Part one in a two part series on developing effective data-driven content strategies.
Content strategy thrives and adds real value when it authentically connects your organization’s expertise to your audience’s interests. However, content strategy exists in a dynamic ecosystem wherein these intersections are constantly shifting as industries continuously evolve. Thankfully, measurable data can be found all around this ecosystem that can be mined to uncover the most relevant intersections of expertise and interest and quantify their value to your content strategy. HDMZ takes a data-driven ecosystem-level approach to developing content strategy that exploits the data and creates more authentic conversations that are better at connecting to relevant audiences where, when and how they are seeking to engage with you.
For life sciences and healthcare-focused companies of all stripes — therapeutic developers, contract research organizations, diagnostics developers, instruments and reagents suppliers, etc. — this approach is especially important. Topics and conversations in these fields are highly detailed and technically deep, and audience interest shifts regularly and quickly. Potential clients and customers are eager to engage, but their time is limited. If you’re not meeting them in the right places, with the right information, they’ll engage with someone else who is.
The challenge with typical content strategy development is that it tends to be subjective about where the audience is and what they want to hear about. Sure, there’s often a SWOT analysis done on a company’s content library or their digital and media channels, but conventional content strategy is too often driven by sales team insights, general industry chatter and “data” that is ancillary to the content itself, such as Google Analytics. And, yes, those are important signals to pay attention to. They add nuance to content plans, but they shouldn’t drive strategy.
Content strategy should be driven by a firm understanding of what you want your organization's future state should look like, and measurable data that can help define the path to get there.
This is an outside-in approach that allows your audience’s needs and challenges to show your content marketing efforts are best applied to create the most value.
Embrace data that’s authentic to your audience
Letting your audience shape your content strategy is more straightforward than it might seem at first. At HDMZ, our approach to developing content strategy is statistically driven — not surprising, given how many stats-nerds we have in our agency. Our “secret weapon” for content strategy development is a willingness to let the data lead the way.
Building a conversation with your audience that unequivocally demonstrates your organization’s thought leadership is built upon several considerations:
- What are the most important topics and concerns to your audience?
- When and how are you addressing those topics?
- How do you stack up against other voices (competition) in the conversation?
Life sciences audiences leave clues about their concerns and needs all around the digital ecosystem. Relevant and informative data is everywhere. Take for example an exercise we performed in 2023 to help guide an obesity-focused content strategy. To gauge audience interest, we audited several data sources:
- Trade media coverage
- Peer-reviewed research publications
- Research funding volume (U.S. Food & Drug Administration + European Medicines Agency)
Trade media coverage provided a sense for how crowded the conversation was on each subtopic, in this case comorbidities of obesity. An audit of peer-reviewed research provided an estimate for the size of each audience that might be engaged and interested in the topic. These two numbers are proxies for “conversation” volume, and together they create the HDMZ research-to-media shift (RTMS) index that gives us a sense of which conversations have white space to exploit, and which are too crowded to stand out in.
The direction of research funding dollars (increasing or decreasing) helped align content strategy with relevant business goals. Combined with the HDMZ RTMS index, we were able to decipher where content could both stand out and align to future state needs.
Without this analysis, gut instinct might tell you that obesity therapies and diabetes would be the best topics around which to center new content creation efforts. At that time in 2023, Wegovy (semaglutide) had been on the market and doing well for two years, and Mounjaro and Zepbound (tirzepatides) had just come out of wildly successful clinical trials. The race was on for other obesity therapeutic developers to try and get their innovative diabetes therapies on the market. “Diabetes” and “obesity therapies” would have been obvious hot topics to focus on for new content creation — too hot, as it turned out. While funding dollars were up for both of those areas, peer-reviewed research volume on these topics was surprisingly lackluster. And, everyone in the media was writing large volumes of content about both ideas. Middling audience interest paired with too much media noise to effectively break through did not present a good recipe for standing out.
As it turned out, the data indicated that oncology and pediatrics as overlapping topics for obesity-focused content were far more attractive choices. Despite the data demonstrating a lower volume of peer-reviewed research around obesity-liver studies, funding for liver research that focused on obese populations was increasing at the fastest rate, making it another attractive co-topic. Women’s health was yet another that presented a much better target than what a look at the media sphere alone might have suggested.
Using this data (and more not discussed here) we crafted an authoritative obesity-focused thought leadership campaign that leveraged authentic topics of interest and cut straight through the noise. The assets we crafted (a mix of whitepapers, articles, blogs, social media and other premier content) stood out and were able to gain large readerships, because we took advantage of white space centered around obesity-related topics that weren’t obviously valuable without diving into the data. The campaign significantly beat digital benchmarks and was the top revenue driving campaign for our client-partner.
Public research dollars and peer-reviewed journals are not typical measures to harvest for audience metrics, but in the ecosystem for the audience we wanted to speak to, they represent authentic indicators of interest. This is just one way we take an ecosystem-level approach to developing content strategy.
Content ecosystems thrive when they’re authentic and relevant
Besides providing much more reliable and tangible direction to content strategy, a data-driven approach to content strategy provides baseline measures that can be revisited periodically to assess the health and results of ongoing content campaigns. We’re able to actively see the needle move as campaigns grow, adjust if the vector is out of alignment, and keep tabs on inevitable shifts in audience sentiment and interest. A data-driven approach allows us to cultivate a content ecosystem that thrives and grows, is continuously relevant, and stands as a recognizable face for brand authority.
Ultimately, the goal of this ecosystem-level approach is to provide tangible guideposts to illuminate a content strategy that is two-sided, aligning your expertise with your audience’s challenges in authentic ways that authoritatively demonstrate your point of view. Every action your audience takes leaves a mark on the industry, a signal of preference, frustration, intent or any of a myriad of attitudes.
We seek out those signals in the data, and use them to drive authenticity in your content strategy and communications. It’s how we work to drive your business goals and help you create the future faster.
In part two of the series, we’ll discuss how to turn this analysis around and assess the health of your own content ecosystem.
