There’s a lot that goes into a successful healthcare company. Most businesses require extensive training, expensive equipment, and an endless stream of logistics to succeed in the healthcare field. And that doesn’t even touch on the need to actually market a brand to consumers.
Healthcare marketing may sound superfluous or even out of place, but done well, it serves a critical role. Good healthcare marketing ensures that consumers know that your company exists and what services you provide. It establishes your brand as an authority with answers for real-world problems.
The issue with marketing in such a high-pressure field as healthcare is ensuring that your content conveys value and expertise. Done poorly, healthcare marketing can not just fail. It can undermine your brand. That’s where a subject matter expert and a professional writer can make a big difference.
What Is a Subject Matter Expert?
A subject matter expert or “SME” is a straightforward concept. It is a title for individuals specializing in a particular industry, business process, or other niche knowledge areas.
“Niche” is the keyword here. It’s hard to be a subject matter expert for something like invoicing or blog writing. Instead, the term typically applies to a unique and valuable process or function. For instance, a retired brain surgeon could be an SME, as could an engineer who designs robotic healthcare equipment.
If you want a good litmus test for whether or not a person is an SME, consider how easy it would be to duplicate their knowledge. Can you train someone else to replace them in a reasonable time? Can you affordably hire someone to do their job? If the answer to these questions is no, chances are you’re looking at an SME, or at least someone with enough knowledge and experience to be given that title.
Subject matter experts can operate in either an internal or third-party role. You might bring them in occasionally as a contractor to help. They can also be a full-time professional already on staff that provides vital information regularly.
The Influence SMEs Can Have on Healthcare Marketing
SMEs can influence any company in any area of business. However, some industries where SMEs are more valuable than others — including healthcare. The density of information coupled with the diversity of its application in the medical field can be overwhelming. Even thoroughly trained, experienced healthcare professionals tend to focus on specific areas or disciplines.
Subject matter experts can help bridge the gap when knowledge is lacking. Nowhere is this more apparent than in marketing. For instance, SMEs can bring a fresh sense of life to a healthcare blog’s content.
When you hire a professional writer to pair with an SME, that’s where the synergy takes place. You can infuse your content with a degree of value that can’t be rivaled by research, briefs, internal memos, or other documents. An SME can help communicate key pieces of information through storytelling that writers can use to make healthcare topics more accessible to readers.
Getting the Most Out of Your SMEs
Having a subject matter expert available doesn’t instantly increase the potency of your healthcare marketing. You need to find the best ways to utilize them as you develop marketing strategies and create the content itself. Here are a few suggestions for ways to get the most out of your SME in your healthcare company.
Set Up SME Interviews
Setting up marketing-related interviews between your own staff members may sound odd. But the goal here is the transfer of knowledge. When professional writers can interview a subject matter expert, it allows them to answer important questions. Your freelance writer can collect valuable data and fill gaps in their knowledge. From there, they can narrow down the subject matter to make it more accessible to a larger audience.
Use SMEs Across Different Content Verticals
While blogging and text-driven articles are important, there are many other aspects to content creation in healthcare. From infographics to social media, it’s important to keep your SMEs in mind with all the content you’re generating. When you’re ready to post something on LinkedIn or add a description to an infographic, tap your SME for the right words and information to sound authoritative in every situation.
Let SMEs Cross Swim Lanes
In the same way bees pollinate flowers by going from one plant to the next, it’s a good idea to let your SMEs cross out of their swim lanes from time to time. Consider a blog writer focused on an article about a breakthrough treatment for those struggling with postpartum depression. A surgical SME might be able to add some valuable information to the piece from a third-party perspective about C-sections and how they connect to postnatal depression.
Don’t Use SMEs as a Magic Bullet
If you want to get the most out of your SMEs as a healthcare company, it’s important to remember that they’re one piece (albeit a valuable one) of a larger puzzle. Just because you assign someone with the proper knowledge to a project doesn’t mean it will turn out well. You still need competent writers, graphic designers, content managers, and so on to keep the content flowing smoothly.
Use SMEs Throughout the Content Creation Process
Finally, don’t limit your subject matter experts to the beginning of the creation process. While they can load a writer up with lots of good info, they can also help on the back end of the content creation process, too. Have SMEs work with your content managers, freelance editors, and other editorial personnel to ensure that each piece of content is accurate before it’s published.
Bringing Content Creators and SMEs Together Through PowerPublish
Good healthcare content leads to better lead generation, robust brand recognition, and greater trust from consumers. PowerPublish helps create killer content by equipping healthcare companies with highly qualified writers and editors. These can work with SMEs within your healthcare brand to take valuable information and present it to your audience in an accessible manner.
Remember the power of SMEs if your healthcare company needs a content boost. And don’t forget the support that the expert content creators within the PowerPublish marketplace also have to offer. Bringing the right people together can be all that’s required to take your healthcare content to the next level.