Content Marketing Generated a 5,100% ROI for Health Care Innovator Optum
The promise of content marketing is that all that’s needed to provide value is creating high-quality material that gets noticed. The material then does all the pre-selling for you so your company closes more deals with greater efficiency.
No need for cold calls, pushy sales tactics, or throwing money at direct mail.
But the question since the beginning has always been, “does it ROI?”
According to Karen Thomas-Smith, VP Provider Marketing and Reference Management at healthcare giant Optum, it absolutely does. She led a team in a pilot program at Optum that completely turned the company’s traditional campaign-based strategy on its head.
“We literally flipped all the roles on their side,” she said.
“We don’t even want to talk about campaigns. We want to first look at a list of all the content, all the topics we need to be talking about, then build a campaign.”
It worked. Swimmingly.
Thomas-Smith’s strategy generated $51 for every $1 spent on her pilot program, alongside the following results:
- 12 million impressions
- 10,000+ downloads of gated content
- $120+ million in sale pipeline
Watch the video to see the full strategy below:
Time Stamps:
1:00 – Quick look at the preliminary results
2:20 – Background on Optum
3:16 – Evaluating the team based on a marketing maturity model
6:00 – Why content marketing is important
8:15 – Aligning the organization around content
12:32 – Building customer personas
17:36 – Creating a content strategy
20:36 – How Optum takes care of their client champions (for content)
22:25 – Creating compelling content
25:45 – How Optum maximizes its content production with content nuggets
28:00 – The overall content machine and how it works
31:25 – How marketing works with sales in Optum’s model
33:43 – Optum’s four lead nurturing phases
37:45 – Optum’s results to-date
38:19 – Thomas-Smith’s top takeaways
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