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5 Critical Factors that Impact the Medical Device Sales Cycle

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Medical device sales is a fast-paced industry with new trends and technology constantly emerging. To succeed, medical suppliers need to adopt a comprehensive sales strategy that allows them to utilize multiple platforms and channels to interact with customers.

In 2019, medical device sales increased 5.5% resulting in over 450 billion dollars in revenue. Due to increased health concerns in 2020, medical suppliers have a unique opportunity to provide healthcare facilities with the necessary tools to increase revenue. 

What’s the key to amplifying your bottom line next year? Building a sales cycle that drives results. Let’s take a look at what factors impact a medical device sales cycle and how you can optimize your process to increase your bottom line. 

How Do You Build a Medical Device Sales Cycle?

77% of healthcare buyers said their latest purchase was difficult and complex. For your sales cycle to be effective, you need to develop a comprehensive communication and marketing strategy at each stage to increase conversions. 

The first step is mapping out your ideal customer journey to understand your strengths and gaps. To get started, consider the following steps when developing your journey map:

  1. Identify your customer’s goals and where your value intersects as a solution
  2. Assess all your communication touchpoints throughout your customer’s pre-decision, purchase, and post-close phases (i.e., search ads, case studies, presentation, or follow-up call).
  3. Understand your customer’s needs and pain points
  4. Experience the full customer journey yourself by working through every stage
  5. Develop a visual customer journey map

5 Factors that Impact the Medical Device Sales Cycle

Even when you map out your ideal customer journey, it’s important to recognize that certain factors impact its overall effectiveness. Here are the elements you need to optimize your sales cycle: 

1.Right Audience Targeting

When it comes to your sales cycle, you need to attract the right qualifying target audience to ensure you’re not wasting time on leads who are unlikely to make a purchase. To narrow down your target audience, build robust buyer personas based on quantitative and qualitative data such as surveys, focus groups, and analytics data. Buyer personas will help you determine your most qualified prospects and prioritize your lead generation resources on those who will result in higher conversion rates and retention.

2.On-Point Messaging

Only 66% of marketers develop content that meets their audience’s needs. Your messaging throughout the sales cycle can have a large impact on whether or not a lead commits to a purchase decision. Throughout each stage, your messaging needs to be consistent, educational, and persuasive enough to land the sale. 

Develop unique messaging and content that supports your audience’s needs and pain points for the following actions points:

Your sales strategy is all about reaching your audience at the right time. If you’re too late, you could potentially miss the sale to a competitor. Too soon, and you might come off too pushy. By using marketing automation technology, you can deliver messaging based on when your leads take an action throughout the sales cycle. 

  • Lead prospecting
  • Cold calling
  • Setting up an appointment
  • Closing the sale
  • Asking for referrals

3.Quick Automated Technology

Tied to the customer relationship manager (CRM), create email triggers as welcome emails, follow-ups, consultation requests, and more. You can also send valuable incentives closer to closing to sweeten the deal.  

4.Comprehensive Sales Distributor Training

Distributors are a huge part of developing a successful buying cycle. You need to not only train new distributors with an effective onboarding program, but also empower them with best practices, resources, and knowledge so they can identify growth opportunities. Additionally, to keep your distributors engaged, consider incentivizing their sales and offering additional benefits when they meet your business goals. If you fail to educate your distributors, they’re unable to advocate your brand to their healthcare facilities.

5.Performance Analytics 

To build an agile sales cycle, it’s crucial to have your eyes on real-time performance at all times. Analytics will give you visibility into what’s working in your customer journey and what isn’t — allowing you to improve any underperforming stages. You’ll need to monitor the following features:

  • Form fills
  • Email open rates
  • Appointments made
  • In-person visits
  • Presentations given
  • Conversion rates
  • Dollars closed by each sales rep

Optimize Your Medical Device Sales Cycle to Increase Conversion Rates

If you’re looking to optimize your customer journey and increase conversion rates, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of your medical device sales cycle. By understanding and reacting to your customer needs, you’ll be able to effectively interact with them throughout every stage to build long-term loyalty. 

Contact Share Moving Media today to improve your sales cycle process with content development.

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.

Healthcare Manufacturers’ Top Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2021

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Successful marketing relies on planning. Strategizing is even more critical in the competitive healthcare field. The medical device market alone is expected to reach $208 billion by 2023, and many companies are competing to dominate this lucrative market.

Getting ahead of the healthcare marketing trends in 2021 can help increase your market share.

5 Essential Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2021

Marketing will increasingly take a consumer-first approach. Businesses now recognize that by meeting consumer demand, they foster loyalty and encourage engagement, which ultimately boosts the bottom line. 

As you create your marketing strategy for the year ahead, take these consumer-first healthcare marketing trends into account.

1. Voice Search is Gaining Ground

Improvements in artificial intelligence and modern voice recognition technology (Alexa, Google, Siri, etc.) are reinvigorating voice search marketing. Instead of typing queries into search engines like Bing and Google, consumers are making requests verbally.

Traditional search engine optimization is geared towards writing. Modern SEO must be geared toward talking. Voice queries are lengthier and more conversational. Instead of typing in “new medical device 2021,” a person might ask, “What new medical devices are coming onto the market in 2021?”

Cater to the consumer desire for voice-driven tech by adapting your SEO – one of the most impactful content marketing techniques you can use. By driving organic traffic to your website, SEO attracts leads that are already interested in your content.

2. Retention Marketing is the New Priority

Retention marketing is expected to be one of the dominant marketing trends for all industries in 2021. This strategy focuses on fostering loyalty among existing customers instead of attracting new customers. This allows for continual sales at a lower cost per sale since you don’t have to invest in lead generation.

Retention marketing techniques like cross-selling and upselling are critical to success. If you have a customer that’s currently only buying one product from your company, look at ways to maximize that profit. Are there other products relevant to their field? Is there a chance to up their existing order?

You can also nurture your customer relationships and boost engagement through non-sales activities. Providing educational opportunities like webinars is a great way to give your clients added value that keeps them coming back.

3. Content is Still King

Content will remain a critical cornerstone of successful healthcare marketing strategies in 2021. Content marketing can include everything from blogs to thought-leader articles in healthcare publications, social media activity, and more.

The key to success is consistency. You have to publish regularly, creating value-added content rooted in keyword research that reflects your target audience’s needs. A mix of long- and short-form content is ideal, allowing you to cater to different media platforms, e.g., a medical magazine versus social media.

To take your content to the next level in 2021, make it interactive. Interactive content captures the user’s attention span for longer. Quizzes, videos, and infographics are all great ways to engage users actively. Visually driven content is also popular and highly shareable.

4. The Chatbots are Set to Take Over

AI technology has improved the functionality of chatbots immensely. In the past, this tech could do little more than give a standard greeting and then direct the user to an alternative resource (like a customer service email) for real help.

Today’s chatbots are fast, responsive, and intelligent. Need proof? The technology is so advanced that it’s been used to conduct COVID-19 risk assessments in 2020, alleviating the burden on overworked healthcare professionals.

Incorporate chatbots into your website to provide your clients with an improved online experience. A chatbot offers immediate assistance, decreasing wait times and increasing customer satisfaction.

5. Nostalgia Marketing Has Customers Looking Back

So far, this list has been all about modern approaches, with a heavy emphasis on tech. Consumers don’t just want what’s shiny and new, however. Nostalgia marketing is a significant trend to watch out for in 2021. This emphasizes human connectivity and authenticity.

To make the most of the nostalgic mood, capitalize on the moment’s cultural trends – or consider reintroducing a discontinued product or service. If you previously held informational podcasts about your product line, for example, consider bringing this back.

Prepare Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy for 2021 Now

Share Moving Media can help you harness the power of 2021’s top healthcare marketing trends. As a full-service media and content agency, we help medical manufacturers keep their marketing current to boost healthcare sales. Our quality content includes blog posts, podcasts, webinars, ebooks, and more.

Sign up for our newsletter for the latest healthcare marketing trends. Want support for your 2021 strategy? Contact us today!

6 Content Optimization Tweaks for Effective Branding in Healthcare

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Why do you, as a healthcare supplier, publish content? 

You want to demonstrate your authority as a brand and set yourself apart from competitors, right?

You can’t accomplish any of your goals without solid branding throughout your content.

Branding your healthcare content isn’t as simple as tossing in a logo and colors. Instead, it requires a more nuanced strategy.

Today, we’ll cover some untapped content optimization tweaks for effective branding in healthcare to solidify your presence. 

6 Content Optimization Tips to Improve Branding in Healthcare

For healthcare suppliers and manufacturers, branding cannot be an afterthought. You must incorporate branding throughout every piece of content you publish. 

In some cases, branding will indeed include obvious logos and colors. In others, however, branding will ooze from your content in less noticeable ways. 

Potential buyers and current customers need familiarity with your content. Familiarity breeds trust. Trust encourages loyalty. 

Consistent branding is especially important for healthcare suppliers where the buyer’s journey is long, and the stakes are high. Your branding must be standardized and preserved over time. Make it your goal to prioritize branding in every comment, blog post, tweet, video, and more.

1. Look for Content Gaps to Position Yourself

7% of Google searches – over 1 billion a day and 70,000 every minute – relate to healthcare. While some come from consumers, many are doctors and decisionmakers searching for answers to their problems and questions.

Your job is to figure out which of those queries you can answer. 

Start with your competitors– research their content strategy to see which topics they already cover thoroughly. From there, study your audience’s pain points to find a content gap and focus on creating content within that arena.

2. Develop a Thought Leadership Strategy

Thought leadership isn’t reserved for Silicon Valley startups, and it’s not about nuance for its own sake. Thought leadership is about leading in your industry through well-researched content and conversations – and it’s an important part of content optimization for branding in healthcare.

In an industry like healthcare, it’s especially vital to use real author names for your content instead of generic terms like “staff writer.” Make sure only experts in your field create your content and use the same author names to build familiarity. 

All of Share Moving Media’s unique publications fill a distinct gap as thought leaders. The Journal of Healthcare Contracting, for example, is the only publication dedicated to the healthcare supply chain, and readers rely on us for the authoritative content we provide.

3. Incorporate Your Identity into Media Content

Multimedia content is your big chance to incorporate branding like logos and colors into your content marketing:

  • Custom email newsletter and social media header images
  • Adding a color filter to your images and graphics
  • Using your brand’s color scheme for infographics and social graphics
  • Adding a watermark to your image content
  • Including a brand logo in the corner of your videos 
  • Using your brand color palette for video production

First, make sure every piece of multimedia you publish is authoritative, useful, and relevant to your audience. You don’t want your brand associated with generic or boring content. 

4. Settle on a Specific Brand Voice

Remember, branding must be standardized and preserved. You can’t preserve your branding if you don’t create a standard. Comprehensive brand guidelines are key. 

Most brands know to include logo and color rules in their guidelines, but they neglect voice and tone. 

Setting the standard for voice and tone ensures your blogs, videos, and social media posts all sound the same no matter who writes them. A consistent tone might seem subtle, and it certainly is. However, a consistent tone also has a huge impact on trust and familiarity. 

5. Interact with Your Followers

Don’t be a broadcaster. A broadcaster publishes content to social media but never interacts with their followers or shares content from other accounts. 

Social media is most useful as a conversation or relationship-building tool. For healthcare suppliers and manufacturers, casual conversations in your comments and tweet replies go miles towards humanizing your brand. 

6. Include Emotional Social Share Triggers Throughout Your Content

Creating useful content is important, but usefulness alone won’t earn you shares. You must trigger an emotion if you want people to share your content with others. 

If sharing the content will demonstrate that someone is a good person, they’re more likely to share it:

  • People want to look intelligent and informed on the most current medical best practices (urgency, importance)
  • People share content to help others, like tips or insider information (exclusive, interesting, unusual)
  • People want to show their humanitarian nature by sharing content on important causes (heartwarming, optimism, inclusivity, sadness)
  • People share content that sparks conversations (intrigue, excitement, surprise)

Certain emotions work better than others. Consider what emotions you want associated with your brand. 

Prioritize Content Optimization for Branding in Healthcare and Build Better Relationships

Consistent branding in content humanizes your business and is necessary for technical fields like healthcare supplies. Content is your big chance to connect with decisionmakers at offices and hospitals and form professional relationships. 

Use branding to give them something to remember and solidify your presence as a thought leader in your industry.

Content from Share Moving Media reaches the offices and homes of several thousand healthcare decision-makers across the country. Get in touch with us to start planning your comprehensive content strategy today!

7 Vital Steps to Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy in Healthcare

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As a medical supply distributor or manufacturer, your clients depend on you for the highest quality, professionalism, and reliability in your products and services.

Your content marketing strategy in healthcare must prioritize those same values.

Now, professionalism doesn’t necessarily equate to stuffy and boring – two qualities you absolutely must avoid in content marketing. 

As with most things healthcare-related, an effective content strategy starts with comprehensive research and thorough planning.

Research shows 60% of B2B companies with the most successful content have a documented strategy. Meanwhile, only 21% of the least successful B2Bs can say the same.

How to Start Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy in Healthcare

Every piece of content you create should serve a specific goal and purpose. 

Without a documented strategy, your content will come off as irrelevant or generic. This type of lackluster content in an industry like healthcare can end up damaging your reputation – the exact opposite of what you need your content to do.

1. Research Your Audience

You cannot produce effective content without understanding who you’re creating content for. Your content can inform a handful of audiences, but the point is to pick a specific audience for each piece. 

At Share Moving Media, for example, we have several publications to reach thousands of people in distinct audiences.

Ask yourself some questions as part of your audience research:

  • Who do I want to educate and inform? End users/office workers, doctors of private practices, office executives at hospitals, etc.?
  • Where do they hang out online – Facebook, LinkedIn, industry blogs, Twitter, Reddit?
  • What are their biggest pain points each day? 
  • Which influencers do they follow and trust?
  • What format do they prefer – blogs, social media, infographics, video, podcast?

2. Plan Your Goals

Gartner research shows the B2B journey is long and convoluted. It’s foolish to end every piece of content with a CTA to “buy now.”

Timeline Description automatically generated

Gartner

Your content marketing strategy in healthcare should play the long game. Set up short-term and long-term goals for each stage of the buyer’s journey so each piece of content serves a broader strategy. 

Short-term goals:

  • Increase monthly website traffic and retention
  • More lead magnet downloads
  • Boost social media followers
  • Increase email subscribers

Long-term goals:

  • Improved brand awareness and recognition
  • Preventing customer churn
  • Expanding customer base

3. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is a must for SEO. Plus, keyword research aids in audience research because it shows what questions your audience is asking and what problems they face.

You can use tools like BuzzSumo and SEMrush to investigate keywords and topic inspiration.

4. Set Up an Editorial Calendar

Quality content always trumps quantity. Google’s algorithms, social media algorithms, and your readers all appreciate in-depth high-quality content. 

In your calendar, plan for about two blogs and about ten social media posts each week along with some multimedia, depending on your resources available. 

If you have the resources to produce two high-quality videos a week, certainly go for it – but don’t sacrifice quality. 

Plan your editorial calendar and posting schedule about 60 days out so you’re always working from an offensive position.

5. Choose Your Creators Carefully

People need to know they can trust what you have to say. 

Google cares too. According to Google, sites promoting your-money-your-life content (such as healthcare), must prioritize expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. 

For healthcare, this means experts should create your content. Choose expert creators that mimic your audience – such as doctors in their respective fields and medical assistants. Don’t use generic author names like your brand name or “news desk.”

Strive to uplift specific people at your company as influencers and thought leaders. Eventually, your target audience will learn to trust them and seek out their opinions. 

6. Keep a Consistent Tone

A set of brand guidelines goes miles toward building trust in your audience through a content marketing strategy in healthcare. 

Consistency breeds trust. People come to expect a familiar voice, format, and tone from you at every touchpoint.

An inconsistent tone accomplishes the opposite: it’s unsettling and provokes distrust.

Your brand guidelines should outline rules for your content to follow:

  • How does your content “sound?” Is it warm, friendly, and subjective or encyclopedic and technical? 
  • How will you adapt your tone for different platforms? For example, email requires a more personal tone than Twitter.

7. Get Personal and Engaging

Even doctors and executives don’t want technical content all the time. Give your content some personality to boost engagement:

  • Interactive quizzes 
  • Gamified content
  • Polls 
  • 360-degree or 3D photos

Squeeze More ROI from Your Content Marketing Strategy in Healthcare

An effective content marketing strategy in healthcare is all about reputation. Building a trustworthy reputation takes time and consistency, so there’s no room for slacking in content marketing.

Remember to:

  • Research your audience’s needs, mindset, and pain points.
  • Plan your short- and long-term goals for content marketing.
  • Research your keywords and SEO plan.
  • Focus on producing high-quality content on a consistent schedule.
  • Look for fresh ways to engage your audience via content.

Content from Share Moving Media reaches the offices and homes of several thousand healthcare decision-makers across the country. Get in touch with us to start planning your comprehensive content strategy today!