One of the biggest pitfalls of content creation – and by far the biggest content mistake by amateur life science marketers – is forgetting that your content isn’t just directed AT your target audience, but is FOR your target audience. Many content creators focus too heavily on what they want their customers to hear rather than sincerely addressing customers’ needs through content and, in doing so, providing customer value.

To illustrate the point, here are some types of content which I frequently see and which have the wrong focus:

• Generic event-promoting blog posts (“We’ll be at the XYZ meeting in booth 2000!”)
• “White papers” which don’t do anything but restate the value claims for a product or service.
• Frequent social media posts about ongoing promotions.
• Blog posts which are little more than product overviews.
• Posting just about any overt promotional message to a LinkedIn group.

All of the above are company-centric or product-centric promotions. They do not properly address the customers’ needs. Even if a prospect has a potential but unrealized need for the product, these kinds of “content spam” will simply drive them away by trying to create an opportunity to purchase when most of your audience is likely not actively in a relevant buying journey. It’s the wrong message at the wrong time, and they’ll filter it out along with the mountains of other promotional content which they get bombarded with.

Instead of company-centric and product-centric messages, use your content channels to provide value-added, customer-centric content. Creating valuable customer-centric content, as well as matching each piece of content to the appropriate channels, requires three things:

• Understanding what information your customers are looking for.
• Understanding your customers’ preferences for consuming content.
• Ensuring that your content distribution is properly targeted such that any given piece of content is provided to the most relevant audiences

To do these things effectively, you need to remove your own mindset from the equation. You need to stop thinking about your customers and start thinking like your customers. If you can effectively do that when you’re planning content, you’ll end up with content which is more valuable to your customers.