Uncover Buyers’ Information and Emotional Needs

The HIMSS Database provides a wide range of useful data about your target audience: The topics they gravitate towards. The buying stages they travel through. The emotions that affect purchasing decisions. These data points are critical to understand since together, they will help maximize your campaign response and content engagement.

Create Well-Defined Personas

Based on study of your target audience both “in the wild,” as well our ability to track their media consumption within the HIMSS digital network, our team identifies patterns emerging in the data. We use this data to draw well-defined personas/ archetypes that can be targeted with relevant content, in the format they like to consume, through the media channels they rely on.

Understand the Purchase Process

The Media Lab can track your buyers’ information needs as they progress from “interest” to “evaluation” to the ultimate “purchase decision” phase. We often discover that paths to purchase can diverge among different portions of your audience, and can therefore require different content needs. By developing and mapping enriched content across buying cycles, your ability to engage qualified prospects increases dramatically.

“Our clients understand the role good content plays in driving growth, and how content without true insight is simply another sales pitch. That's where we come in. At HIMSS, we ARE this audience. We can differentiate nice-to-know versus need-to-know messaging. We’re having a lot of fun — and success — helping clients start the right conversations.”
— John Whelan, EVP HIMSS Media

Take inventory

We’ll help you evaluate all of your current branded content across all touchpoints. It’s important to understand the quantity and quality of assets, and note the effectiveness of different formats and content sources. We’ll pour through every word and every pixel, as if we’re your target audience. We’ll ask why every piece of content was developed and look at its performance with your target audience. We’re on the lookout for "random acts of content."

Look for Gaps

By cross-checking the results of the audit against the personas and purchase process insights, we can now identify missed content opportunities, or assets that need improvement. This commonly is an eye-opening experience for many clients, as they learn not only more about their target audience, but also all they ways their content marketing can be improved.

Let’s Make a Plan

Because Media Lab’s scientific approach is so thorough and comprehensive, we will have discovered more about your audience and your content marketing needs than ever before. We’re now equipped to build a content roadmap that will deliver the community, the data and the leads you need to drive business.

Like every other step, the planning phase is highly collaborative. We’ll need help prioritizing topics, content formats, creative and expert resources, scheduling and budgets. This ensures business goals are met, as well as expectations.

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  Prioritize Audiences

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  Identify Topics

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  Create Editorial Calendar

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  DECIDE ON FORMATS

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  SCHEDULE SOCIAL MEDIA

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  ESTABLISH BUDGET PARAMETERS

“Clients used to come to us for industry-savvy white papers and infographics in order to generate leads. Now, they are bringing us in much earlier in the process, to help determine strategy and the right solutions for their team long term.”
— Betsy Kominsky

Build the Right Team

Determine if you currently have the right resources for your newly re-aligned content strategy. Is your designer top tier? Do you need a published industry expert writer, or a ghost writer? What about a video production team? An event producer? Quality counts for a lot here. Make sure you find the best team you can afford. Not so coincidentally, HIMSS Media and the Media Lab maintain a deep bench of established content producers with a track record of success. We invite you to include the Media Lab team in your execution plans.

“HIMSS’s position in the center of the HIT industry affords us access to content experts across spectrum, which is critical to delivering authentic, authoritative and engaging content. We push our expert teams to create dynamic content that contains relevant information with an emotional connection to the audience.”
— Julie Boardman

Develop Enriched, Emotional Content

Together with our clients, we’re after high engagement levels from their target audience. The best way to boost engagement is to develop “enriched” content — content that has been informed by the insights we’ve yielded. We’ll direct our content and design resources to present information in engaging, dynamic and often interactive formats that trigger high levels of response from the most viable segments of your audience.

One key factor we’ve proven is: An effective driver of engagement is the injection of emotion into your content. We produce content in a way that appeals not only to an audience’s information needs, but also to their emotions. Which trends should I be “worried” about? What best practices will help my organization project “a sense of excellence?” Which technologies are out there that I definitely do not want to miss out on? Our research shows a quicker, richer and deeper engagement level when emotions are folded into content stories.

Leverage Social Media — Yours and Ours

Social Media postings must be planned, executed and tracked for every content asset in order to effectively drive your audience to engage. Our social media team has unrivaled experience in creating "buzz" within the HIT community. We apply a scientific approach to driving impressions and building engagement. And as we track your audience from social media clicks to content consumption, we’ll adjust and optimize your social tactics in order to meet your goals.

Disseminate within HIMSS Media and Beyond

It’s time to put your enriched content assets to work. The best place to start is HIMSS Media’s vast and deep media brands, which 400,000+ HIT professionals rely on for news and information. We’ll align your content within the most relevant media environments or live events. We have a deep understanding of how and where target audiences consume information. Best of all, as they consume your content, we’ll continue to collect more data more about them to share with you.

We do understand that enriched content can also be effective outside the HIMSS universe. We’ll help place your content wherever your audience can be found.

Track The Journey

HIMSS’s digital platform is built using Marketo technology, which gives us an accurate window into your target audience’s media and content consumption. As content is pushed live, the Media Lab team monitors your audiences' interest and engagement. In many cases, we’ll know right away how audiences are responding to your new content. As they make their way through the buying cycle, we’ll be able to identify leads with deep levels of engagement. The more they engage, the more we can share with you.

GEnerate Leads with Speed

Leads are precious. But so is Lead Velocity. The faster leads are in your hands, the faster you can drive sales. That’s why HIMSS Media Lab can deliver leads in real time — integrating directly with your CRM, whether you use Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, or any other platform. We can also export lead reports and data on a regular basis. We can also score leads as needed, to rate the depth of engagement, or whether captured leads should be deemed marketing leads (MQLs) or sales leads (SQLs).

“The numbers are always telling you a story. If people want to hear what you have to say, we’re going to see that in our data. We know quickly if we have to adjust or if we’re doing well with a campaign.”
— Joe Haddock