Marketing 360: Life Science Content Marketing Needs Connected Content
Content marketing has been around for over a century but has been recently gaining more traction as audiences ignore traditional marketing efforts. In fact, a 2014 survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. However, the survey also revealed that many of these marketers don’t feel that their content marketing is as effective as it could be.
Where are things going wrong? One of the biggest factors holding us back is how we understand content versus content marketing. Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer at CMI, notes that all successful content marketing efforts provide value through a collection of assets rather than individual pieces of content.
Unfortunately, as marketers we are creating a blog post on topic A, then a white paper on topic B, and an infographic on topic C. Then these pieces of content get piled into a resource center that is nothing more than a disparate and muddled pile of content created for various marketing campaigns.
Rather than working on a campaign-by-campaign basis, successful content marketers build thematic collections that matter to their specific audience. Marketers can implement these collections strategically so that companies can re-use and build upon the most successful pieces within the collection.
Life Science Content Marketing: Who’s doing it right?
General Electric (GE) has been a powerhouse in content marketing. You will be hard pressed to find a list of top content marketing examples that doesn’t feature GE’s online magazine, TXCHNOLOGIST, which examines how science and industry will shape our future.
ExxonMobil’s Be An Engineer (this website no longer exists) is another masterful example of life science content marketing. The publication uses a variety of content types to tell a story about the importance of engineering to inspire the next generation of STEM professionals.
Life science content marketing is here to stay so we must start changing our approach in order to make sure our efforts are not in vain. The best way to do this is to change our approach to thinking about content. Instead of thinking about one piece at a time, the key will be to focus on connecting many pieces of content in order to create a resource our customers can’t live without.
This post is part of Chempetitive Group’s Marketing 360 series. These articles offer a high-level analysis of a very specific science marketing area, delivering a smart overview in just 360 words.