Medical device companies have relied on traditional marketing and sales methods for a hundred years. And for good reason. Traditional methods like trade shows and industry magazine advertisements continue to drive sales and increase brand awareness.
But the landscape is changing.
Medical buyers are becoming increasingly reliant on digital channels to make purchasing decisions. In fact, 93% of today’s businesses conduct research online before buying.
You can’t afford to ignore SEO, social media marketing, ABM, and automation.
Your competitors aren’t.
Below, we’ve outlined six key tactics that will help you keep up with the modern medical buyer (and stay ahead of the competition).
1. Don’t Forget Distributors in Your Buyer Personas
The differences between B2B and B2C medical marketing are very clear.
We know that developing a successful digital marketing strategy requires a buyer persona that represents professionals within healthcare organizations (end-users like doctors, gatekeepers like administrators, and decision-makers like buying committee members), not patients.
But let’s take that a step further.
Medical technology providers — whether they are providing equipment for operating rooms or electronic health record (EHR) software — cannot simply target hospital CFOs, MSOs, chief physicians, hospital administrators, or other internal stakeholders.
If you want to drive maximal results, your digital marketing efforts should also be targeting distributors.
You rely on distributors to push your product out into the market, sell to buying committees, and navigate nation-wide integrated delivery networks. And the reality is, the most successful digital marketing strategies for medical devices will target distributors just as aggressively (if not more) as end-users.
You should treat your distributors like your most valued prospects, and create an additional buyer persona to match that importance.
2. Enhance Traditional Marketing Strategies with ABM
To maximize the ROI on your B2B digital marketing strategy, you should be enabling your sales team with account-based marketing (a relatively new technique in the digital space).
For example, your trade show efforts can be greatly enhanced with the help of ABM. Here are a couple of steps you can take.
- Prepare an array of useful, targeted content for your personas — like tech sheets, blogs, and videos — before each trade show. This will help you build authority in the eyes of prospects you meet in person and those who Google your brand out of curiosity.
- Serve this content to prospects attending the trade show with a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Campaign. Most folks attending a trade will use Google to find the trade show’s website, agenda, presenters, etc. If you launch a PPC campaign targeting the tradeshow keywords, you can serve your marketing materials directly to attendees who may have never heard of you before.
Just imagine how much easier it would be for your salesperson to convert a lead that’s already seen your brand and content from those hyper-targeted keywords.
Learn How Sales Enablement Services can Empower Your Sales Teams
3. Invest in SEO That Enhances Your Sales Funnel
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital piece of any digital marketing strategy.
Ranking on Google for keywords that explicitly link to your core product pages can bring in new, organic leads from buyers who may have never heard of your product before.
After all, 72% of potential medical buyers start with a search online.
For example, if you sell surgical headlights, ranking for short-tail keywords such as ‘surgical headlights,’ ‘surgical headlamps,’ and ‘best surgical headlights’ with your product or home page, will generate leads from an audience that you were not previously tapped into.
4. Build Research-based Content Marketing for Medical Devices
The vast majority of B2B marketers are using blogs as part of their digital marketing strategy. However, only 58% of healthcare marketers are doing the same.
This presents an enormous opportunity for medical device companies.
As mentioned above, three out of four medical buyers start with a search online, and they are 60% to 90% of the way into a purchase cycle when they reach out to a vendor.
Because medical buyers are doing their research before committing to any purchase, you need to prepare a diverse content strategy that will answer any questions they may have along the way. If you can capture leads in your sales funnel, and lead them all the way to the end of the buyer journey — you’ve just made a sale.
Here are the types of content that you should be actively developing:
| · Technical Documentation · Clinical Reports · Case Studies · References · Product/Service Demos | · Guest Posts in Authority Medical Publications · White Papers · Explanatory Videos |
5. Don’t Forget About Medical Devices Marketing Regulations and Compliance
As you develop your marketing strategy for a new medical device product launch, its imperative that you (and your content writers) are acutely aware of all medical device marketing regulations (in any region you want to sell to).
Every medical marketer — B2B or B2C — must be trained on compliance standards like HIPAA.
Furthermore, each country, state, and province has different regulatory standards that your digital marketing strategy must keep in mind. For instance, because you must follow stringent rules on privacy and patient identity, customer testimonials can be tricky to create (if not impossible) to leverage.
While this hurdle may seem like an extra headache, there is no excuse for ignoring it. If your campaign fails to comply, you can be subject to enormous fines of up to $50,000 per violation.
Work with Medical Marketing Specialists Who Understand Your Complex Regulations
6. Earn Brand Recognition with Hyper-targeted Social Media
Traditional medical marketers will be familiar with KOL programs (peer-to-peer selling), where doctors speak on behalf of your medical device to their colleagues to improve brand recognition and generate leads through word of mouth.
In the age of social media, those doctors are now social media influencers.
Consider this statistic: two-thirds of doctors are using social media platforms (like LinkedIn) for professional purposes.
With influencer marketing tactics, you can reach out to doctors, surgeons, and hospital administrators who are active on social media and leverage their audience to generate leads.
Developing a Comprehensive Medical Device Digital Marketing Strategy
B2B healthcare buying cycles are notoriously complex. Buying cycles can take up to two years, and within healthcare institutions themselves, there is often more than one buyer making purchasing decisions.
To keep buyers engaged with your product throughout such a long, long cycle, you need a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that includes the above six points and guides your leads through your sales funnel.
You can accomplish this by working with a team of medical marketing specialists.
Jumpfactor has proven to experience developing winning strategies for medical device organizations. Contact us today to learn how our team of specialists can develop a comprehensive strategy that puts your products and services ahead of your competitors.
