Content marketing is an essential part of any successful B2B digital health marketing strategy. According to research, content marketing brings in 3x as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
Blogs typically make up the foundation of a solid SaaS content marketing strategy. While they’re still the primary media for sharing content with your target audience, search behavior is changing — thrusting other types of helpful, long-form content into the limelight. Today, blogs alone won’t suffice for effective health tech marketing.
A reputable health tech marketing agency understands that pillar pages are the new cornerstone of a strong content marketing strategy. With a firm grasp of SEO and the topics your buyers care about, the right digital health marketing partner can develop strategic blogs that form the basis of pillar pages, then repurpose these insights into comprehensive, long-form pieces — providing content that attracts leads and converts prospects.
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Search engine algorithms are evolving constantly. That’s because how people search also changes constantly. In recent years, marketers researched relevant SEO keywords to attract visitors and incorporated them into blogs, website pages, and other content. However, this method has become less effective as people have changed how they search. For example, internet users now search with longer, more conversational queries.
As search behavior has changed, technologies have begun to evolve as well. Rather than rewarding search results only based on specific keywords, Google is aiming to provide people with results closely related to their intended use case with its core updates.
Understanding these types of changes in search behavior is central to content marketing for health tech companies. It’s also useful in understanding why pillar pages are indeed a “pillar” of effective healthcare digital marketing services.
A pillar approach is a more effective way of creating content. Pillar pages enable you to aggregate several blog posts about one core topic with related keywords that can be combined into a long-form guide.
A pillar page is an authoritative piece of content that resides on your website. It’s designed to deliver the type of information search engines want to serve (i.e., the best, most accurate information). It contains a deep dive into a specific topic and is more informative than an individual blog post. This format parallels how people seek insights, as search engines aim to deliver the highest quality results for any given prompt.
Pillar pages enable you to organize content on your website by helping you strategically design your blog content architecture. Each pillar page provides an overview of all aspects of a specific topic. Each blog post on your website covers each of those aspects in more detail, linking back to the pillar page, ultimately enabling visitors to gain a comprehensive understanding of the topic.
Rather than writing an ever-increasing number of blog posts using specific keywords, an agency can partner with you to develop a pillar page that focuses on your expertise in a particular industry topic. To ensure that the pillar page covers the subject matter comprehensively, Spot On uses HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool to create a topic cluster. This tool:
A topic cluster anchors one topic to more in-depth blog posts on different aspects of that topic. Pillar pages serve to organize and aggregate the resulting content, as they tie together the blog posts on different topics.
Creating pillar pages and topic clusters enables you to broadly and definitively cover specific topics. Linking all topic content to a pillar page enables search engines to scan and identify a relationship between all the content. Due to the breadth and depth of the content, the pillar page is given more authority on the topic, resulting in higher search placement.
As stated, pillar pages are effective for health tech marketing because of their potential for high search placement. However, there are other reasons why they work so well. They enable you to optimize your website content for search engines while also increasing opportunities for visitors to convert to leads on your website. While they can be used on-site to attract inbound traffic, they may also be promoted as a gated resource, allowing you to capture more information about leads.
Pillar pages also increase engagement. Because the content is well-organized and covers a topic in depth, it’s more user-friendly for website visitors. This results in increased numbers of visits and longer visits to your website.
Longer visits are the key. Topic clusters bring visitors using different search terms to a singular location. While the visitor might have come to learn about one specific topic, they will often stay to keep reading about other related topics, keeping them on the site longer and increasing engagement and page views.
First, decide on a topic. Focus on a broad topical theme rather than specific keywords. This theme should be general enough to require multiple blog posts, but not so broad that it’s impossible to cover.
When creating health tech marketing strategies, Spot On will work with you to research topics that appeal to your audience. We’ll analyze trends and ensure the topic has enough search volume to support the creation of a pillar page. Researching buyer personas will help with determining your audience, enabling us to identify what they’re searching for and select topics for your pillar page.
You can create a new pillar page or turn existing blog posts into a pillar page. It depends on whether you’ve already covered the topic in question. Either way, you’ll need to outline your ideas.
Your pillar page should include:
Do advanced keyword research within the framework of your main topic. Cover as much as possible of what people search for within the topic cluster. A good starting point is to focus on questions that people ask when searching for a specific topic. The most-asked questions and keywords with the highest search volume and lowest difficulty will, in most cases, become part of the titles for your blog posts.
First group your keywords into blog posts. Keep in mind that the keywords should be relevant to your audience, not chosen only for SEO benefit. Determine an overall structure for your pillar page outline that would be helpful to a reader and then fill in any gaps with blogs that are missing. Write blog posts that fit into each topic cluster. Then link those blog posts to your pillar page. Update your pillar page when adding new blog posts and topic clusters, if necessary.
Keyword and topic research are key to creating strong pillar pages. But you must also validate your pillar post’s topic before writing it. A topic might seem interesting and have good SEO. But it might not necessarily appeal to your audience. That’s why it’s important to validate the topic first.
To validate a topic, consider:
How do you know if your pillar page is working? You’ll need to examine the metrics.
Your health tech marketing agency should include measuring your content marketing ROI as a part of its service. This involves subtracting your content creation and distribution costs from the sales generated from that content. The goal, of course, is to bring in more money than you’re investing.
There are other ways to measure the success of your pillar pages. For example:
These results will help guide your health tech marketing agency by indicating how well the topic cluster is working. From there, it can be tweaked and improved to ensure your content is being viewed and converting visitors to leads and leads to customers.
Spot On specializes in health tech marketing. We focus on understanding your customers’ needs and expectations and helping you to create content that pulls them to your website.
Content marketing for health tech doesn’t simply mean creating more content. It involves developing a plan to create the right content. Spot On will help to develop and execute a playbook to increase recognition and drive sales. For example, we’ve helped several health tech companies to create content that gets found on the first page for organic searches, as well as realize a greater than 1,600% increase in deals.
Interested in working with our health tech marketing agency? Schedule a time to chat with us for a free consultation.