Are you struggling to capture your audience’s attention in today’s crowded marketplace? Do you find yourself wondering if you need to produce both articles and videos to optimise your sales process, or will just one do?
In today’s digital landscape, you’re likely bombarded on an ongoing basis with advice on content marketing strategies. The challenge, however, lies in selecting which forms of content truly drive sales, impacting your top, but more importantly, bottom line (profit).
How can written content boost my sales and marketing?
Written content in the form of articles, downloadable guides, and educational or topical interviews enables you to boost your search engine rankings, grow your email lists, and enhance your sales team’s performance by providing the right content at the right stage of your audience’s buyer journey. 
Improving search engine rankings
There are many ways in which creating written content can improve your organic rankings on search engines, which is important for driving high-intent traffic to your website.
Firstly, quality written content allows for the strategic use of keywords, which signals to search engines how relevant your pages are to a particular audience. The more relevant your pages, the higher you’ll rank for specific search terms, and the more clicks you’ll earn.
Secondly, well-crafted content enhances user engagement. Engaging articles or blog posts encourage visitors to spend more time on your site, which search engines interpret as a sign of quality and relevance, further elevating your ranking.
Backlinks (other websites linking back to your website) also signal quality to search engines, indicating that other websites have found your content valuable enough to recommend it to their visitors. Opinion-generating articles, comprehensive guides, and clear diagrams or infographics are proven backlink earners.
Finally, regularly revisiting and updating content signals to search engines that your website is up-to-date and provides a good user experience. It shows that you want your content to be genuinely useful to readers, which is what search engines prioritise.
Ensuring my content can be digested on the go
Written content can work well with the fast-paced lifestyle of today’s audience, making the sales cycle more accessible wherever people are.
People are constantly on the move and might not have the privacy needed to watch videos, making text-based information a practical alternative. It is also easily accessed on various devices, allowing for seamless integration into daily commutes or brief intervals of downtime. Readers don’t require a quiet environment or headphones to absorb the content.
Written content also offers the convenience of engagement and pace control. Readers can easily pick and choose what they want to engage with just by looking at the article, unlike with a video where they would need to blindly jump through to land on the information they need if the video didn’t come with chapters.
How can written content nurture my leads?
Through the creation of written content, you’ll be able to help grow your email list, push your audience further down the sales funnel, and make more sales. This can be done by creating downloadable content, which you can then share with your audience in exchange for email addresses.
This exchange allows you to build your email list full of marketable contacts that you know are interested in you and your industry. Following this, you can then send them marketable content to help them convert into new leads.
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How can video content boost my sales and marketing?
Incorporating video into your sales cycle is a game changer. It’s been on an upward trajectory for years, and it isn’t slowing down any time soon.
Sharing your message
Incorporating video into your sales strategy can supercharge how your audience processes information. The combination of the spoken word, tonality, and body language means viewers comprehend messages more completely compared to text.
Research suggests that individuals can understand information provided in a video approximately 60,000 times faster than written text, making video an extremely effective medium for accurate and swift message delivery.
Building trust
Incorporating video into the sales process can significantly bolster trust with your audience. Personalised videos responding to client queries create a sense of direct engagement and authenticity, which is often missing in text-based communication.
By attaching these videos to emails, your sales team can offer a richer experience, simulating a face-to-face interaction that nurtures customer relationships.
Videos can also help nurture these relationships by increasing the depth of communication, with tone of voice and body language providing additional context. These are key for conveying complex medical information clearly and preventing unproductive misunderstandings.
Such clarity in communication ensures that both parties are aligned, fostering trust and smoothing the path to a successful sales outcome.
Boosting internet traffic
Video currently dominates online traffic, accounting for 82% of all internet bandwidth by 2025, yet for most websites, only about 5% of the content is in video form.
This significant oversight could be harmful to your outreach and education efforts. By not leveraging video, you could miss out on a vital channel that not only meets customer preferences but also aids in effectively demonstrating complex medical devices.
This gap presents a lost opportunity for enhancing engagement, comprehension, and ultimately, the success of your sales process in an increasingly digital-first healthcare environment.
Sharing complicated technical information
It can be difficult in the medical device industry to convey complicated and long pieces of information to your audience accurately. From patient and HCP benefits to technical information, your content needs to be conveyed succinctly.
This is why it’s often better to explain and share this content in the form of a video. The personable and verbal explanation can convey details incredibly concisely, making it an indispensable tool for sharing complex information and ensuring that the audience fully grasps the subject matter at hand.
What are the benefits of creating multi-formatted content?
While articles and videos both bring a lot to the table, there’s no need to pick just one. Written content and video content can complement each other in several ways.
Audience preferences
When it comes to creating content for your audience, offering different formats gives them the choice to consume information in a way they find more engaging.
By providing both mediums, you cater to different learning styles and situational needs, whether it’s a deep dive into text during quiet moments or a quick video overview during a busy schedule.
This dual approach avoids alienating any segment of your audience, maximising reach and inclusivity by ensuring everyone can access information in their preferred format.
Repurposing content
You can speed up new content creation by repurposing already existing content into a new format.
For example, you can start by creating a comprehensive article to form a solid foundation. This detailed groundwork expedites the creation of a video script (or several scripts), ensuring the core message is concise and impactful.
This dual-format approach not only enriches the audience’s understanding but also optimises content production by repurposing research and ideas into multiple forms of media.
Do you really need both articles and videos?
In short, it depends. Each form has its benefits, and in an ideal world, both would be great, but they do come at a cost. If you are going to create articles and videos, you will likely need a copywriter on your team along with a videographer.
This is often not always possible, so you need to choose which one you feel will make the biggest impact on your business. They’re both powerful tools for enhancing your sales cycles and strengthening engagement with prospects, especially if they are created with your customer at the centre.
If you currently don’t have the bandwidth to prioritise both, starting with articles is a sensible strategy. They’re a sustainable way to begin enriching your online presence with valuable content that boosts SEO and establishes your brand’s authority. Articles provide a solid foundation of information and are an effective means to communicate complex ideas in a clear, concise, and detailed manner.
As your resources grow, investing in video content will become not just viable but necessary. While articles lay the groundwork, videos build upon it, offering a more immediate and engaging way to connect with your audience. Videos can convey emotion and brand personality faster and can simplify the understanding of complex products or services.
Together, a balanced content strategy that leverages both articles and videos can cater to a wider audience, accommodate different learning styles, and enhance customer experience. It ensures that while you’re building up to make a bigger investment in video, your brand continues to inform, engage, and convert your audience effectively.