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Healthcare Industry Branding: 5 Surefire Ways to Get Your Industry Association Talking About Your Brand

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There are currently 784,626 healthcare companies in business nationwide. From hospital purchasing to hospital distributors, that’s a lot of competition throughout the healthcare supply chain. To increase visibility in a saturated market, healthcare suppliers need to find ways to set themselves apart from the competition.

Joining industry associations is an effective way to gain a foothold in the healthcare industry. Developing professional relationships with other healthcare providers can help drive traffic through referrals, create a support system for brainstorming and problem-solving, and help with sales growth.

Becoming an association member isn’t enough to make a significant impact on your business. You need to encourage industry associations to spread the word about your brand. Promotion from an established and respected association can raise awareness about your business, expand your overall reach, and generate revenue for your healthcare business.

How Industry Associations Help Business

From the Health Industry Distributors Association to the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, there are numerous organizations for healthcare providers to join. Becoming a member of a trusted industry association brings numerous benefits. There are three main ways in which an association can enrich your business.

1. Networking with Peers and Colleagues 

Associations consist of professionals who share similar concerns, obstacles, and opportunities. Whether you meet in person or connect online, you’re able to join conversations with a large pool of like-minded healthcare suppliers, end-users, and purchasers. You can break down barriers and learn from others’ experiences, gain insight into how you could be improving your own processes, and share your expertise to help others. 

2. Standardization of Best Practices

By sharing knowledge and experiences with other healthcare professionals, you’re able to develop a series of best practices. From curating important information and separating it from trendy buzzwords to researching industry benchmarks, associations help determine a level of expectation for practices and procedures. As expectations evolve, associations assist with developing and communicating standards to help streamline conversations and practices industry-wide.

3. Individual and Professional Development

Career development is a leading reason people join industry associations. Associations provide educational resources for their members. From training and seminars to bringing in guest speakers who are experts in their field, associations develop knowledge and expertise for healthcare professionals. Mentorship opportunities guide professionals in decision-making and problem-solving. Individual chapters provide leadership roles, which help build management skills and develop a trusted reputation.

5 Ways to Gain Brand Awareness Within Your Industry Association 

With so much to gain from an industry association, businesses need to leverage their membership in these five ways to develop brand recognition and revenue.

1. Contribute to the Conversation 

A major perk to industry associations is having access to a huge audience with shared interests yet different experiences. When you see forums or discussion threads, whether online or in person, join the conversation. Add your own experience and insight to provide helpful resources for others in your industry. By providing relevant, detailed answers to questions, you present a new perspective to the conversation and set yourself apart as an industry leader.

The more people see your name and your company involved in these discussions, the more you’ll build a trusted network of followers who look to you for advice and input. Eventually, members will think of your name when they have questions, need to problem-solve, and ultimately need your services.

2. Generate Insightful Data 

Draw attention to your business with researched facts and figures. Through polls and surveys, you can ask important questions that others in the industry may also have. Analyze the results and share those studies and their findings with the members of your association. 

This helps to educate them on industry-wide topics, which strengthens the industry as a whole. It shows that you take the initiative to seek out answers. You’re willing to share the information with your fellow members as a means to help their personal and professional development.

Whether you post this data on online channels or submit it to an association publication, insightful data can gain you publicity from press coverage to social media posts. All of this raises awareness about your brand and helps to build a loyal following.

3. Join Forces with Other Members 

Associations encourage collaboration among their members. Consider collaborating with another company within the association. By working together, you position yourself as a team player. You also double your audience by appealing to your followers as well as those of the other company. 

Whether you combine your expertise to conduct industry studies or work together to write an educational article, collaboration tends to attract more attention from association membership and leaders. When people see two reputable companies discussing something of interest, they’re more likely to tune in. Position yourself as a thought leader by joining forces with an association partner.

4. Stay Front of Mind 

Create meaningful content and consistently share it with your association. Develop social media posts that deliver useful information and are easy for others to share. Encourage members to leave comments and join discussions to build engagement among viewership. Not only will your fellow members begin talking about your business. Association management is sure to see your involvement and will be more inclined to promote your brand to others in the industry.

5. Volunteer 

Although many associations survive on dues, most still run on volunteerism. One surefire way to get noticed is to help out wherever you can. From offering to coordinate industry-wide or local chapter events to serving on a discussion panel, by donating your time to the greater good, you can become a household name among association leadership. Fellow members will also get to know you and your business. 

The more involved you are in the association, the more opportunities you have to gain visibility, build trust, and create buzz about your business.

Let Share Moving Media Help Increase Brand Awareness

There are numerous benefits to joining an industry association. If you’re ready to take membership to the next level, hire an expert to help you create content that can help gain the attention of your industry association. 

Contact Share Moving Media today to create a strategy that will build brand awareness among your industry association.

3 Critical Metrics You Must Measure for Long-Term Brand Loyalty

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Customer loyalty is one element of success for any business. Once you’ve won a client’s trust, they will return to you repeatedly without new sales and marketing efforts on your part. If they love your product or service, they may even recommend it to others, serving as a free brand ambassador for your business. Brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing is especially critical due to the competitive nature of the industry.

The healthcare marketplace is challenging. You’ve undoubtedly experienced the struggle at some point – having difficulty getting new leads or, even worse, thinking you’ve locked in a new lead, only to have it snatched away by a competitor.

In this business, long-term brand loyalty is worth working for.

But how can you know if you’re succeeding in maintaining that high level of trust that will keep a customer by your side for months, years, or even decades?

You can use a few metrics to check if your brand is resonating with consumers and winning them over.

Understanding the Value of Brand Loyalty

We aren’t alone in our emphasis on the importance of brand loyalty. In the year ahead, retention marketing is expected to be one of the biggest marketing trends. Instead of exclusively trying to attract new customers, professional marketers are refocusing on keeping existing customers happy.

Why the shift?

It’s a simple numbers game: With effective retention efforts, you can enjoy steady sales without paying big bucks for lead generation. This allows for a lower cost-per-sale investment overall.

Ideas for Boosting Brand Loyalty in Healthcare Manufacturing

There are a few ways you can nurture brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing.

You can try personalized cross-selling and up-selling, for example. Check your database of existing clients. What products are they ordering, and what products could they benefit from? Giving customized recommendations for useful items your customers can actually use shows you’re paying attention to their needs.

Think of it like the “Customers Also Bought” function on retail e-commerce websites like Amazon. If you buy a flashlight, do you also need to buy batteries? If you buy leather boots, do you need a leather protectant spray? Those little suggestions are surprisingly useful sometimes.

Another tactic is to boost brand engagement with useful content. For healthcare manufacturers, this could come in the form of information-packed blogs, webinars, or social media content that’s relevant to your target audience.

Notice, we said information-packed – not promotional! Say you sell cardiac stents, for example. Instead of writing a blog that pushes your product, write a blog about the latest stent research or live-tweet an event, like the World Congress on Cardiac Surgery and Medical Devices.

Why do these techniques work?

They show that you care about your consumer and your consumer’s wants and needs.

According to Harvard Business Review, successful modern brands don’t focus on buyers but on users. That means instead of aggressively pushing products – consumers are too savvy for that now – they aim to make the consumer’s life easier. Isn’t that what we all want?

3 Metrics for Measuring Brand Loyalty

So, now you’ve got some idea of how to harness brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing. But how can you be sure your efforts are working? 

Let these three metrics be your guide.

1. Content Engagement

We talked about using content to engage with customers and nurture their loyalty above. To see if your content strategy is working, you have to check your engagement levels. The precise metric will vary depending on the content format.

For social media, engagement can be measured using figures like clicks, likes, and shares.

Also, don’t forget the comments! A Facebook post with 500 likes but zero comments is arguably less valuable than a post with 300 likes but 100 comments.

Why? Comments show a more active interest. They require more than the click of a button. Comments can spark debates and discussions, allowing your brand to reply directly to consumers. This creates a more personalized engagement situation.

For podcasts, engagement might be measured by the number of listens, downloads, and likes. For webinars, it’s all about how many people tuned in. Email, however, is about the number of opens and clicks your content gets. Metrics need to be tailored to the given format.

2. Repurchasing Figures

Your customers can tell you whether they’re loyal to your brand or not – and they can do it without saying a word. Periodically revisit your sales data and check client behavior over set periods (e.g., monthly, quarterly, annually).

Specifically, look for repurchasing levels. This allows you to calculate the overall retention rate (proportion of returning customers versus new customers).

Analyzing repurchasing metrics may also allow you to regenerate leads. For example, if a customer who was a regular has suddenly dropped off, follow up. Did something happen that turned them off? Targeting issues will ultimately allow you to improve brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing.

Also, keep an eye out for multiple product purchases. This is a great sign. It often means a customer was happy enough about their product purchase – and their experience with you as a provider – and thus expanded their order.

Conversely, follow up on orders that have decreased.

3. Reported Customer Satisfaction

Last but not least, if you want the harsh truths as to how engaged and loyal your customers are, go to the source: ask them directly.

Inviting your customers to provide feedback shows them you care about their opinion. It also gives them the chance to tell you where they’d like to see improvement – and gives you the opportunity to make changes accordingly.

Survey tools like SurveyMonkey are a great way to solicit feedback.

Keep your survey questions pointed and specific. Don’t just ask, “Are you happy with your experience?” Ask about their satisfaction with particular parts of the customer process, like placing an order, paying, or follow-up customer care.

Get Support for Your Brand Messaging in Healthcare

Share Moving Media is a full-service media company that supports healthcare suppliers in building trust among their consumers and increasing their market share.

We help our clients leverage top-quality content to boost brand loyalty in healthcare manufacturing. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Marketing Minute, for more best practices.

Want help with your healthcare marketing? Contact us.

Online Reputation Management in Healthcare: What It is and Why Your Company Needs It

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It’s no secret the internet has changed the way companies do business. In 2019, 1.92 billion people shopped online. 

While ecommerce has put many bricks and mortar retail stores out of business, it’s been a great help to the healthcare industry. The internet and ecommerce have reduced the strain on healthcare practitioners as non-emergency patients can seek solutions online. Additionally, selling and distributing healthcare products to suppliers and medical institutions have never been easier. 

For online sales, a company’s true success lies in its online reputation management (ORM). To generate leads and boost revenue, healthcare companies need to understand ORM in healthcare and apply it to their digital marketing strategy.

What is ORM?

When prospective customers search your company on the internet, your online reputation is the perception they gain about you from the information they find. ORM is a combination of strategic SEO, public relations, and marketing tactics to protect your company’s online image while promoting your business and services. 

Several factors impact your online reputation. Whether you realize it or not, people are talking about your company online. From social media mentions and public review comments to the content you post online, the amount of positive and negative visibility your business maintains determines your online reputation.  

Cycles of ORM in Healthcare 

People rely heavily on the information they find on the internet. 90% of online consumers depend on reviews for their purchase decisions. Your company’s online reputation is primarily under the control of your digital audience, since it’s their feedback and input that others will see when researching your company. 

ORM can follow one of two cycles:

  • Vicious: Your website has outdated content or consumers leave poor reviews about your company. Prospective customers find this through search engines and click on it. That information is promoted, and social media perpetuates the negative feedback. Follow-up commentary or online gossip further spreads the information, and the cycle continues, damaging your online reputation.
  • Virtuous cycle: Current, meaningful website content earns you high search engine rankings. Prospects click on your website for meaningful information. Search engines see you as a valuable resource and continue to promote your website. Social media magnifies engaging content, and positive reviews create more traffic to continue the cycle. Business soars.

Through these cycles, it’s easy to see the impact of your company’s online content, and how important it is to manage your business’s online reputation.

Why Your Healthcare Company Needs ORM

ORM is important for healthcare companies. People purchasing for the healthcare supply chain need to know they can depend on the products they buy from your company. That means they need to feel they can trust you. 

ORM enables companies to do this in several ways.

Online Reputation Has a Long Shelf Life

If someone leaves a negative review about your company, it can have a lasting impact on your business. This is especially true in the healthcare industry. Healthcare is an extremely lucrative market riddled with competition. To stand out from other manufacturers, brand management is essential. ORM can help solidify your position as a dependable company providing reliable products.

Mitigate False Information

Healthcare is a social hot topic, so people are highly sensitive to misinformation. If a product doesn’t do what it claims or has unreported negative effects, the results can be detrimental to the end user. ORM ensures you’re posting the most current, accurate information possible. 

As a manufacturer, customers look to you to be an expert in your industry. They need to trust that you’re providing safe, effective products that they can verify to their clients. This is to protect their reputation, and they surely won’t do business with a company that could jeopardize it.

ORM Empowers You to Impact Your Online Reputation

With ORM, you’ll realize you have some power over how people view your business online. After all, the most effective ORM in healthcare is prevention. Be proactive in maintaining your online reputation to ensure your business is held in high regard among current and prospective customers.

The healthcare industry is ever-changing. ORM provides the opportunity to make sure your website content reflects recent healthcare trends. It drives you to check that your product listings include useful descriptions, accurate imagery, and current pricing. 

ORM also inspires you to assess your website links, ensuring they lead to existing articles and resources. It challenges you to think about load time and the function of your checkout process. ORM also entices you to optimize your website for mobile users, since 82% of online shoppers purchase from their mobile device.

Ultimately, ORM helps you to provide an enjoyable user experience. Enhanced UX, in turn, yields positive feedback, thus boosting your online reputation.

Entrust Your ORM in Healthcare to Share Moving Media

To solidify your online reputation in the healthcare industry, use ORM to maintain current and reliable information on your website and monitor online mentions and comments about your business. ORM takes time and effort. Contact Share Moving Media today for help developing an ORM strategy for your healthcare company.

4 Reasons Email Marketing is the Cornerstone of Healthcare Marketing

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The impact of traditional marketing campaigns, like direct mail or broadcast marketing, is hard to measure because it’s difficult to track their effectiveness. In this regard, email marketing in healthcare has changed the marketing playing field. 

Experts estimate that the number of email users around the world will reach over 4.48 billion in 2024. Email marketing also allows you to reach large groups of people with very little effort. 

You can develop customized content that addresses the needs of your audience and gather important information about your current and prospective customers.

By combining traditional marketing methods with email marketing, you’re able to distribute valuable content while tracking the success of your campaigns. This not only helps you improve your marketing effectiveness. It also helps you better understand your readers, improving audience retention and lead generation. 

While numerous marketing tactics are effective, email marketing is the cornerstone of healthcare marketing. 

Why Email Marketing is Invaluable for Healthcare Marketing

With the advent of smartphones and mobile applications, email can be accessed from anywhere. More than 60% of emails are opened on a phone. This means you’re able to connect with your audience in real time from anywhere. Because email is accessible to so many people, email marketing is a powerful tool when executed well. 

Here are four reasons email marketing is invaluable for the healthcare industry.

1. Email Provides Useful Data

Print ads may drive people to your business, but it’s difficult to know for certain. Maybe people found you through your advertisements, or maybe they just saw your building from the street. 

Email marketing provides useful information to help you identify potential business and determine what changes you should make to your marketing campaign.

Email marketing reveals bounce rates, which emails were opened, and which people unsubscribed from your mailing list. You’ll also be able to see how long recipients spent reading your messages and what steps they took afterward. 

All this information is useful data that helps you create customer profiles and optimize future campaigns for lead generation and increased ROI.

2. Email is Highly Targetable 

While developing your email list, you’ve been gathering important information about your audience. These details can be used to categorize contacts into groups that share commonalities. 

Email allows you to create content for a specific audience based on similarities like:

  • Demographics: Age, job title, gender, and area of medicine can help to narrow your audience. 
  • User journey: Understanding where your customers are in their purchasing journey can impact the content you create for them. You can target new customers with introductory offers while current customers receive information about product changes or company policy updates.
  • Previous history: Email allows you to assess open rates and engagement of previous email marketing campaigns. This information can help you plan future emails.

Through audience segmentation, you can pinpoint contacts for carefully developed custom content that resonates. Email marketing, therefore, enables you to provide targeted, meaningful information that increases engagement and boosts conversion rates. 

3. Email Builds Brand Awareness and Customer Loyalty

When people register to receive your emails, they are revealing an interest in your business. Through email marketing, you can capitalize on that interest to stay top of mind and increase your brand awareness. Email allows you to deliver informative and helpful content that benefits your audience.

You can minimize confusion about one of your products with an educational email. Invite healthcare suppliers to a special event with a guest speaker discussing a topic of concern. Or simply send an update about a current order. 

Email makes it easy to stay in front of your audience and continue building a relationship with them. By delivering useful content, you make your audience feel valued and important. This helps to build brand awareness and solidify customer loyalty.

4. Email is Affordable 

American healthcare advertising spend is projected to reach $80 billion by 2024. Paid advertising can be expensive, but email marketing is extremely cost-effective. On average, for every dollar spent, email returns $38. 

Because email is so targetable, you’re able to deliver concentrated content that’s likely to engage. This helps strengthen your relationship with your readers, thus leading to higher conversion rates. By increasing your conversions, you decrease the cost per conversion. 

In this way, email marketing can be adjusted to meet the needs of any budget. Therefore, it’s a highly cost-effective marketing channel for small and large healthcare businesses alike.

Rely on Share Moving Media for Your Email Marketing Needs

Email marketing is an effective and beneficial tool for the healthcare industry. Through careful strategy and audience segmentation, you can maintain your current audience while attracting new business. 

Ready to develop an email marketing campaign that solidifies your market-share in the healthcare industry? Contact Share Moving Media today.

Email Marketing for Healthcare: Reaching the Right Audience

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For the healthcare industry, email marketing is an effective way to communicate information about your services to current and prospective customers. From manufacturing processes and new product introductions to policy changes and event announcements, email marketing for healthcare is a convenient way to reach a large number of people with minimal effort and expense.

When used correctly, email is an extremely powerful marketing tool. Not only is it a leading method of communication (3.9 billion people worldwide used email last year), but it also allows you to target a specific audience,  reaching the right person at the right time. The key to improving open rates and increasing ROI is personalization. 82% of marketers who used email personalization saw an increase in open rates. 

Many people have difficulty navigating the healthcare supply chain. With so many products and services available to the industry, making decisions for hospital purchasing can be confusing. That’s why digital marketing in healthcare is important. Your customers appreciate receiving information to inform, educate, and help them make the best decisions to benefit their business and their end users. 

Email marketing is only effective if you reach the right audience. Through custom content and careful planning, your email marketing campaign can engage your readers, generate new leads, and increase your healthcare manufacturing business.

5 Steps to Reaching the Right Audience with Email Marketing for Healthcare

Today’s consumers have come to expect a certain level of personalization. Without customized content, recipients are more likely to delete unread messages – or worse, mark them as spam. 

Though highly effective, email personalization only works if you understand your target audience. Here are 5 steps to creating personalized content and reaching the right audience with your email marketing campaigns.

1. Gather the Right Data 

Any successful email campaign begins by gathering user data. 

Carefully consider the information you want to collect from your audience. After all, your contact list will only be as strong as the information you put into it. 

What details about your audience would help you personalize a message for them? Identify those qualifiers and be sure to capture that information in your registration forms.

2. Familiarize Yourself with Your Audience 

Take some time to explore your contact list. Note things like company, gender, end users, and manufacturing needs. 

Identify which people share commonalities and determine whether you can group them together. Use that information to create personas for your most frequent customers. Use quantitative categories like age and employment as well as qualitative data like behaviors and interests.

3. Use Audience Segmentation

Categorize your audience into like groups. Develop and test messages to them based on their common traits.

Whether you use information you’ve deduced yourself or data you’ve collected through surveys or questionnaires, consider segments like:

  • Demographics: Narrow your audience by commonalities such as age, gender, job title, and medical field.
  • Consumer cycle: People have different needs based on where they are in their journey with your business. Current customers might like emails about updates to your shipping policies while new customers would rather hear about introductory offers. 
  • Prior campaign history: Determine how people responded to previous email marketing campaigns. Look at open rates, engagement, and testing, and use that data to develop effective follow-up emails.

Audience segmentation can help you create tailored email content that your readers will find meaningful. Customize your emails for each segment so you touch on what’s important to them. This will boost engagement and increase conversions.

4. Employ Audience Mirroring 

Email marketing for healthcare is effective in maintaining your existing following as well as attracting prospective customers. 

By gaining a complete understanding of your current audience, you can create segments that mirror those groups. Create content that has been successful with your primary audience and simply use that to target new groups. 

Audience mirroring not only allows you to increase your marketing channels. It also helps you generate like-minded leads with minimal effort.

5. Personalize All Content 

Consider every aspect of your email message, from the subject line to the body text to the images supporting your text. 

Emails are full of opportunities for personalization. Use readers’ first names in subject lines or to begin the body text. Avoid stock images and instead, incorporate images of the readers’ location. This can increase click-through rates by 29%. 

You can even customize the From field in your campaign. All these details provide a tailored message that resonates with readers and makes them feel valued.

Develop Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns with Share Moving Media

For the healthcare industry, email personalization is key to reaching the right audience. Leave email marketing to a full-service media company like Share Moving Media so you can focus on running your business. 

Share Moving Media develops and distributes compelling, quality content that prospects want to read. Let us help you raise your market share in the healthcare industry with an email marketing campaign that gains new followers faster. 

Contact Share Moving Media today for help with your next email marketing campaign.