The Content Advantage Is Gone. Experience Is Everything.
For about a decade, content was the moat.
Health systems built condition libraries, symptom checkers, physician bios, and blog archives deep enough to own the search results in their market. Pharma ran a version of the same play. It worked, because being the most useful answer online was a real advantage.
That advantage faded fast, and most of us felt it happen in real time.
At Mediate.ly's monthly healthcare marketing roundtable, we opened with a blunt question: how are health systems and pharma companies actually differentiating themselves right now? The room included health system veterans, a consumer data leader, a healthcare IT strategist, a marketing director in healthcare technology management, and a commercialization consultant. The conversation kept circling back to the same uncomfortable point: content isn't the differentiator we built our strategies around anymore.
The part worth saying out loud
If someone wants to understand a diagnosis, a procedure, or a recovery timeline, there's a good chance they're not on your website first. They're asking Gemini or ChatGPT and getting a synthesized answer in seconds.
"I'm not going to your website for that information anymore. Not like I used to 10 or 15 years ago," said Andrew Perry, SVP at Mediate.ly.
Content isn't dead as an activity. It's dead as a differentiator. Few people choose a hospital because its hip replacement page was thorough — and that's not a knock on the marketers who built those pages. It was the right strategy for a long time. The ground just moved.
Healthcare also doesn't get the brand-affection fallback other categories lean on. As one strategic advisor in the group put it: "If you think of hospitals, we're only going there when something bad is happening. We don't wake up in the morning thinking, boy, I can't wait to take my medicine today."
No built-in aspiration, and a shrinking informational edge. So what's actually driving the decision?
A lot of the time, it's habit. "We've been there before, we know where it is, we know where to park," the same advisor said. "It's not always because the marketing was done well. It's more habitual."
That's worth sitting with — habit is quietly doing work your campaigns often get credit for, and it's exactly the kind of advantage a competitor 15 minutes down the road can chip away at.
Experience is the differentiator — and the hardest one to market
The group converged fast on experience as the thing that genuinely separates one provider from another. "What was your experience there, and how well can you convey that experience to me as a consumer?" the advisor asked.
Here's the catch: you can't market an experience to someone who hasn't lived it yet. So brands reach for proxies instead — rankings voted on by a small peer panel, accreditation badges, and the visual shorthand nearly every system in the country happens to be running at the same time.
"It's the smiling family looking off at a 45-degree angle from the camera, and they got back to their life because the back surgery was successful," Andrew said. "We've all seen that image. On TV, on postcards, in magazines."
That image has lost its power to differentiate — it's become genre convention rather than a signal, mostly because so many competitors are running a version of it too. The real opportunity is closing the gap between an experience someone hasn't lived and a decision they're making right now.
Three ideas from the conversation point toward how.
1. Show the process, not just the outcome
Walk someone through what actually happens — from check-in to discharge. Where they park. Who greets them. What the wait looks like. When their family hears an update.
It's unglamorous, and it's rarely done well, which is exactly why it stands out when it is.
2. Let the people who lived it do the talking
In regulated categories, you can't hand a creator the keys — but you can put physicians on camera explaining a technology or a process, backed by a real case study. The same logic scales through referral networks: for any service line, the people with genuine authority number in the dozens, not the hundreds.
"Start with a key opinion leader, work backwards, and create this halo effect," said the consumer data leader in the room, describing it as a modern version of the old press kit.
Amplifying what patients and physicians already say about you — standard practice in most consumer categories — is still an underused lever in health systems.
3. Market what happens outside the clinical event
This is where a lot of systems are sitting on strong material they don't use: community and charitable work, support for families traveling for long treatment stays, prevention programming, nutrition and follow-up care.
"They all have those services, but I don't see them being touted out there," the marketing director said.
Andrew shared a case that made the point well: he learned only by chance that a family whose son was seriously injured out-of-network had been housed for months through a Ronald McDonald House connection — something the system itself had never surfaced publicly. Knowing a detail like that shapes how a family feels about a provider long before they ever need one.
The sequencing most plans get backwards
None of this lands without the right sequencing underneath it, and this is where the room got specific.
"It's not a channel choice — hey, let's just do Reddit," the consumer data leader said. "You have to start with the data and work backwards. Where do you have capacity? Where do you make money?"
A common pattern is solving this in reverse: pick channels, justify them with engagement metrics, then build the business case after the fact. A more durable approach starts with service line capacity and contribution margin, identifies who's genuinely likely to need that care, and then asks where those people actually are.
He described a payer client launching in rural counties where the data pointed somewhere nobody expected — Pandora ended up in the omnichannel mix. Skip that groundwork, he said, and "you're just picking channels and throwing darts."
Measurement deserves the same honesty. A consumer transformation leader who spent 15 years inside a health system before moving to the vendor side put it simply: "There's no perfect answer. You have to solve it case by case."
What's shifting is who's in the room for these conversations — increasingly innovation and AI committees where most stakeholders sit outside marketing. The framing that travels there isn't attribution modeling. It's actionable data.
So why you, and not the system down the road?
The days when patients showed up simply because they always had are ending.
"You are now a business that needs to tell me why I should go to you," Andrew said. In much of the country, three credible options sit inside a short drive.
Content alone won't answer that question anymore. Experience will — if you're willing to make it visible before someone has lived it.
That's the work we spend our time on at Mediate.ly. If you're building an experience-first differentiation strategy, or you'd like a seat at next month's roundtable, we'd love to talk.