Your topic experts and their time are precious.
It is my job as a marketer to share the good work that my peers in other departments are doing, but that absolutely cannot be at the expense of their time. Especially in an industry like healthcare, where I could very well be taking away from their ability to provide much-needed care to patients, not to mention turning them off from ever collaborating with me again. I needed a solution.
Enter the Content Pipeline!
Trademark pending, of course.
We know that personal appeals always win. Whether you’re advertising a service, moving someone to action, or simply imparting information, a person always wins out over anything else.
I also realized that this posed a problem in my role at Howard Brown Health. We had so many sub-departments that wanted exposure from the marketing team; therapy groups on certain nights, promotion of a new diabetes drug, a fundraising event, a new HIV drug trial. Each department was vying for attention, yet they also had very little time to help me create any personal marketing collateral. I also knew I would not cobble together Canva graphics and turn our Instagram feed into a bulletin board.
I needed quality information from them. A quick Zoom touch base wasn’t enough, and these were medical professionals; devoting time to marketing was the last thing on their mind. I needed maximum output with minimal use of their time.
So, I created my own system to solve the problem. It starts with a podcast. A 45-minute sit down interview where I pick their brain about a topic. I record video to go with the audio. What’s new in the field of colorectal health? What are the socioeconomic problems facing our queer young people these days? What does your department even do? After that, my point-person could go back to their busy days.
From there, I feed that raw audio into an AI transcriber and editor. It’s not perfect, but I can easily gain the framework for a blog post. I combine the audio and video and feed that into an AI video clipper; it selects 60 to 90 second clips based on virality. It will even add captions for me. I can usually get 6 or 7 videos out of a podcast.
I borrow someone for just 45 minutes, and from that I gained a podcast, blog posts, social graphics, TikToks, emails, internal resources, and more.
I am proud of my innovation here for a few simple reasons.
1) Our SEO gained a significant boost as a result of my effort. Consistent posting on our website related to this content centered us as a trusted voice on select topics, and we saw our SEO ranking jump considerably in a short amount of time.
2) One of the most important qualities in any marketing department is the ability to play well with other facets of the organization. No marketing team exists in a vacuum, so generally if you can win allies in other areas, you are setting yourself up for success. By not making outrageous demands of my peers, I gained their trust for future marketing endeavors.
3) Having a master plan for content is important, and since I was the sole person executing all of it, I could see every piece of content through from beginning to delivery. The tone of the podcast set the tone for the blog, which in turn influenced the emails, and so on. It made for a cohesive, speedy, and effective process.