Horizontal Tech Vendors Need Superior Content Strategy to Survive Healthcare

Healthcare is a high-risk vertical for many tech vendors. But a strategic approach to content marketing can reduce your chances of failure and overspend. 

Healthcare is a hard industry to crack. Walmart lost almost a quarter billion dollars trying to enter this vertical, and Amazon potentially lost even more. While their losses were largely on the consumer side, the perils of B2B healthcare tech are even more plentiful.

I’ve talked with multiple CEOs and marketing leaders who come to me after success in other industries—stumped at how to navigate healthcare. They’ve burned huge amounts of time and money and have made little to no progress. And that’s perfectly normal.

Healthcare is a highly nuanced industry. Decision makers can seem like they’re hidden behind layers of stakeholders. Pain points make little sense to non-natives. Buying committees keep expanding while sales cycles extend. It’s all a recipe for low (if not negative) ROI…if you don’t have a guide. 

As a native to healthcare and content marketing consultant dedicated exclusively to B2B healthcare tech, I want to be that guide for you. This is why I’m sharing the top six challenges I’ve seen horizontal tech vendors struggle with—and more importantly, how to respond.  

1. Expectations to Communicate Value Are Exceedingly High

There’s a story I tell pretty often on my discovery calls to illustrate just how challenging it can be to sell into healthcare organizations. 

My first real job out of college was with a hospital revenue cycle consulting company that identified and recovered underpayments. Their pitch was simple—let us look at your contracts and data on payments you’ve given up on, no charge. We’ll find underpayments, recover them, and you’ll only pay us as a percentage of what we find. 

That sounds like hospitals would jump at the chance, right? Well, that wasn’t the case. Lots of hospital leaders simply walked away. In healthcare, the status quo is often your biggest competitor, no matter how much sense your solution makes or how great your results are. This means you have a much bigger lift in terms of communicating value to the right people at the right time. But many horizontal tech vendors trip up, in a few common areas:

• Assuming the (incorrect) personas
• Misunderstanding what the healthcare organization actually values
• Overestimating the scope of the insight of their own internal leadership with healthcare experience

These factors create a dynamic where content marketing is indispensable and not something you can drag your feet on. An immature content marketing program is a glaring liability in this industry. (If you’re curious where your current program falls, you can use this framework to plot your starting point.)

Vaulting the Pit

Getting past these challenges requires a content marketing strategy that’s highly dialed in to the intersection of your value prop and what perks the ears of healthcare buying committees. Your content marketing should be an extension of this value prop, framing your results and differentiators around the top three to five pain points of your key personas. 

You should be listening closely to the needs of healthcare decision makers to inform every piece of content you create. To get started, you can explore Evidence-Based Listening and how to apply it to your healthcare content program here. 

Resources

Here’s a piece from Wolters Kluwer (a trusted staple in clinical decision support tech and content leader in healthcare) on the doctor-patient relationship, targeted toward physician leaders. We leaned heavily on key decision maker pain points to frame the discussion on technology. 

2. Buying Cycles Are a Marathon

The extended nature of healthcare tech buying cycles are a perfect fit for content marketing. And while those lengths seem to be shrinking recently, many vendors still underestimate just how long they run—and what it takes to stay top of mind with a buyer over that expanse of time. 

In 2024, half of healthcare tech companies reported that their buying cycles took over 19 months, and 41% came in at over two years. But 2025 data from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) reflects that two out of three healthcare tech buyers report buying cycles under a year. 

Even with shorter timelines, these are stretches many sales and marketing teams aren’t prepared for if they aren’t familiar with healthcare. I’ve had multiple sales leaders frustratedly tell me they have representatives that haven’t closed a deal in months or years—that’s definitely an issue, but it also reflects the nature of enterprise healthcare buying. 

Vaulting the Pit

If you’re playing in healthcare waters and don’t want to be a B2B repeat of Walmart’s multi-billion dollar losses in healthcare you’ll need a content marketing strategy that aligns with the nature of the vertical. 

This means a need for long-term focus on content that provides value. Staying the course is possible with sheer grit, but choosing (and optimizing) the right metrics and marketing platforms (such as HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.) can go a long way in helping your marketing and sales teams maintain focus. 

Resources

• Learn more about content that centers value here. 
• Here’s an example of how I helped a hospital SaaS company optimize their use of Salesforce. 

Grab some time for a discovery call if you’d like to explore how to translate your value prop through content marketing in healthcare tech. 

3. Buying Committees Are an Enigma

For marketing and sales teams used to other verticals, the healthcare buying committee can seem like a riddle wrapped in an enigma hidden behind a brick wall on the other side of a chasm. 

But they’re much less daunting if you understand how they work.   

HIMSS reports that almost 60% of buying organizations have five or more individuals involved in decision making. 23% reported over 10 involved when purchasing tech. But this isn’t where the real challenge is. Healthcare buying committee members often have vastly different pain points, backgrounds, and goals. As a tech vendor, your real challenge is addressing those while communicating how your solutions synergize individual members’ needs with organizational health. But this doesn’t have to mean endless streams of hyper-personalized content. 

Vaulting the Pit

Your content marketing can take a more simplified approach. By focusing on research into the pain points and preferences of key buying committee roles, you can build relationships with individuals on the buying committee while encouraging them to communicate with each other about your brand and solutions. 

Resources:

• Here’s a look at clinical buyer content preferences based on research of hundreds of hospital leaders. 
• This white paper walks you through the content expectations of healthcare financial decision makers. 
• This workshop replay is an introduction to using industry-specific market research in your content program.

4. The Wrong Tone Can Sabotage You

Many horizontal tech vendors struggle to communicate in a way that resonates with the healthcare industry. You need to convey your marketing and thought leadership in a way that clearly acknowledges the weight of the challenges of your audience—while also projecting hope and belief in positive future outcomes. 

I’ve had marketing leaders come to me for writing support because they struggled to find agencies that could strike the right balance. Others had internal writing teams who simply couldn’t transition effectively from verticals like manufacturing or oil and gas to relate the sensitivity needed in healthcare. 

Vaulting the Pit

Tone in healthcare is a real Goldilocks situation—and the reason a lot of vendors pull me in for both content creation and ideation. Other helpful solutions include custom style guides and playbooks to direct agencies and internal writing teams, but also content review and content recycling to beef up content that has good bones but needs some aesthetic help. 

Resources

Looking for an example? Samsung Health has done a great job of finding that sweet spot. Here are a few of my pieces for them for you to explore. 

5. The Industry Can Be Deceptively Insular

B2B healthcare has opened up a lot to new players in recent years, but it’s still a pretty insular field. Healthcare leaders want to know that you understand the intricacies of this vertical—and they want proof. 

I always suggest a pilot project that you can tout as an example, but also working toward a really clean and clear product market fit—healthcare leaders are going to expect much more granular specificity than just their vertical. Most aren’t likely to take you seriously without proof you’ve worked with their specific firmographics with positive results and testimonials.

Vaulting the Pit

One of the easiest ways to prove that you “get” healthcare, is distribution that meets leaders where they are. The big sites and conferences are great, but if you can show up at local meetings, and engage with partners like HFMA, TORCH, and local groups, you’re well on the way to earning credibility. 

Resources

• This list of top watering holes will get you in front of healthcare leaders in their “native” and trusted environments. 

6. Sales Enablement Requires Extreme Specificity

I work with a lot of sales leaders and I commonly hear they have reps that haven’t closed deals in a year, even two. While this isn’t completely unheard of because of healthcare tech’s long buying cycles, it is often indicative of a problem. 

Usually, what I find with horizontal tech vendors is that reps, even those dedicated to the healthcare vertical, haven’t been trained or equipped to engage with healthcare decision makers in productive ways. They’re using the same tactics, cadences, and content that they use in education and government. Maybe they’ve got a couple of case studies in healthcare, but they’re frequently in the patient space or in ASCs when they’re trying to sell into health systems. 

Healthcare leaders expect precision when communicating with them—this is true at the marketing level, but it’s absolutely essential once you’re down to one-on-one sales conversations. 

Vaulting the Pit

Anyone selling into healthcare needs to be trained on the vertical, how to sell to complex buying committees—but also how to use content in a way that doesn’t put prospects off. 

Sales content should be highly specific in terms of firmographics and reps should have access to libraries where they can pull the content they need for conversations with any and every member of the buying committee. 

Resources

You can learn more about what a functional sales content library can look like here. 

Creating Success in the Healthcare Vertical

Healthcare can be an extremely beneficial and stable industry to capture for multi-industry tech vendors—but only if you find your footing. 
If you’ve struggled to find success in healthcare and realize you need the support of robust, strategic content marketing, grab some time with me today for a quick discovery call and we can see where we have alignment.