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What is the Real Cost of Stopping Your Healthcare Marketing Campaigns?

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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many businesses to reconsider their 2021 budget and growth strategies. In doing so, it’s easy to look at your marketing campaign expenses and wonder if it’s worth investing in.

Healthcare marketing campaigns, digital platforms, and technology costs often quickly add up and cause serious sticker shock. How can you guarantee a return on investment (ROI) and growth? What are the consequences of cutting marketing out?

Once you take a closer look at those numbers, it’s clear to see why marketing is one of the smartest investments medical suppliers can make. Without consistent and effective marketing, you’re unable to reach your distributors and end-users to increase sales. However, running healthcare marketing campaigns for the sake of doing it isn’t effective. The key is finding a balance between driving results and allocating your budget. 

Many marketers plan to increase their budgets by 7.6% on average in 2021. What would happen if you stopped all healthcare marketing campaigns right now? Let’s dive into what it would cost you long-term and quick tips on how to cut expenses without hurting your business growth. 

The Cost of Stopping Your Healthcare Marketing Campaigns

If your marketing campaigns are running up your budget without impressive results, you may consider throwing in the towel altogether. However, healthcare marketing campaigns encompass many aspects of business growth including brand awareness, lead generation, customer insights, and more. 

Without marketing, your company would have to rely solely on the merit of your products and services, along with word-of-mouth referrals from past customers. Ultimately, this would lead to a decrease in sales, engagement, and overall brand awareness — costing your business thousands and thousands of dollars.

Where Your Healthcare Campaign Went Wrong

Depending on your products and services, healthcare suppliers are spending anywhere from thousands to millions of dollars on marketing expenses. With endless marketing channels and technology to test, it’s easy for many businesses to quickly overload themselves. If your marketing campaigns are underperforming, ask yourself the following questions before cutting your budget:

  • Are you targeting the right audience?
  • Have you built out buyer personas from research?
  • Did you develop realistic success metrics?
  • Is your messaging not resonating with your audience?
  • Do you understand the customer journey?

3 Ways to Reduce Healthcare Marketing Campaign Expenses Without Hurting Your Business

While marketing is paramount to your overall business growth, you can still cut down your budget without sacrificing the quality of your results. Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your healthcare marketing campaigns and expenses:

1.Conduct a Full Marketing Audit

You need to conduct a full marketing audit to determine how much you’re spending on marketing activities, active marketing channels, and measurable results. You’ll need to quantify how much you’re spending on each channel and include any software, fees, materials, etc. 

After you’re finished, you’ll most likely be surprised which areas you’re overspending and where gaps exist. You can either decide to limit the number of active channels you’re investing in or reduce your spend on underperforming campaigns. 

2.Improve Audience Targeting

The key to a successful marketing campaign is targeting the right customer, at the right time, on their preferred platform. However, 60% of marketers agree that their customer acquisition cost (CAC) has increased in the past three years. Focusing your budget on prospects who aren’t in your ideal market jams up your lead pipeline and is an ineffective use of your budget. 

Instead, build comprehensive buyer personas through quantitative and qualitative research so you can better understand your customer’s needs and pain points. Use these profiles to arm your marketing strategy and better use your budget for the right audience.

3.Use Marketing Automation Tools

While the idea of investing in new technology may seem daunting, it can help you cut back on resources and not spread yourself too thin. Marketing automation will help free up your time and ensure your team can focus on different tasks.

Common marketing automation tools include:

  • Chatbots
  • Email autoresponder and journeys
  • Customer relationship managers

Build Comprehensive Healthcare Marketing Campaigns that Drive Results

Budget cuts are never easy. However, completely stopping your healthcare marketing campaigns can have serious consequences for your overall business growth. Without marketing, you’ll be unable to attract and engage with your customers on a larger scale. If you’re concerned about your budget, consider analyzing your expenses, budget, and data to make smarter campaign decisions that propel your medical supply company forward.

Ready to develop marketing campaigns that amplify your growth? Contact Share Moving Media for more information.

Brand Storytelling in Healthcare: If You’re Not Visible, You’re Irrelevant

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Today’s world is fast-paced and digitally driven. Consumers have adopted a “need it now” mentality and value brands that prioritize instant gratification. 

As a result, brands focus on convenience instead of the personalized human touch. However, to better connect with your target audience and break the cycle of endless scrolling, it’s important to engage with them on a deeper level through storytelling. 

Brand storytelling in healthcare requires embedding skill, creativity, and vision in your marketing campaigns to evoke emotion and increase your bottom line. By telling the “why” behind your brand, you’re able to engage with your customers and give them a reason to invest in your products and services. 

You need to start sharing your story to edge out the competition. Let’s take a look at what brand storytelling is and how medical suppliers can implement it in a marketing strategy.

What is Brand Storytelling in Healthcare?

Storytelling has existed for over 27,000 years. Brand storytelling is the art of weaving fact and narrative together to communicate a message to your target audience. While you’re providing real and transparent stories, you can embellish them to better explain your core meaning. While “good” and “bad” storytelling is relative to your customer, developing a positive brand story includes the following elements:

  • Entertainment
  • Education
  • Universal
  • Memorable
  • Organized

As a medical supply brand, you can utilize storytelling to create powerful videos, testimonials, case studies, marketing materials, and more to amplify your brand.

Why is Brand Storytelling Important?

Brand storytelling in healthcare is no longer a nice-to-have. Successful storytelling allows you to boost your brand awareness, profit, and impact to drive more engagement and conversions with your customers.

Why is brand storytelling successful? Consider the following benefits: 

  • Stand out: You can gain an edge against the competition by creating a memorable narrative that highlights your products and how they have helped save lives.
  • Build loyalty: You’re not just attracting customers through a story; you’re building a relationship with people who will become loyal to your brand and products. 
  • Increase bottom line: You can boost your ROI and overall profitability through complex content marketing stories that drive engagement.

How to Create Healthcare Brand Storytelling for Your Brand

As a medical supply brand, your story can bridge the gap between your company, distributors, and the end-user to increase awareness and engagement. It’s not just a differentiator, it’s a strategic tactic that yields long-term results. Here are two types of brand storytelling for healthcare you need to know:

Data-Driven

76% of marketers fail to use behavioral data in their marketing strategy. With 149 zettabytes of data created worldwide by 2024, you can leverage data to create more targeted stories based on your audience’s preferences and pain points. 

As the key to create content that resonates with your audience, your data is one of the most powerful resources you can leverage for powerful storytelling. Consider analyzing your data from qualitative and quantitative sources to derive key insights for your stories. For example, you can use data to discover the following insights:

  • Does your audience prefer videos over static images? 
  • Do they consume short-form or long-form content? 
  • What are they searching for on search engines? 
  • How long are they engaging with content?
  • What platforms does your audience prefer?

Audience-Focused

To develop successful stories, you need to take your healthcare brand out of storytelling. While you may be accustomed to selling yourself, building impactful content needs to focus on your customers instead. The purpose of your story is to provide your audience with valuable content that evokes emotion and compels them to move forward with your products.

Brand storytelling videos are the most popular types of media marketers create. Get started by assessing your current content and note how often you mention your products or brand throughout the story. Depending on your audience needs, you can develop storytelling through the following mediums to attract customers:

  • Podcasts with industry-adjacent guests to connect with your audience on topics that matter
  • Micro-moments through videos and mini-ads that quickly bring your brand to life
  • Philanthropic news to showcase what your business cares about on social media

When you create user-generated content, you’ll be more likely to expand your reach and build trust with your customers.

Strategic Brand Storytelling for Your Healthcare Business

What’s the “why” behind your brand? Impactful storytelling is the art of highlighting your brand purpose. Without honest and transparent content marketing, your customers will likely find a competitor they better connect with. If you’re looking to build a deeper connection with your distributors, developing brand storytelling is the best way to establish long-term relationships. Looking for quality content marketing services that engage your customers? Contact Share Moving Media for more information.

Lead Generation for Healthcare Manufacturers: 5 Tactics to Keep Your Pipeline Full

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 When it comes to lead generation for healthcare manufacturers, quality is more important than quantity. Your marketing tactics need to showcase your brand as a solution that meets customer challenges and needs. If done well, your lead generation strategy will not only elevate your brand awareness and engagement but foster long-term relationships with customers. 

While the top priority for healthcare marketers is to generate leads, it’s often difficult to pinpoint which tactics will prove most beneficial to your bottom line. Let’s dive into the top tactics for you to amplify your lead generation strategy to grow your bottom line. 

What is Lead Generation for Healthcare Manufactures?

Before jumping into tactics, it’s essential to develop a strategic approach that targets your objectives. A proper lead generation strategy embraces tactics for every stage of the customer journey to attract and convert leads. 

Consider the following elements when developing your strategy:

  • Lead capture: Create a way to capture the lead’s contact information and relevant qualifying details (name, position, email, business, etc.)
  • Lead magnets: Develop quality content with an incentive that drives engagement
  • Lead qualification: Build a process that determines how likely the lead is to buy from your brand
  • Lead segmentation: Segment leads based on common attributes or data so you can deliver a personalized user experience

With the right processes in place, the key to a robust lead marketing strategy is developing quality and informative content. In fact, 96% of customers want to consume content from a brand before making a purchase decision. 

5 Lead Generation Tactics for Healthcare Manufacturers

Share Moving Media helps healthcare manufacturers increase their market share through valuable content and promotional strategies. To connect with healthcare facilities or distributors, your lead generation tactics need to boost credibility in the industry and drive qualified leads. Here are the top lead generation tools for healthcare manufacturers to use: 

1.Gated Content

Unlike normal landing pages or blog posts, gated content is only accessible to users once they fill out a form and submit their contact information. However, your content needs to valuable enough that your users want to submit their information. Consider creating interesting industry insights or in-depth data about your product offerings in the following formats:

  • White papers
  • E-books
  • Reports
  • Guides
  • Checklists
  • Online tools

Regardless of the format, make sure your website is optimized to highlight your content with a strong call-to-action and placement.

2.Newsletters

With 3.9 billion email users worldwide, developing a must-read email newsletter is a strategic way to encourage prospects to stay in touch with your brand. Utilize a newsletter sign-up form on your website to collect email addresses and share valuable promotions or noteworthy news to stay top of mind with leads. Consider improving your newsletter’s effectiveness by sending special promotions or product demos to move subscribers through your lead funnel.

3.Events

Even in the COVID digital landscape, traditional lead generation strategies like events are still a relevant way to attract your target audience. Utilize a registration form to collect prospect’s contact information for the following virtual or in-person events:

  • Webinars
  • Conferences 
  • Workshops 
  • Online classes

4.Live Chat Bots

62% of modern consumers prefer to communicate with a brand via a live chat feature. When users have questions, they expect to have answers fast. Once a user engages with your chatbot, provide an answer and then prompt them to fill out a form to speak with a representative from your company, download a lead magnet, or sign-up for a product demo.

5.Search Engine Optimization 

If you want to attract prospective customers to your content, you need a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to target their search intent. Conduct keyword research to discover what your prospects search for at the top of the funnel so you can better optimize your content to appear in search engine results (SERP). Utilize those keywords in the following assets:

  • Evergreen content
  • Meta titles and descriptions
  • Consistent blog posts
  • Pay-per-click search marketing
  • Guest blogs on industry-adjacent platforms
  • Social media profiles and Google My Business listing
  • Press releases 

Grow with Lead Generation for Healthcare Manufacturers 

Lead generation plays a crucial role in your overall marketing strategy for your medical supply brand. With more consumers using the internet to conduct brand research before making a purchasing decision, you need to develop quality lead generation tactics that capture prospect’s attention and drive results toward your bottom line.

Increase your market share through valuable content by contacting Share Moving Media today.

Should Healthcare Leadership Be Overconfident or Uncertain?

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Confidence is an important aspect of leadership for medical suppliers. While you might be someone who tends to step back from the spotlight, your team won’t follow a wishy-washy leader and you’ll have difficulty inspiring top performance. 

However, being too confident often results in rash risks that may come off arrogant and frustrate direct reports or shareholders. The most successful leaders know that while confidence is important, you need to embrace uncertainty as well. 

With evolving business practices in the healthcare industry, leading with uncertainty doesn’t mean a lack of confidence, but rather allows you to search for a middle ground and examine a range of possible options to make the most informed decisions. Uncertainty allows you to communicate more effectively, listen to key stakeholders, and avoid the bad judgment that is often caused by overconfidence.

What’s your healthcare leadership style? Let’s dive deeper into the differences between leading with uncertainty instead of overconfidence. 

The Consequences of Overconfidence in Healthcare Leadership

Only 18% of enterprises believe that their leaders are “very effective” at meeting business goals. Making the wrong decisions in a healthcare leadership position can be the difference between growing your bottom line or losing a valuable deal that jeopardizes your quarterly earnings. 

What does it mean to be an overconfident leader? Consider these behavioral traits that negatively affect your performance:

  • Mistrust: Your peers won’t trust your decisions or authority
  • Arrogance: Overconfidence often leads to you resisting change and feedback
  • Weak relationships: Your direct reports may feel underappreciated by your communication or decision-making skills
  • Integrity: You are unlikely to honor commitments 

Additionally, leaders that lead with sales confidence are often blind to innovation and are misaligned with the company, leading to a weak sale or marketing strategy. 

Confidence Traits that Positively Affect Leadership 

However, as long as you don’t cross the threshold into overconfidence, confident leaders are still successful in leading teams for your brand’s vision. For example, confident leaders have the following positive traits:

  • Dominating projects and marketing themselves
  • Having the courage and willingness to make bold changes
  • Increased levels of energy and inspiration
  • Ability to positively represent your company to customers

Healthcare Leadership Self-Check for Overconfidence

So, how do you know if your leadership style is confident or overconfident? Consider asking yourself the following questions: 

  • Does your organization trust you?
  • Do you ask others for feedback and make an effort to implement it?
  • Do you care about others’ issues?
  • Are you balancing other perspectives? 
  • Are you a role model?

How to Use Uncertainty to Your Advantage in Healthcare Leadership

77% of employees believe that leadership trust is a key motivating factor. How can you instill a motivating work culture through effective healthcare leadership?

Uncertainty. 

Uncertainty isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s the ability to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and practice servant leadership to drive a successful healthcare organization. While you don’t know all the answers, you are willing to ask the right questions to make an informed decision.

Consider the following steps when implementing uncertainty in your healthcare leadership style:

1.Identify What You’re Uncertain About

Where is your uncertainty stemming from? What specific part is causing concern? Your uncertainty is often associated with an upcoming event, decision, or action. Depending on your brainstorming style, consider writing down your thoughts in a notepad and creating an actionable list to help you make an action plan. 

2.Select Actions that Will Propel You Forward

Once you have your thoughts laid out, you’ll want to develop a strategic action plan. Your action plan shouldn’t be just built on your assumptions, but instead, use real-time data and other perspectives to determine how your decision will affect your healthcare organization’s objectives. Don’t be afraid to hold meetings with other key stakeholders to dive into the scope of the project more deeply before making the call.

You’ll also want to consider who or what your decision impacts and any long-term implications. It’s wise to think about the timeline, resources, budget, and even a testing strategy to ensure your decision drives the best results. 

3.Measure and Repeat the Process

If you’ve implemented your action plan, you’ll want to measure the success of your decision and the impact you made on the project or company growth. Do you feel confident in your decision? Did your decision propel the company or your team? You can drive real results by holding follow-up meetings to breakdown the success of the project or analyze metrics that showcase positive growth.

Elevate Your Healthcare Leadership Strategies

To drive innovation and growth, your medical supply brand needs both confident and uncertain leadership. While it’s important to be a confident leader that can inspire your company, you also need to lead with uncertainty to ensure you’re not taking unnecessary risks. 

Ready to feel confident in your content marketing? Contact Share Moving Media today.

How Content Marketing Aids Healthcare Sales Reps at Explaining Product Value

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Content development enables sales teams to drive brand awareness, demand, and convert leads into loyal customers — making it a direct connection to your ROI and buyer engagement.

Situated throughout the lead funnel, effective content development also gives your sales reps everything from website content and presentations to nurtured qualified leads throughout the entire buyer’s journey with advanced case studies and whitepapers. 

When you have a sales enablement strategy in place, utilizing the right types of content can benefit your overall bottom line and create more cohesion between your internal teams. After all, 73% of sales teams agree that cross-functional collaboration is key to the overall sales process.

Let’s take a look at what sales enablement is and how you can develop impactful content to aid healthcare sales reps.

What is Sales Enablement for Healthcare?

Your medical distributors are an integral part of your business, responsible for selling your products to healthcare facilities across the country. Since they’re spread throughout different regions, it’s essential to arm them with content resources that successfully educate key audiences on your product’s use cases and benefits.

Sales enablement is the process, technology, and content that empowers these sales reps to sell your product effectively. When you provide content that educates, offers solutions, and breaks down barriers, you enable reps to improve their sales conversions and ultimately spend more time selling.

77% of companies currently use a content marketing strategy to empower sales teams. You can get started with the following steps:

  • Understand what makes your customers move through your buyer’s journey and create content for every stage 
  • Develop customer-centric content that targets pain points and positions your product as the solution
  • Make content accessible to your sales teams, such as using cloud storage or CRM tool
  • Utilize sales analytics to understand what content your reps using and where you can improve

By aligning distribution sales reps and marketing teams to create quality content, you’re more likely to see higher engagement and conversion rates.

6 Types of Content that Aids Healthcare Sales Reps

By developing a sales enablement strategy, you can create content for every interaction your distributors have with existing and potential customers. Here are a few types of quality content to aid healthcare sales:

1.Competitor Research

If you understand your customer’s pain points and needs, it’s essential you analyze where you stand amongst the competition with real statistics. To create successful competitor analysis, you also need to educate your sales teams on how they can persuade potential customers to make the next final conversion step by filling in your competitor’s gaps and highlighting the success of your products. 

2. Case Studies

Case studies are true testaments to your products and help prospects resonate with your brand. High-quality and customer-centric case studies demonstrate your audience’s struggles and showcase how your services are a valuable solution.

You can develop case studies in several ways:

  • Written testimonials
  • Video interviews
  • Reviews

4. Blog Posts

Blog posts are utilized in an early stage, search engine optimization (SEO) marketing strategy, but they are also valuable sales tools to help nurture prospects. While they typically live on your website, you can turn your blog posts into one-page reference flyers for your sales team to quickly send to customers.

4. Ebooks or Whitepapers

High-quality ebooks and whitepapers often provide in-depth educational material and statistics around your product’s benefits. Typically used in the early stage of the sales process, they are ideal for a quick pitch or last-minute call to provide additional information and proof. 

5. Video

Video marketing results in 66% more qualified leads in your pipeline. By developing education video content, you can explain your product’s benefits, features, and even instructions beyond your sales rep knowledge. Videos are also more digestible and hold attention for longer periods, so they are excellent material to showcase in a presentation, webinar, or email. 

6. Onboarding Content

Often overlooked by marketing teams, developing engaging onboarding materials help train your sales reps on how to effectively sell your products. Not only does onboarding content provide valuable company and product information, but it also establishes your ideal sales pitch for each customer interaction, so your reps feel confident nailing the sale.

Start Developing Content to Aid Healthcare Sales and Boost Your ROI

For marketing to impact the success of your sales reps, it’s essential to develop quality content that meets their needs, helps streamline the process, and improves your ROI. Your content should not only affect each stage of the buyer’s journey but also help your team be more prepared to interact and educate customers. When marketing and sales collaborate, you’ll be more equipped to engage and convert your customers into long-term brand advocates.

If you’re ready to develop content that empowers your healthcare sales reps, contact Share Moving Media today.