How vendors use my work:

In this case, I’ve been approached by marketing leaders who have burned significant time and money—either because they thought they’d reduce costs with a cheaper and less specialized option or because they simply didn’t know that specialized content marketers existed in this space. In this situation, my clients have brought me in as a replacement vendor.

Option 3: Hiring an Agency

Pros:

💠Launch and scale quickly

💠Advanced tools and use of metrics

💠Immediate access and paths to advanced levels of program maturity

If specialized in connecting with your specific personas, they’ll need little trial and error

Cons:

💠You’re locked in to longer-term commitments and higher dollar investments

💠Many will claim to know “healthcare” when what they know is actually a completely different area of the industry, rendering their experience irrelevant to your goals (Learn about downfalls of a generic “healthcare” approach to content marketing)💠

💠Tend to focus on vanity metrics to quickly justify spend

💠Risk of overbuying and creating “content for the sake of content”

How vendors use my work:

There are some great agencies out here and you can absolutely find one that fits your needs (especially if you know what to look for).

The risk of agencies is that they tend to have higher minimal budgetary commitments, starting at $8K monthly or more. This can be disastrous for vendors who don’t have a strong product market fit or a good handle on their market pain points and needs. Agencies also tend to lean more into quantity and in today’s healthcare tech environment, you should always be looking for ways to do more with less content.

I once was approached by a CMO of a digital health company who had spent tens of thousands on their agency and unfortunately, because the agency wasn’t specialized in healthcare and they were locked into a contract, they ended up having to review and rewrite every piece of content. In situations like this, I can help in two ways.

You might not want to part with your current agency, so I can either take the review portion off your plate, or create playbooks to guide their work and better align it with healthcare.

Option 4: Stagnating in the Status Quo

Pros:

💠Comfortable

💠Predictable budget

💠No disruption to SMEs or other leadership

Cons:

💠Significant vulnerability—especially in the face of competition with more aggressive content programs

💠Highly inefficient and manual sales processes—frustration can lead to high turnover

💠Buying and sales cycles that last months to years mean playing “content catchup” is essentially impossible after a certain point

 

How vendors use my work:

This is common in sales-driven organizations or in situations where leadership is well-connected or has direct experience in healthcare, leading them to mistakenly over-rely on word of mouth and their networks.

I sometimes get pulled in to create one-off pieces of sales collateral or to help standardize sales content, but eventually we end up having an honest conversation about sales-marketing alignment and creating a more holistic content experience for their clients.

 

Option 5: Working with Me at LocutusHealth

Cons:

💠Since I want to see your content strategy reduce opportunity costs in your marketing program, I insist on establishing some form of basis in market feedback that listens to healthcare decision makers. This can include market research, sales conversations, customer surveys, or reviewing key account materials.

💠Initially, my content can be more expensive than a generalist. Efficiency and ROI increase with time, especially if we work toward atomization. 

💠I’m a one-person team so some leadership might (incorrectly) feel as if they’re limited in comparison to agencies, especially if they want a fast track to a large library or “content for the sake of content”.

 

Pros:

💠My emphasis on Evidence-Based Listening through targeted market research and thorough review of key account materials means we spend less time and money on trial and error—connecting with healthcare buying committee pain points faster since we front-loaded accuracy and precision.

💠My rich network of healthcare partners and content scaling platforms means that you’ll have access to the same options that many agencies offer, just with more flexibility.

💠Budget flexibility that adapts with your needs

💠Creating rich foundational content means that, especially with the help of AI, scaling to granular, persona-specific content becomes very cost efficient and supports shorter time to value. 

💠I’m focused on maturity in your program, so I’m setting you up to graduate to more complex options like specialized agencies, targeted hiring decisions, and expanding your vendor ecosystem.

Making the Content Marketing Decision That Aligns With Your Goals

By working with me and pushing your leadership, SME’s, and other marketing resources to ground their work in listening to your market, you’ll build a foundation of richer relationships with healthcare buying groups and set yourself up on the path to turn marketing into a revenue center and extension of your value prop.

To explore opportunities you have to start on this path, grab some time for a quick, no-pressure phone call with me here.