Health tech marketing is crucial—it promotes awareness about the important work clinicians at your facilities are doing every day. Patients can’t benefit from your stellar expertise if they aren’t aware of it. Health Tech marketing is even more critical now, during a global pandemic when people are scrambling to stay healthy, creating more competition for your brand.
Let’s talk a bit more about why it is imperative that you have a good digital health tech marketing strategy and some ways you can set one up for greater future success.
Article Contents
What Makes a Health Tech Marketing Strategy Crucial for Med Tech Companies?
A marketing strategy can help your health tech company get in front of the right buyer personas—for health tech this is usually decision-makers. Marketing for digital health companies can be uniquely challenging. Digital health leaders are creating amazing products and technology that have the power to change the way we do healthcare. But having an effective healthcare marketing strategy that amplifies your powerful message requires targeting the right personas and decision-makers.
A digital health company can spend months—sometimes years—immersed in target market research on persona pain points before building tech that helps resolve them. Turning this information into a marketing message that will skyrocket customer acquisition and tell prospects that you know them as well as they know themselves? That is hard to do.
What Is a Health Tech Marketing Strategy, Anyway?
A health tech marketing strategy is a combination of goals, assessments, and messaging plans. It should embody your company’s overall mission—your “why”, as leadership expert Simon Sinek puts it. In order to know your “how” and your “what”, you first have to know why you do what you do. We strongly recommend getting your hands on Sinek’s books before embarking on your health tech marketing strategy.
First, you’ll have to lay out your goals—how will you turn your vision into action? You’ll want to assess the current landscape in your industry. We always have our clients do a SWOT analysis—assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Once you review the SWOT, where you are now and where you want to be, you’ll soon detect the gaps. Based on your mission, assessments, and gaps you’ll devise messaging that speaks to your well-defined buyer personas.
Once you’ve crafted that core marketing message that serves as your foundation, bake it into every single piece of content. Then, figure out how that content can also generate SEO traction. And if you’re doing any sort of paid advertising, strategize how to bake it into your Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns? Create a holistic marketing strategy that serves the people who really need you.
How Should Organizations Start Their Health Tech Marketing Strategy?
A lot goes into a health tech marketing strategy and it can seem quite overwhelming at first. To make it more manageable, break it down into bite-sized chunks.
The very first step before creating a tangible health tech marketing strategy is to, again, define your “why”. Get a firm understanding of your company’s overarching mission. For instance, Uhuru’s mission statement is: “leave people better than you found them.”
Your marketing should not happen haphazardly. A blog post here, a digital ad campaign there, and an Instagram picture over there are going to do nothing to help you reach the people who really need you. Your cohesive, calculated, purposeful strategy should be rooted in your core beliefs and mission.
What’s the overarching mission that gets you up in the morning and keeps you going in the face of insurmountable odds? This is what we really mean by your “why.” If you don’t have that true north defined, it’s going to be really hard to know where you’re going.
How Can You Begin to Really Understand Your Ideal Customer?
Before deciding on your marketing tactics and the channels you want to use to reach your audience, you need to really get to know the people who will be searching for your products or services—your “buyer personas”.
It’s really important to define who those people are, who your target market is, how you reach them, who influences them, what their pain points are, and how they will find you.
Sometimes B2B companies think that because they’re selling to another company, they don’t need to understand the people. But there are real people on the other side of every deal you make, and sometimes you’re not even aware of how you’re touching or helping them.
For instance, if you’re selling to a hospital, while you may need to reach the program or clinical director, you also have to be able to reach the actual clinicians—even if you’re selling a tech product. There may be other users you don’t even know you’re influencing in some way. Understanding your personas enables you to produce content that speaks to them.
B2B companies also need to create an ideal customer profile—a type of company that you’re targeting and ideally want to work with.
Determine the size, industry, revenue, and employee base of a company that works best for your product or service. Research the company’s pain points—what challenges is it facing? What are some market shifts, technology shifts, or economic shifts that they’ll need to overcome? What does the future look like for them once you’re in it?
How Do You Create Buyer Personas?
Whether you’re using a B2B or B2C model, the best way to create buyer personas for a specific company is to segment your target markets. Figure out who in those markets are the decision-makers that actually have the authority to move forward with the purchase of your product or service.
Narrow that down to about three or four people in the market for your products, and identify the biggest problems each of these types of people are facing so you can help guide them toward success. Typically, you should outline things like job titles, professional circles, and information sources. Get as specific as possible to minimize confusion later.
At Uhuru’s buyer workshop we like to ask our clients: how do your personas describe themselves? What do they value most? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their most burning triggers? What are they struggling with most, and how can you help solve those frustrations? Be sure to look at demographic information, including age, income range, marital status, education level, hobbies, and lifestyles. Get a good sense of what experience they’re after when seeking out your product or service.
What’s The Best Way to Set Marketing Goals and KPIs?
This is an important third step when devising your digital health tech marketing strategy. To recap, step one is to understand your company. Step two is to understand the people that you’re targeting, your customers, and the companies that they work for. Step three is crafting a map to follow while crafting a solid digital health tech marketing strategy.
Your goals need to be SMART goals—that is, measurable, specific, attainable, relevant, and timely. To get results, every single marketing initiative or activity that you do needs to be tied to a goal. Start with your overall mission, then break down realistic goals that you can achieve in a short timeframe. Try to set goals for no more than three months at a time.
At Uhuru, we work on a 12 week year, broken down into quarters.
A three-month time period is long enough to accomplish larger activities but still short enough so that goals don’t get lost. Annual marketing goals can get caught up in strategy changes and staff reshuffles. A 12-week format enables quicker, more efficient pivots than a year long plan does.
Every one of your goals should have a KPI—key performance indicator—tied to it. A KPI tells you whether or not you’re getting close to meeting your goal. Each KPI should have an activity and effectiveness metric tied to it. An activity metric would be something like, “I made 20 sales calls this week” and the effectiveness metric could be “5 percent of those sales calls converted into a closed deal.”
Get that framework laid out, then list all of your goals and share with your team so everybody’s on the same page. Have regular updates—it could be weekly, it could be monthly—as you need to be talking about them on an ongoing basis. This way you’ll see how you’re moving toward your goals, while keeping your team in the loop and accountable.
How Can Current Content Create a Strong Health Tech Marketing Strategy?
Step four of your health tech marketing strategy is assessing the current landscape. What does your current content look like? What marketing activities are you currently promoting? At Uhuru, we carry out an audit of our current content assets to determine how they can be repurposed. There’s a good chance much of your current content can be repurposed too.
For example, you may have a basic blog that could be repurposed into a downloadable content offer. Assessing all of your past efforts and deciding how they can be applied to your current strategy is one of the keys to your success. This will help your team see the gaps, establish a direction, and prevent duplicate content.
A marketing funnel content production schedule and map of your buyer’s journey can help you close any gaps you’ve discovered. This schedule will help you and your team stay on track. We like MindMeister, but a spreadsheet will also do the trick.
Any sort of top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) content goes first, and then the goal of that piece of content should be to drive readers to the next stage of the funnel. Thus, if you have an awareness piece of content, you need to make sure it has a CTA (call to action) that invites users to visit the next page or explore the next stage of the funnel.
We recommend that you look at your metrics on at least a monthly basis to see how your funnel is performing. Once you have your funnel deployed, you’ll want to determine how many searchers visited your site overall, how many visited each page, and what channels drove those most visits.
For the middle of the funnel (MoFu), or consideration stage, you’re going to look at how many site visitors turned into contacts in HubSpot—or whichever CRM you’re using. What are your best performing channels? What are your best performing campaigns? If you’re using HubSpot like we do, you’ll see it’s easy to track campaigns on this robust platform.
The bottom of the funnel (BoFu) or decision stage is where you’ll want to look at how many of those people converted—bought a product, closed a deal, had a conversation with a sales rep—to measure which content, channels, and campaigns have been performing best.
Once you know that, you can go back and optimize the channels that may not be performing quite as well. Lean into the channels and campaigns that are performing better. You can see what’s resonating with your target audience and look at your metrics on a full-funnel basis. Having metrics for every stage of the funnel allows you to detect gaps and decide where to tweak or add content to improve that funnel experience.
Attract More—and Better—Prospects for Your Health Care Organization
Once you have your content plan outlined, you need to create a health tech marketing strategy to promote that content and start attracting your prospects—and ultimately, drive them all the way down the funnel!
Prospects are great, of course, but you eventually want them to be clients or customers. A few of great mediums you can use are email nurture content, organic website content, social media, or pay-per-click. Pay-per-click health tech marketing is ideal for re-targeting your buyer persona and proving you’ve made an effort to personalize their messaging.
Remember—they’re people. You can’t just serve them one piece of content and think that they’re going to buy. You’ve got to nurture them, appeal to their emotions, build a trusting relationship.
We went over a lot today. If you have any questions, please reach out. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking and determine how we can help uplevel your messaging with a powerful health tech marketing strategy.
We’ve been doing this for a long time—try us! There are very few things we can’t answer about this topic. In the meantime, if you don’t feel like picking up a phone right away, we encourage you to take a deeper dive by downloading this exclusive resource.
