What Is Evidence-Based Listening for Hospital Tech Vendors?

It’s a complaint I hear from tech vendors all the time…

“Our content marketing is going great in retail/physician practices/finance, but it’s just not getting the same results in enterprise healthcare.”

It’s not surprising. In the world of content marketing, hospitals & health systems are their own beast. You need a particular nuance in branding and tone, the topics and pain points shift at a pace that’s on a completely different rhythm than the rest of the world, and even the way this space consumes content can be worlds different than other fields. 

But the answer to all of this isn’t publishing more and crossing your fingers. 

The answer is to meet hospital & health system decision-makers where they are, and that’s where Evidence-Based Listening (EBL) comes in. 

EBL is an approach that grounds your content marketing in the practical application of the findings of the best available current research. It’s your North Star in a sea of healthcare confusion. It’s simplicity in the complexity of enterprise marketing. This means that every element of your cohesive content strategy—from content, to processes and systems, to distribution, and marketing-sales alignment—starts with the needs and voices of hospitals & health systems. 

There’s an incredible amount of variation here (especially when differentiating between customer and market/prospect application), but let’s cover the basics first: 

The Output of EBL

You’ve got a few options in launching your listening exercise, but there are three, key outputs you should be looking for at a bare minimum. 

Who

This is the answer of who you’re marketing to. It goes deeper than just “hospitals” or even the firmographics of the enterprise providers you’re selling to. Any EBL exercise should yield key roles and titles, and ideally, the position they play in the tech decision-making process. 

What

This is your content topics and ideas. You’re looking for pain points, organizational goals, professional aspirations, and current trends that are keeping leaders up at night. 

Where

This answers the distribution question. You should know what conferences (regional and national) your target audience is attending (along with who they’re sending.) Where they’re spending their social media time, what print publications they’re reading, and what organizations

they trust. 

All of these should be optimized and playing in harmony for your listening exercise to create true downstream value in your content strategy. 

The Levels of EBL

Listening is a process that never ends and every vendor starts where it works for them, but there are three general levels to choose from. 

Internal

This involves working with SME’s (who understand hospitals & health systems), sales people, and any knowledge a marketing team has picked up over time. It’s the most accessible, but unfortunately also the most biased, limited, and disconnected from the day-to-day reality of decision-makers. 

Existing Research

This comes in free and paid and can be a great way to get market-specific insights quickly. The payoff is that it’s a nice balance between objectivity, cost, and time. 

Bespoke Research

Custom research costs more and takes a bit more time (typically around 2- 4 weeks depending), but you walk away with laser-targeted results—the kind that optimize content marketing efficiency and can pay off big in refining other elements of your marketing strategy (e.g. learning the nature of the hospital buying committee, identifying true white space, or learning whether you’re making a vendor-replacement play). 

Curious how it works? Here’s a quick webinar explaining the process. 

How to Get Started on Evidence-Based Listening in Your Healthcare Content

As I mentioned before, you’ll get the most robust results from grounding your strategy in a full, custom exercise. But if you just want to test the concept, a content repurposing campaign based on EBL can be highly effective in testing the waters and evaluating your results. You can learn more about that kind of Smart Content Recycling exercise here. 

If you’ve got any questions, grab some time on my calendar and I’ll be happy to tell you more!

Megan