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Can Content Marketing Help You Squeeze ROI Out of Your R&D Process?

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Research and development, R&D, is the key to advancement in the healthcare industry. From pharmaceutical companies to med-tech suppliers, healthcare companies must continuously innovate to find new treatments to improve the patient experience. And all that innovation? It costs.

Getting a return on R&D investment is more challenging than ever. R&D leaders face numerous challenges, such as the increased complexity of global regulatory requirements. Unfortunately, this has led to dwindling investment, particularly in the med-tech field.

Companies that want to increase their market share shouldn’t be cutting back on R&D investment. They should be focusing on securing a greater return on investment (ROI). Content marketing is one avenue to do this.

This guide explains how content marketing assists R&D in healthcare and provides five golden rules for using content marketing to squeeze more ROI out of your innovation.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing uses relevant content to attract a clearly defined target consumer audience with the ultimate aim of driving profitable consumer action. The term “content” encompasses digital media, like websites, blogs, infographics, and traditional media, like healthcare conference speeches and print magazine articles. Content marketing gives you a huge toolbox of ways to reach consumers.

How to Create Content Marketing That Assists R&D in Healthcare

The med-tech industry is expected to grow at a rate of 5.6% annually in the years to come, reaching $595 billion by 2024. Now is not the time to cut back on R&D investment. It’s time to harness content marketing to increase your ROI.

Here’s how to use content marketing to reach your target audience, boost consumer engagement, and ultimately increase ROI.

1. Create Content with Value

To create content that converts into sales, you need to know who you’re selling to. Healthcare buying behaviors have changed. Physicians themselves are less influential as many now work for hospitals, group practices, or medical centers, instead of independently.

These larger organizations are the economic buyers, mainly focused on cutting costs – especially in cutting-edge segments like implantable heart defibrillators and knee implants. As a healthcare supplier, it’s up to you to understand such decision-makers’ hurdles (like tumbling product costs coupled with increased regulatory burden).

Create buyer personas to get in the mind of your target audience. You can then craft content that speaks to the points they care about. This allows you to ensure that your content adds value – the secret to success in any marketing endeavor.

2. Diversify Content Platforms

One of content marketing’s most valuable traits is its versatility. Content can consist of blogs, webpages, thought-leader articles, infographics, e-books, print books, white papers, videos, podcasts, and more. The list goes on.

Content marketing can be easily adapted to diverse purposes and target audiences. It can also be integrated with other marketing techniques. For example, you can use social media to drive consumers to a webpage or blog.

3. Create a Content Calendar

Content marketing isn’t made to be stagnant. Update your marketing materials regularly. For example, if a new iteration of an ultrasound machine you are selling is coming out, plan a publishing strategy for your blog to highlight this development.

A content calendar is an excellent way to track all of your content marketing efforts. Advanced planning allows you to roll out campaigns highlighting new R&D developments and whet the consumers’ appetites. If you know your company has a cutting-edge product that will enter the market in 2021, you should start planning content to flag this innovation in 2020.

4. Repurpose Content for Maximum Efficiency

Just because you plan, it doesn’t mean that your content marketing plan is set in stone. Again, content marketing is versatile. Finding ways to repurpose content across diverse platforms reduces costs while improving reach. For instance, a series of blogs can be adapted to a white paper or even an ebook, while talking points from a conference presentation can be used for a blog.

5. Analyze and Optimize Content’s Impact

Rely on healthcare marketing tools to create, track, and analyze content. Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) in advance will help you measure success and pivot as needed. For instance, if you publish a thought-leader article in a healthcare online magazine, you should be able to get feedback on how many clicks this drove to your website – and how many of those visitors became buyers.

Optimizing content doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing the wording of a headline or swapping out images. Even the format of a concluding call-to-action (CTA) can influence whether a consumer decides to click or not. Timing is also a factor: Sending out an email newsletter at 2:00 a.m. when your target audience is sleeping isn’t a great idea.

Learn More About Content Marketing for Healthcare

Share Moving Media can help you increase healthcare sales with comprehensive content marketing. A full-service media company, we create many types of content, including webinars, blog posts, e-books, graphics, and more. With this diverse array of healthcare marketing tools, we help your brand grow.

Subscribe to our newsletter and discover more ways to ensure your content marketing assists R&D in healthcare. Want personalized content strategy guidance? Contact us to get started.

How to Use Video Marketing to Boost Healthcare Sales

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Digital marketing provides marketing teams with endless options to boost healthcare sales, especially given the fact that more patients are heading online to search for answers to various health-related needs. Approximately 70,000 health-related Google searches happen every minute! So, with so much competition online, how can you stand apart from the crowd? One excellent method is to start utilizing video marketing for healthcare sales. 

Video Marketing: What You Need to Know

Recent studies state that 92% of marketers believe that video is an important aspect of their overall marketing strategy. 

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Source: Wyzowl

Video has a profound effect on consumers. This is because people process videos and other visuals at a much faster rate than they do text. The human brain processes visuals (videos, infographics, images, etc.) approximately 60,000 times faster than text and grabs the attention of viewers five times faster than still images do.

Visual content is not only easier to process, consumers continuously state that they prefer videos instead of still images because it delivers to them the information that they need much quicker than it does via text and infographics. 

Since it can have such an impact on your audience, video marketing is well worth the time and monetary investment. So, how do you implement video marketing into your current strategy? By getting to know the basics first. 

What is Video Marketing?

Video marketing is just what it sounds like – creating video content to help share information with your targeted audience. Video content comes in almost as many forms (if not more) than traditional written content. Some of the most popular videos used in marketing include:

  • How-to/Educational Videos
  • Video Ads
  • Explainer Videos
  • Product Videos
  • Testimonial Videos

Videos can be animated, they can be traditionally filmed, and they can even be live broadcasted on social media and shared over and over again, making it an excellent source of evergreen content for your brand. 

Current Video Marketing Statistics Worth Knowing

While it’s true that traditional content can be simpler to put together than video content, it’s definitely worth the time and investment. Need further proof? The numbers don’t lie:

  • 85% of internet users in the U.S. watch video content monthly across multiple devices.
  • 57% of marketers say they now use live video in their marketing strategy. 
  • 41% of B2B marketers are curious about adding video marketing to their sales strategies in 2020.
  • 48% of consumers want to watch videos that reflect what they are interested in – whether it be educational, entertainment, or on products. 
  • Both global online video viewing and ad spend on videos are predicted to increase in 2021
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Source: MarketingCharts

How to Use Video Marketing in Healthcare Sales

Now, when it comes to using video marketing in healthcare sales strategies, there are countless directions your team can take. Whether you are looking to bring in new patients to a given office/hospital location or are trying to sell various treatment options to patients, video marketing can play a significant role in encouraging them to take action. 

Not quite sure how video marketing can help in your healthcare sales strategy? Here are a few examples to help give you some ideas to play around with.

Physician Profile Videos

If you’re a healthcare organization looking to bring in new patients, one of the best video marketing methods to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy is to include physician profile videos. These videos introduce each doctor and give patients an idea of who they may or may not be working with. 

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Source: Edward-Elmhurst Health

Welcome Videos 

Having doctor profiles are an excellent way for new potential patients to get to know your staff. In that same light, including welcome videos on your website is an excellent way to introduce your organization, your mission and share your values with those who are trying to decide if your organization is the right fit for their needs. 

Video Testimonials

Research shows that 90% of patients use online reviews and testimonials to evaluate doctors and care facilities. So, what better way to improve your online reputation than by sharing patient testimonials? 

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Source: Loyola Medicine

Reading about a pediatric cancer survivor’s journey is powerful in itself. However, watching a video of the patient and/or their family sharing their story holds a much higher emotional power over those who are looking into the testimonials of a healthcare organization. 

Educational Videos on Various Procedures and/or Health Conditions

Investing in educational videos to help you explain various health conditions or medical procedures is another excellent way to incorporate video marketing into your healthcare sales strategy. These videos are a great way to not only educate your patients but help ease any of their anxieties revolving around a recent diagnosis or an upcoming procedure. 

Product Information Videos

Finally, product information videos are an excellent tool for those in healthcare manufacturing and distribution. Much like the educational videos for procedures and health conditions, product information videos give consumers an idea of what a product is, what it does, why it’s beneficial, and so much more. 

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Source: AliMed

Amp Up Your Marketing Strategy with Share Moving Media

At Share Moving Media, we are a full-service media company that understands how important your content is to your healthcare marketing strategy. That’s why we help healthcare brands create stunning webinars, blogs, and articles, and we’ll be happy to help you develop your video marketing strategy for your healthcare sales team.

Ready to get started? Then contact us today to learn more!

The Definitive Guide to Building Buyer Personas of IDN Supply Chain Leaders

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The healthcare market is enormous – and it’s only going to get bigger. Global healthcare spending is anticipated to increase at a compound annual growth rate of five percent from 2019 to 2023.

Medical suppliers who want to increase their share in an expanding market should act now. The right marketing campaign is the key to success. What’s the “right” campaign? It depends on your target audience.

Suppose you’re a supplier trying to sell medical masks to private physicians’ offices. In that case, your healthcare marketing techniques will be (should be!) different than if you’re a supplier selling diagnostic ultrasound equipment to integrated delivery networks (IDNs).

Buyer personas are integral to guiding your approach. A buyer persona allows you to define your target audience and better understand their buying behaviors, so you can craft your marketing accordingly.

This guide takes you through a simple three-step process to craft buyer personas for healthcare.

Why Buyer Personas Matter

The purpose of a buyer persona is to understand how your customer thinks and acts. With this information, you can better understand the decision-making process that governs what, when, where, and how they buy.

What a Buyer Persona Is

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of who is using your product or service. This imaginary profile covers details like demographics (sex, age, race, income, marital status, educational level), purpose (such as career goals), and motivation.

What a Buyer Persona Isn’t

A buyer persona is not a guess. It’s fact-based, created with detailed market research.

3-Step Checklist to Creating Buyer Personas for Healthcare

The healthcare supply market is exceptionally competitive. A well-crafted buyer persona allows you to stand out with concise, impactful messaging that attracts the buyer’s attention – and keeps it throughout the medical equipment sales funnel.

Here’s how to create buyer personas for healthcare.

1. Conduct Quantitative Analysis

Suppose your product isn’t exclusive to a single market segment (for instance, you target both individual physicians and IDNs). In that case, the first step is to break down your broader market into smaller segments.

Create a list of existing clients and group them according to details like location, contract value, and engagement (as evidenced by the frequency of orders, for instance). With this demographic and revenue information, start looking for trends.

For instance, you might find a correlation between location and an uptick in spending – indicating a gap in the market that you can step in to fill. If a competitor had an area sales rep changeover, it’s a prime opportunity.

2. Complete Qualitative Research

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when crafting buyer personas is ignoring psychographics in favor of demographics. This is where qualitative analysis comes into play. To better understand your target segments, both at the individual and organizational levels, get more intimate.

Reach out to trusted clients to arrange a chat. Healthcare professionals are busy, so keep it short. Emphasize that you’re trying to collect feedback to see how you can better serve them. 

During the interview, get a brief description of the business, the individual’s role within the organization, and their main goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Are they looking to cut costs? Have they been tasked with researching new tech? Is efficiency a factor?

Also, refer to your offering, asking what they use it for and, of course, what improvement they’d like to see in your product or service. Remember, retention is half the battle in healthcare sales.

3. Create and Socialize the Persona

You can now create your semi-fictional buyer persona based on the evidence you’ve collected. Say you sell heart stents, for example. A quantitative analysis reveals that private hospitals in the Midwest are your most significant revenue source. Your qualitative research shows that it’s the heads of cardiology departments who are the relevant decision-makers.

So, make your buyer persona the head of cardiology in a hospital setting. Let’s call her Rachel Harding. Dr. Harding will be further along in her career, at least 40 years of age, and highly educated. She must balance providing the best patient care with budget limitations set by higher-ups. 

As head of her department, Dr. Harding must stay on top of the latest developments. She does this by reading certain healthcare publications, like Wiley’s Clinical Cardiology, and attending essential conferences, like the American Society of Echocardiography Annual Conference. 

Finally, Dr. Harding is busy. She’s overseeing an entire department. Maybe she also has a family at home. Her time is precious. Your healthcare marketing strategy must take this into account.

Now you have an idea of where and how to reach a professional like Dr. Harding best. Thus, the buyer persona makes it easier to sell to your end customer without ever meeting them in person.

Find Out More About Making Buyer Personas Work for You

Share Moving Media helps healthcare suppliers reach diverse buyers through targeted content. Our publications, educational services, and associations cater to distributors, providers, and manufacturers. With our industry knowledge and comprehensive content offering, we help you increase market share.

Sign up for our newsletter for more healthcare marketing tips and tricks. Want to work with us? Then contact us today!

Influencer Marketing: Are Journals in Healthcare Marketing the New Influencers?

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Influencer marketing and healthcare don’t always go hand in hand in the mind of a marketing professional. When people think of influencer marketing, they automatically think of big-name celebrities cross-posting promotional material on their social media pages for various brands. In fact, there has been some backlash in the past regarding influencer marketing in healthcare because social media influencers “aren’t doctors” and shouldn’t be advising on medical concerns. 

So, if traditional influencer marketing is so controversial, how does the marketing trend work in the healthcare industry?

Influencer Marketing in Healthcare: Current Trends

When it comes to healthcare marketing tools, many of the “traditional” marketing tools work well for those in charge of building a healthcare marketing strategy for manufacturers, providers, etc. The same can be said of influencer marketing when done right. Studies have shown that approximately 80% of advertisers find this marketing method effective.

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Source: Smart Insights / Mediakix

The easiest way to break the idea of influencer marketing down is to pay careful attention to the audience that you’ll be addressing. However, when it comes to healthcare, things can get dicey. So, if you’re looking to leverage influencer marketing in the healthcare industry, you need to keep in mind that you are catering to a very specific audience made up of either doctors or patients (or sometimes a combination of both). 

So, while a creative celebrity cameo can work in some instances, you’re better off implementing one of these three current healthcare marketing strategies:

1. Healthcare Influencers

The concept of healthcare influencers works very similarly to that of more traditional influencers. The primary difference is that these individuals are experts in the industry. They can be doctors, surgeons, scientists, manufacturers, and more. 

2. Health e-Mavens 

The concept of e-Mavens isn’t exactly a new marketing concept; however, it’s not often talked about either. This concept stems from a term first coined in 1987 known as marketing mavens. Marketing mavens were known as a type of influencer who not only had a social presence but, again, a certain level of expertise or insider knowledge in a particular industry. 

In our current age of technology, these individuals are known as e-mavens, and they are considered consumers with first-hand knowledge of a subject and share their expertise online. What makes these individuals different from healthcare influencers is that while they have first-hand knowledge, they aren’t exactly “experts” in the traditional sense. 

Health e-mavens are defined as those who are “actively involved with health information acquisition and information transmission” across the internet. These are people that the public has come to know and trust for one reason or another. They are constantly searching for new information and they have a deep desire to share it once they’ve found it. 

One recent example is Lucy Hale, who has taken it upon herself to open up and share her women’s health journey and finding the right kind of birth control that suits her specific needs. 

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Source: Instagram

Helping women everywhere find the information they need to stay healthy is a passion for the young actress, so it’s unsurprising that she would open up about her story and share something so vulnerable with the public. 

3. Online Medical Journals

Did you know that approximately 7% of Google’s daily searches are in some way, health-related? That amounts to nearly 70,000 health-related Google searches each minute. Technology is an excellent resource, and with so many patients taking more control over their health and wellbeing, they are turning to the internet for information both before and after consulting with their medical team.

This is where journals in healthcare marketing come into play. Online medical journals come in many different forms, including:

  • Professional medical journals, such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
  • Digital healthcare journals for the public, including The Journal of Healthcare Contracting, Frontiers, and more.

How Journals in Healthcare Marketing Work as a Form of Influencer Marketing

So, which of these methods is the most effective for a successful healthcare marketing strategy? The right answer is to say all three have their advantages; however, online journals have a bit more edge to them than health e-mavens and other healthcare influencers. 

The saying content is king still rings loud in the marketing industry, no matter what sector you are in. This is especially true when it comes to content marketing in healthcare. Think about it for a moment – blogs and other similar online content are among the top three types of media used in content marketing today. 

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Source: HubSpot

Online journals in healthcare can and often do fall under this category. They work because they can be easily optimized for search engines, they can help draw in consistent (and relevant) traffic to your website, and when thoroughly researched, can help you build your authority on a given subject matter. 

This type of content is crucial now more than ever as more and more individuals start turning to Dr. Google for answers to their medical questions. 

Get More Healthcare Marketing Tips and Tricks with Share Moving Media

As a full-service media company, the team here at Share Moving Media understands that staying up to date on the current healthcare marketing tools and trends can be a tricky process. That’s why we do the heavy lifting for our clients. Contact us today to learn how we can help your brand.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Marketing Minute, today! 

How to Make Your Content Sell When You Never Meet the End Customer

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A guide to successful content marketing in the healthcare supply chain.

Content is a global industry and it’s more accessible than ever before. You can hammer out a blog at your computer and have your words read by someone you’ve never met, in a country you’ve never visited.

The great news is that this gives you an enormous scope. You can reach consumers across the state, the nation, or even the world. The bad news? You lose specificity. You lose personalization. And you lose trust – the same trust that is essential to successfully selling an idea, a service, or a product.

Those drawbacks might make it sound like effective content marketing – especially in the competitive healthcare supply chain market – is a losing battle. But it doesn’t have to be.

This guide lays out what it takes to craft compelling healthcare content marketing.

Hurdles to Effective Content for Healthcare Sales

In a globalized world, the key to creating content that converts is to overcome the two “T”s: Targeting and Trust.

1. Targeting

You’ve written an original blog. It’s informative. It’s eloquent. It’s a masterpiece. But if you don’t get that blog in front of the right eyes, it’s useless. Being able to sift through the massive content marketplace and get the right people looking at the right content is critical.

2. Trust

Sales used to be personal. In the ’50s, salespeople went door-to-door to peddle their wares – or, in the case of the healthcare industry, from one healthcare provider’s office or hospital to the next.

Today? Not so much. With modern technology – fast internet, fast communications, fast logistics – sales has become just as far-reaching as the global content industry.

This has created a trust issue with consumers. When it comes to content, research reveals that people distrust internet information, especially social media. That’s bad news for content marketing, which is increasingly digital-reliant.

How to Craft Content That Converts

The same tools and technologies that have created a content marketplace hampered by targeting and trust issues can be leveraged in your interests.

Here’s how to tame the beast.

Understand Your Customer

Just because you never meet your end customer in the flesh doesn’t mean that you can’t develop an understanding of who they are and what they want. Develop a customer journey map to articulate customer personas, allowing you to target different content marketing types to different niches. This helps you create content for healthcare sales that is meaningful to the end customer – even if you never meet them.

As you map out the customer journey, consider different decision-maker roles. Who makes the choices about what the consumer receives? How do you reach that audience? Determining the gatekeepers will help you define relevant brand messaging in healthcare.

Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader

There are a few essential keys to success in sales. Expertise is one. The best salespersons are experts in their fields, backed by industry knowledge. Study, learn, and establish an opinion in your area, whether it’s catheters or stents.

This opens the gates to healthcare organization thought leadership. You can become a thought leader by publishing blogs, opinion pieces, or investigator-initiated studies in respected healthcare publications. Target both digital and physical media for maximum impact.

Get Personal

Don’t rely on just one channel to sell your content. You have many avenues available to you. A multi-platform approach encompassing both inbound and outbound marketing allows you to diversify your target audience.

Speaking at events, live streaming seminars, or participating in podcasts further confirms your position as a thought leader. It also lets people get to know you. Once people have a face to the name, they feel more connected, and you start building trust. 

Run with it. Get personal. Talk about your background. Did you spend years touring hospitals as a medical sales rep? Have you spent time working in a lab in healthcare R&D? Are you personally invested in the message, product, or service you are selling? You should be. And you should make that clear to consumers.

Be Adaptive

Another trait of great salespersons is that they know when to pivot. One of the best things about content marketing is that it’s measurable. Don’t just put content out there and hope for the best—Set KPIs (key performance indicators).

How many subscribers does your newsletter have? How many people follow you on Twitter? How many unique clicks did your last thought-leader article in a healthcare online magazine receive? Did those clicks convert to new contacts or, better yet, sales?

There are many healthcare marketing tools available to help you craft and track content. If something isn’t working, reexamine your approach. Is it the medium, the message, or a combination of both? With KPIs, you can better understand that elusive end customer and tailor your marketing accordingly.

Get More Tips on Content Strategy for Healthcare

Here at Share Moving Media, we know how to craft content for healthcare sales. As a full-service media company, we create articles, webinars, podcasts, e-books, blogs, and more. Our mission is to give clients the tools they need to increase their market share.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more best practice tips and tricks. Interested in collaborating? Then contact us today!