AI won’t save bad content—but these strategies can.
Start with a strong brand foundation, speak directly to decision-makers, tell human-centered stories, and prioritize quality over volume.
58% of B2B marketers admit their content strategy is only “moderately effective.” If you’re in that camp, their reasoning might sound familiar: unclear goals and a weak connection between content and the customer journey. After more than a decade of watching promising healthcare startups struggle to grow, we’ve seen the same root issue again and again—a lack of strategy and focus. It creates a “treading water” effect: content teams scramble to keep pace with shifting priorities, producing a flood of content that’s either too diluted to make an impact or never gets published at all.
And now, with AI in the mix, it’s even more tempting to turn to automated tools to churn out “meh” content. But here’s the hard truth: no amount of automation can make up for a missing strategy. Clarity and intentionality are still the most powerful drivers of effective content.
How NOT to Use AI Tools for B2B Marketing Content
The issue is: AI-enabled tools are outstanding for generating outlines, compiling and organizing materials, summarizing key takeaways, and speeding up “mindless” tasks—but they have yet to replicate the nuance of real-time industry shifts and unique human perspectives. Research shows that the most successful marketers are those who infuse MORE humanity into the work, pulling at emotions and activating nuanced thought processes.
While perhaps more efficient to produce content pieces (e.g., blog and social posts, newsletters, industry articles) written exclusively by AI tend to follow the same structural and stylistic patterns, no matter the mission or message. Not only does this cookie-cutter approach dilute the impact of your organization’s work, but it also increases the chance that your ideas get lost in the sea of other AI-generated content.
Why Mediocre Content Fails in Healthcare
Particularly in the healthcare industry, where decision-making is primarily driven by trust and expertise, high-quality content is essential for building credibility and accelerating the B2B sales cycle. For those healthcare organizations marketing to busy healthcare executives, your messaging must also be straightforward, succinct, and tactical. In this blog post, we share 6 ways that you can augment content plans to stand out on value and stay relevant.
6 Ways to Create Better Healthcare B2B Content
1. Ensure Your Foundation Is Strong
Before diving into content marketing, it’s essential to establish a strong visual identity, brand voice, and digital presence. As you create and promote content, your company’s website and overall brand should align seamlessly with the focus and quality of your strategy. This requires clear brand guidelines and a website that embodies them. If your organization hasn’t yet defined these elements, pause and prioritize building this foundation first. Consistency and cohesion are key to making your content efforts truly effective.
2. Know Your Audience Inside Out
A well-defined target market is essential to creating content that resonates, educates, or inspires action among decision-makers. Ask yourself what gap your product/service is filling, who is currently being impacted by that gap, and what filling the gap would mean to them. If you can, conduct market research to gain a deeper, more holistic understanding of how industry trends, legislative and regulatory action, and evolving patient/consumer priorities are affecting the way your key decision-makers are engaging with information, spending resources, and approaching potential partners. Ideally, you can then build out a content plan that explicitly and thoughtfully targets the priorities and pressure points of each decision-maker or persona.
3. Prioritize Scannability and Storytelling
Scannability and storytelling might seem like conflicting tactics, but when executed correctly, they can complement each other in a way that appeals to the heads and hearts of healthcare executives.
When building long-form content, start by getting all the materials and thoughts in one place. Remember, messiness is inevitable in this stage. Carefully read it all through – what themes are emerging? Where do emotions show up? What thought processes drove action? Once you have a sense of the story, you can create an outline, add in key statistics or studies, and populate engaging components (e.g., videos, images, additional resources). Finally, once the prose is complete and the story is set, create headings optimized for search engines and AI chatbot queries.
For short-form content, scannability may be easier to achieve, but storytelling can be a challenge. How do you convey an impactful message with such little space and time to capture attention? This is a prime time to ask AI-enabled tools for help via creative inspiration, quick topic summaries, or trimming more verbose pieces to fit tighter formats.
4. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
If we had to pick a favorite tactic, it would be this one. When faced with a decision of quality versus quantity in the content realm, quality should be the choice 10 out of 10 times. For Slabtown’s clients, we often leverage the hub-and-spoke model to organize content around a central theme (hub) and answer specific questions (spokes) related to it. This model ensures that each piece of content is constructed to both (a) serve a specific and important purpose for the target audience and (b) enhance the organization’s reputation or authority in the market.
If you want to maintain quality while ramping up quantity, start by identifying a few of your highest-performing and evergreen pieces. Then, consider how you could present the same information in new formats (e.g., break down a longer blog post into a LinkedIn video series) or telling the same story from a unique perspective (e.g., supplement a numbers-heavy case study with a narrative-driven video).
5. Build Trust Through Thought Leadership
While it is best practice to keep a regular cadence of posting on your company’s main outlets (e.g., blog, social media page(s), podcast), it is increasingly critical that individual organization leaders cultivate a robust presence online as well. Business leaders often have a sizable, loyal, and focused following—making them uniquely positioned to amplify brand awareness and establish industry credibility in ways that a company page alone cannot.
By leveraging their personal influence, they can humanize the brand, foster meaningful connections, and build trust with key audiences, ultimately strengthening your organization’s presence and relationships in the market. When working with leaders to build their online presence, emphasize that authentic connection, relevant content, and reliable posting are the three secrets to success—and establish a plan to help them discover each one.
6. Build in Room for Flexibility
The only constant is change, and ignoring that reality is a surefire way to unravel a content plan.
Especially in American healthcare, uncertainty and chaos at the federal level means the future of many programs and priorities is up in the air. A strong content plan will account for these external forces by proactively leaving space in the marketing production engine for emerging industry issues, shifts in organization strategy, and unexpected personnel changes. Marketers should also be responsive to incoming engagement data and customer feedback, adapting topics, formats, and platform presence to meet evolving demands and opportunities.
Start Producing Stellar B2B Content
Ending mediocre content creation requires a deep understanding of your audience, a focus on quality, and a commitment to continuous improvement. High-quality content builds trust, accelerates the B2B sales cycle, and positions your brand as a leader in healthcare marketing. By implementing these strategies, healthcare B2B marketers can create content that resonates, educates, and drives meaningful results.
