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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.

The Share Moving Media Blog: Your Marketing Resource for Healthcare Contracting Professionals

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The Share Moving Media blog is the ultimate marketing resource for healthcare contracting professionals, such as medical suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors. Our goal is always to help you increase your customer market share through value-added content and opportunities for increased visibility and brand awareness.

Your feedback is important to us. If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered here, let us know. Meanwhile, be sure to subscribe, so you don’t miss important content that can show you how to create ideal customer relationships, boost revenue, and increase your authority in the field.

Healthcare Industry Challenges

A new world

At Share Moving Media, we believe now is the perfect time to launch our new blog series. Healthcare industry challenges have perhaps never been greater than in the last six months. However, we see this time as a window for rethinking business practices and creating new methods for addressing customer needs.

You’ve no doubt experienced some of the hurdles brought on by the novel coronavirus and the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic:

  • Supply chain disruptions at all levels for equipment, pharmaceuticals, raw ingredients, and materials
  • Supply/demand imbalances, shortages, and allocations
  • Increased marketplace competition in some sectors
  • Abrupt price changes and quality control issues
  • Development of nontraditional distribution pathways
  • Formation of government consortiums
  • Reallocation of medical and support staff, as well as budgets
  • Timeline shifts for mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations
  • Stock market volatility and unpredictability
  • Shift from B2B to B2C selling and vice versa
  • Expanded focus on COVID, PPE, and vaccines
  • Decrease in non-emergent medical care
  • Implementation of telemedicine for routine care
  • Reduced onsite personnel and more remote work
  • Customer workplace visitation restrictions
  • Retail outlet closures and an increase in online business
  • Academic institution shutdowns
  • Patient loss of insurance coverage with unemployment

The healthcare industry as a whole has been reeling since the start of 2020. While the remainder of this year may seem shrouded in mystery, many companies are starting to see the fog clear. We want to assist you in developing marketing strategies moving forward, to the degree we are all able to plan for the future. Therefore, we will be addressing these challenges and much more in upcoming blog posts.

Introduction to Share Moving Media

Our publications and services

For readers not yet familiar with Share Moving Media, we are a full-service media and content company dedicated to medical providers, manufacturers, and distributors. Through our associations, educational services, and publications, we provide news, information, and brand visibility via advertising and sponsored content.

Our high-quality content includes:

  • Articles
  • Blog posts
  • Ebooks
  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Podcasts
  • Graphics

We produce multiple publications in the healthcare contracting vertical. You may already be familiar with Repertoire, our magazine for the healthcare distribution channel focusing on physician offices, hospitals, surgery centers, and long-term care institutions. We also publish The Journal of Healthcare Contracting for healthcare supply professionals. This popular publication features content for healthcare systems and facilities, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and group purchasing organizations.

Pillars of our mission

We’re confident that Share Moving Media stands out from other healthcare contracting media companies by virtue of our three mission pillars:

  • To provide and promote marketing excellence in healthcare
  • To enhance healthcare brand communications via storytelling and unique case studies
  • To use persona-based marketing to help clients finetune consumer demographics and to identify and address evolving industry demands

Healthcare Contracting Help Where You Need It

How our blog will elevate your business

Whether you’re a small niche supplier or an integrated delivery network, our blog will help you take your business to the next level. In future posts, we’ll be discussing diverse topics in the industry, such as:

  • Contract management software
  • Medical device innovation
  • Integrated delivery networks
  • Equipment purchasing
  • Hospital inventory management
  • Healthcare marketing analytics
  • Brand messaging
  • Thought leadership

Through examples and best practices, we want to help you:

  • Tell the story of your brand and earn an audience
  • Guide your brand through its lifecycle, from launch to customer conversion and retention
  • Demonstrate how your products are beneficial
  • Evaluate different content forms (blogs, white papers, videos, etc.) to determine which one is right for your varying needs at any given time
  • Develop one-of-a-kind marketing content to set you apart from the competition and to provide invaluable tools for sales staff
  • Discover how to use content and advertising together to complement each other

We’ll be talking about health insurance trends, group purchasing, medical distribution, supply chains, sales creativity, and more.

Reach Out to Share Moving Media Today

Interested in how you can start working with Share Moving Media to help your business reach its goals? Contact us today and let us know how we can assist you. And we look forward to welcoming you as a new blog subscriber.