Cornerstone Content in Healthcare: How to Corner Your Old Content

Jan 12, 2018 | 4  min
author Pyxl Development
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Trust us, we get it. Creating the amount of content necessary to drive the amount of desired leads and engagement is a common challenge for B2B healthcare marketers. Well guess what? There’s another way. Instead of trying to cover every relevant topic in the industry, a more focused (and debatably more effective approach) is to instead focus your time and resources on one or two pieces of cornerstone content in healthcare.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know we recently wrote a blog that answers the question, “What is cornerstone content?” If your sense of loyalty makes you want to stay in this blog, cornerstone content is a foundational piece or series of closely related pieces that focus on a specific topic or pain point of key audiences. It could take the shape of an industry report, op-ed piece or seminar/webinar series. It can live on a landing page to generate leads or be ungated. From this piece of cornerstone content, you can extract blog posts, eBooks, infographics, presentations, webinars, etc.

While avoiding the headache of developing tons of content topics is attractive, the overarching goal of a cornerstone content campaign is to deliver consistent, relevant content to your ideal audience that is highly optimized to attract and generate leads. By creating killer content that also drives traffic through backlinks (the link created when one website links to another, giving it more validity), your message will reach farther. Just in case you need more convincing, one Hubspot blogger trialed this concept with his brand, bossing organic traffic 43 percent in 3 months.

“A backlink, also called an “inbound link” or “incoming link,” is created when one website links to another. The link between the two websites is the backlink — so named because it points back to the linked-to page.”- Moz

Okay, okay, we get it! Cornerstone content campaigns are the way to go. But how do you go about creating a cornerstone content campaign? Answers below:

Step 1- Do your research.

Research is the largest and most important step of creating a successful cornerstone content campaign. Knowing what topics or pain points are truly relevant to your primary audience is the key to creating a resource, and in turn, resources, that drive traffic and ultimately, leads. Think of it this way:

“The ideal topic for a cornerstone content piece is something that people are commonly searching for, without getting satisfying results.”- WordStream

To get satisfying results, you need to do research. Although keyword research is an integral part of selecting topics and a content writing strategy, it is important to expand beyond keyword research to include other methods that will identify what customers want to explore. Methods like…

  • Surveys to find out what consumers want to read
  • Interviews to explore what’s valuable to existing customers
  • Keyword research to determine how to best optimize your content
  • Competitive analysis that checks out what your competitors are doing well

Put in the time up front to determine a topic that will resonate with your target audience.

Step 2- Decide on Type

Beyond the topic of your cornerstone content piece, you need to decide on the type of content you will create. Is it a whitepaper? A long-form guide? A podcast series?

You want to select a medium that will be a foundational reference point for collateral created around your topic, so although the quality of a great cornerstone content piece isn’t necessarily determined by length, longer pieces (2,000-10,000 words) tend to be ideal.

Use the research you conducted to determine the topic of your piece to help determine the format. Depending on the information you offer and the ideal personas you target, one format will most likely be more influential than another. For example, a C-suite healthcare executive may prefer a report, something concrete that they can read on their own time. A physician may prefer something more interactive, like a webinar or podcast. Determining the best format for your cornerstone content starts with taking a hard look at who your target audience is.

Step 3- Create Supporting Collateral

The goal of cornerstone content is to create something that can be segmented into various forms of supporting content. Once you determine your topic and write your cornerstone piece, use the same topic (or very similar topics) to create resources like:

  • Blog posts/articles
  • Downloadable Resources
  • Webinars
  • Interactive Infographics
  • Videos
  • Internal Resources
  • Social Posts

This will extend your reach, not only by creating more resources for personas to read but providing various formats of similar information, making it more shareable. The benefit here is that a lot of the hard work is already done. You’ve already researched topics and keywords. Now, instead of recreating the wheel, you’re just repurposing your foundational content in different bite-sized pieces. You can always link back to the foundational piece in these tools, boosting traffic to the cornerstone piece, which also helps build its authority with search engines.

Step 4- Determine Metrics

If you’ve reached this point, you’ve done all of the heavy lifting. Now it’s time to determine what success looks like by determining metrics and learning from the results. The metrics you select may vary depending on the type of of cornerstone content you selected, but there are a few that should remain consistent, including:

Measuring backlinks– At its heart, cornerstone content is an SEO strategy. You should link back to cornerstone content in as many resources as possible, including webpages, blogs, guest blogs, social, email, paid ads, “related content” links via distribution networks, third-party sites and more. By increasing traffic and backlinks, your message will reach farther and gain more authority. The more traffic the content receives, the higher it appears in organic results.

Social Shares– Measuring the amount of engagement and shares that a resource has is a good indication of its relevance and timeliness to your audience. For high quality cornerstone content, make it easy for readers to share the piece with social sharing icons and site plugins like ‘Click to Tweet’, that allow users to easily share key content.

Let’s recap…

Cornerstone campaigns allow for continuity as well as create great content that can be paired and shared. This type of content distribution creates a dynamic approach to relaying information and speaking more clearly and influentially to the personas you are targeting. Interested? Confused? Excited? Reach out to us, we’d love to help you launch a campaign!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022

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