Device manufacturers often struggle to grow awareness as they introduce new products to market. Educating healthcare practitioners and patients can be a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. Despite rapid advances in sales and marketing tools, most device manufacturers stick to the tried-and-true tactics such as field sales, trade shows, and brochure-ware web presence.
Over the past few years, there have been significant changes in B2B sales approach, particularly the rise of account-based-marketing (ABM) strategies that use CRM, digital and third-party data to help focus on marketing into specific customer accounts, and often rely on tools that are able to identify engagement across a company and it’s multiple decision makers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning systems have proven the ability to automate away the complex process of identifying and engaging with the target market.
I’ve identified some of the common strategic areas that can help you quickly and effectively determine the right tools, tactics and messaging for your medical device campaigns.
Measurement Matters
Understanding how to measure performance is a key first step to any successful digital program. Determining the goals for the campaign and how it will be measured helps create alignment with sales, marketing and executive management, and ensures marketers don’t end up talking about ad impressions and brand reach while the CEO asks tough questions like “how much money did we make on this campaign?”
For most marketers in the medical device space, the focus is on conversions and the cost metrics around customer acquisition. Determining return-on-investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns and channels is often complex and requires multiple data sources including CRM and ad-tech platforms, but will help deliver a clear picture of the value that a campaign brings to the business. Most digital marketing platforms do a great job at measuring basic advertising metrics like impressions, engagement, and reach, but measuring ROI often requires marketers to go the extra mile and integrate their sales data to tell a real business story.
Build an Audience, then Activate it
One of the biggest shifts in marketing has been the declining effectiveness of many traditional advertising tactics and the shift to social media and content marketing. More than ever, consumers of all types, including corporate buyers, expect to learn about new products in high-trust environments, particularly those that contain some sort of peer validation, as opposed to advertisements. Customers expect brands to deliver significant value in the marketing and sales process. Digital excels in this area, and there are a number of approaches that can help a brand build an audience of interested prospects and influencers without using often-wasteful mass advertising tactics.
Educational content marketing is particularly effective in new markets where demand may not yet be fully realized, particularly for emerging product categories or new technical break throughs. Device manufacturers can often own demand for information through some basic search-engine marketing techniques. By owning the educational content for a category, the manufacturer can build and capture demand for the search terms around the category, and grow awareness as well as traffic back to the corporate site.
The most common and successful approach for many brands is building an audience through value-add content marketing. With this approach, the brand produces a high value content piece which requires prospective readers to give their email address to obtain a copy. Once limited just to newsletters and email blasts, this category has become increasingly sophisticated to include vendor pricing and selection guides, salary surveys, how-to content, industry surveys, analysis and insights are all content items used by brands to help build their in-house lists. Setting up customer journeys, drip campaigns and newsletters are all popular ways to keep prospective leads engaged and encourage them to convert.