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7 Strategies for Picking the Right Healthcare Marketing Influencers

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When you think of influencers, medical supplies isn’t typically the first industry that comes to mind. But picking the right influencers to enhance your healthcare marketing strategy might just be the smartest thing you do this year. 

Just put yourself in the mind of your buyers and decision-makers. For starters, they’re busy.

A recent survey found that 76% of B2B medical supply buyers rate ease of finding information as their top priority. 

Meanwhile, 50% of all medical supply buyers are Millennials and 57% of all buying teams have already made a purchase decision before they ever reach out to your sales team.

The point is, you need a strategy to get your content and info in front of your buyers’ faces before they even think to ask for it. That’s why influencers in healthcare marketing are so critical today. 

Picking the right ones, however, is another battle. Here’s how to narrow your search.

How to Nail Down the Best Healthcare Marketing Influencers for Your Niche

Think long term as you pick influencers for healthcare marketing. Remember, they’ll be uniquely representing your company and products. 

You’ll have better ROI and avoid costly faux pas if you spend time researching and strategizing now.

1. Bigger Isn’t Always Better with Influencers in Healthcare Marketing

The follower count means nothing if the influencer isn’t relevant enough to your niche. 

For example, people like the Kardashians are considered mega-influencers but you’d never want them promoting your content to their millions of followers because it wouldn’t deliver results. 

It can backfire too – like when Kim Kardashian promoted a morning sickness medication on Instagram without following pharmaceutical disclosure regulations. 

Even within healthcare, massive influencers tend to have broader audiences and a huge chunk might be consumers. 

Pay little attention to the follower count. Instead, start with a healthcare influencer’s engagement like comments, shares, and clicks. 

2. Analyze the Audience of Potential Influencers in Healthcare Marketing

Engagement must come first. All your target accounts and audience segments might follow someone, but if they aren’t engaging with the influencer’s page then what’s the point?

That’s why your next step is to analyze their audience insights. 

Tools like BuzzSumo can help you work backward. By setting up social listening alerts for keywords and topics, you can see who shares what and whether their audience engages with them. 

Agencies can also help you hedge your bets across internal influencers at offices and hospitals with strategic magazines and journals.

3. Vet Each Healthcare Influencer’s Healthcare Experience

The point of partnering with influencers in healthcare marketing is to build trust in your medical supplies and products.  

Influencers don’t work for your company. They do, however, still represent your company and products. You can’t remove the risk completely, but you can mitigate it with background research.

Ask yourself, would your end-users and buyers trust this person? Experience in their field is key.

Vet their work history and education on LinkedIn just as you would when hiring someone for a job. You might be surprised how easy it is to falsify work history at massive companies. 

4. Consider the Influencer’s Experience Working with Brands Too

Kim K had plenty of experience working with brands but no experience working in pharmaceuticals. 

Don’t laugh. You could run into the opposite problem with healthcare influencers: plenty of medical experience but none in modern marketing.

For example, overly promotional content from influencers doesn’t build trust or deliver results.

Experienced influencers in healthcare marketing understand the subtleties of sparking interest in your product without looking tacky or desperate. 

5. Look at Audience Personas to Build a Comprehensive Influencer Strategy

Ideally, you should already have detailed audience personas mapped out:

  • Doctors
  • Nurses
  • Medical assistants
  • Other professional end-users
  • Medical students
  • Patients 

Remember to include each professional persona’s firmographics, like their hospital size, job role, market share, pain points, and specialties. For patients, include basic demographics along with other qualities as they relate to your product, like health conditions, insurance provider, health concerns, and pain points.

Use these detailed personas to target each one via the right influencers in healthcare marketing.

Building an influencer strategy through these personas ensures your content will reach all the most important touchpoints.

6. Study How Each Influencer Writes and Interacts with Their Followers

Successful influencers need charisma to keep their followers engaged. It gets complicated because different audiences want different personalities from influencers.

Analyze the tone of an influencer’s posts – are their followers receptive? 

What do their followers say in the comments and how does the influencer respond? 

Carefully considering the influencer’s tone and comments first tells you if they’re committed to keeping their audience engaged. Second, it also helps you decide if they fit your brand’s values and culture.

7. Make Sure Your Goals Align with Your Potential Healthcare Influencers

Look at your healthcare influencer shortlist. 

Have any of them effectively retired from medicine to work as professional influencers? 

Do they seem committed to integrity and sharing their knowledge, or are they only interested in the cash-advertisement exchange?

You could certainly ask your influencers in healthcare marketing these questions during an interview call. However, you can also glean plenty of insight just by analyzing their online presence and background too.

Don’t Force Influencers into Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Landing relationships with healthcare influencers who have large followings might sound tempting but massive reach alone won’t build you a sustainable strategy. 

You’ll enjoy the best results for your medical supply manufacturing or distributing company if you take time researching the potential influencers in healthcare marketing and picking the right fit. 

Your prospective buyers and your company’s reputation should always come first. After you’ve built a shortlist with those factors considered, you can finetune potential influencers based on your goals and content. 

Just remember, the influencer’s audience analytics demand just as much vetting as the influencer’s background. 

Share Moving Media has helped countless manufacturers and distributors reach thousands of the right decision-makers through targeted publications like Repertoire, The Journal of Healthcare Manufacturing, and Efficiency in Group Practice. Contact us now to talk!

How to Map Your Content to the Customer Journey in Healthcare

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The customer journey might seem straightforward enough. A person thinks, “Hey, I need that product,” and then buys it. In fact, the customer journey is a complex five-part process. Mapping out the steps and tailoring content to target the customer at each step is a great way to bring them on board with your brand at any stage of the sales funnel. 

Below, we provide a step-by-step guide to customer journey mapping in healthcare to help you boost sales.

An Intro to Customer Journey Mapping in Healthcare

Understanding the customer journey’s steps is the first step in content mapping. Here they are:

  • Awareness: This stage makes the consumer aware of their want or need for a product or service. The consumer identifies a problem to solve. Example: A private physician’s practice recognizes the airborne infectiousness of the COVID-19 virus. The physician realizes they need FFP2 masks to protect staff and patients.
  • Evaluate: The consumer starts researching their options, comparing differing providers. They are looking for a solution to their problem. Example: The physician investigates FFP2 vendors, looking for a reliable product, affordable bulk orders, and fast delivery.
  • Decision-making: Having weighed the options, the consumer selects a provider. Example: The physician finds a vendor that meets their criteria and places an order.
  • Advocate: The consumer uses the product or service and is so happy with the experience that they refer other consumers to the product or service provider. Example: The physician is satisfied with the FFP2 product and customer experience. They recommend the vendor to a fellow healthcare practitioner who is also in need of FFP2 masks.
  • Retention: The consumer continues to use the product or service without switching to a different vendor. Example: The physician becomes a recurring customer, placing a new bulk order every month.

As you can see, customer journey mapping in healthcare allows you to step into the consumer’s shoes. With the example above, we peek into the physician’s mind and identify three selling points (reliable product, affordable bulk order, fast delivery) that would be relevant to them.

So, what is the role of content?

Content marketing can come into play at any stage of the journey. The right content format with the right message allows you to target your potential consumer effectively.

4-Step Checklist: Mapping Content to the Customer Journey

Follow these steps to create content according to customer journey mapping in healthcare.

1. Create Your Buyer Persona

Create a theoretical sketch of your target audience. This is your buyer persona. Research and write down a list of traits, like profession, demographic details (age, location, gender), professional goals and challenges, and influences (like medical journals they read).

Forbes recommends consulting frontline workers who work directly with consumers (like salespeople) to create buyer personas.

2. Draw the Map

Next, take your buyer persona and walk them through the customer journey described above. Again, this is about adopting their mindset. Ask yourself these questions at each stage:

  • Awareness: How will the person seek a solution to the problem they’ve identified, e.g., via Google, healthcare publications, industry thought-leader websites, etc.?
  • Evaluate: What points are important to the person, e.g., the price versus convenience?
  • Decision-making: What touchpoints will the person come into contact with to conclude their decision, e.g., visiting a company website versus calling a healthcare sales rep?
  • Advocate: What will convince the person to advocate the brand they end up choosing? What channels will they use to spread the word, e.g., word of mouth versus social media?
  • Retention: What will keep the person coming back, e.g., reliable delivery, special deals, etc.?

3. Perform a Content Analysis

With the answers to these questions, it will become clear what content formats you should use to guide your target consumer through the sales funnel.

Here are some ideas:

  • Awareness can be driven via info-packed content in the form of blog posts or infographics.
  • Evaluation can be informed through website landing and sales pages or live demos.
  • Decision-making might be driven via free trial sign-up pages.
  • Advocacy can be encouraged via shareable social media posts and forward-friendly emails.
  • Retention can be encouraged via engagement-boosters, like user guides, webinars, and podcasts.

4. Craft the Right Content

Finally, you’ve got the information you need to start crafting content according to your customer journey mapping in healthcare.

Let’s get back to that private physician in need of FFP2 masks, for example. He’s a GP running a family medicine practice in his early 50s, has been in private practice for 20+ years, is a family man, and prioritizes giving his patients affordable care.

When he’s looking for FFP2 masks, he’s prioritizing efficacy and convenience. He needs masks that work that will be delivered to his clinic doorstep fast. Cost-effectiveness is another concern, though: He’s willing to pay for quality but would prefer bulk pricing to keep costs down.

How are you going to get this guy’s attention at every stage of the customer journey? Maybe a blog post summarizing clinical study results on the efficacy of different types of masks will catch his eye at the awareness stage.

A clear sales page that offers bulk pricing options might be what wins him over when evaluating.

You might then follow up the sale with an email, asking if he’s satisfied – and whether he wants to place repeat orders, so he doesn’t have to think about re-ordering. There’s your retention phase.

In that email, you might include social media links to your company profiles, like Twitter. He then follows your company on Twitter.

Then, on your company’s Twitter page, you might share some infographics about the efficacy of FFP2 masks in minimizing COVID-19 transmission. The physician retweets the infographic to his followers – becoming an advocate of your brand.

We Help You Create Content Your Customers Love

Share Moving Media helps healthcare manufacturers craft authority content that captivates consumers and spurs them to take action. By boosting conversions, we help you increase your market share. We are a full-service media company, covering diverse formats from e-books to webinars and more.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more healthcare marketing tips.Contact us to take your content marketing in healthcare to the next level.

3 Ways Online Media Coverage Results in More Revenue and Brand Recall

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Reaching a wider audience. Building your reputation. Gaining credibility. You need all three to advance to greater marketing goals.

In the healthcare manufacturing industry, earning a trustworthy reputation is vital, because your products have a direct and lasting impact on people’s lives. A solid reputation also may be the deciding factor when a customer is choosing between you and a competitor.

This is where online media coverage can give your business a huge boost.

Online media coverage is PR (public relations) carried out digitally. Rather than earning mentions in print news stories or TV/radio broadcasts, you’ll pop up in social media feeds, search engine results, online articles, blogs, and other digital media formats. 

And, unlike traditional PR, you can build your online media coverage by publishing authoritative content on your website. This accomplishes three goals:

  • Showcases your expertise 
  • Builds trust with your existing audience
  • Creates inroads with a wider audience as that content is shared, reshared, and mentioned across various channels

Let’s dive deeper into the ways reputation-building marketing tactics like online media coverage boosts your brand recall and bottom-line.

3 Ways Online Media Coverage Earns Results for Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Greater visibility in online media means greater visibility for your brand. In turn, greater visibility is your ticket to more leads, more customers, and more revenue. Here’s how.

1. Online Media Coverage Builds Brand Awareness and Recall Through Greater Reach & Repetition

To ensure your target audience knows who you are and what you sell, you need the power of online media coverage in the form of content.

70% of marketers actively invest in content, so you’re in good company.

It takes many forms, but some of the best types that effectively build brand awareness and brand recall for your business include blog posts and guest blogs.

Blog Posts

These are one of the best tools for online media coverage in healthcare for a few reasons.

First, your company blog is under your complete control. It’s the ideal place to inform and educate your audience about your expertise and your products.

Second, blog posts can be endlessly repurposed. You can share and distribute posts across social media channels and reuse them to create new content assets, such as infographics and videos.

Finally, blog content created with SEO techniques gives you greater visibility in Google search results. That means, when customers are searching for a solution or expertise like yours on search engines, they’ll find you.

This cycle of sharing and repetition is inherent in creating blog content, and is one of the keys to building brand awareness online.

Guest Blogs

These have most of the same benefits as blog posts, but they offer one additional asset: they get your name, company, and expertise in front of another brand’s audience. And, if you play your cards correctly, this audience will overlap with yours.

Most guest blogging opportunities allow you to include one promotional link to your website in a byline. So, it’s a good way to expand your reach and pull in more potential customers.

2. Online Media Coverage in Healthcare Draws in Traffic & Leads

Online media coverage is a direct way to draw in more traffic and leads to your website.

It’s pretty simple. Increase the targeted places you appear on the web, and more of the right people will notice you. Produce more quality content, and you’ll increase your chances of getting shared, getting ranked on Google, and earning links from other websites.

Each of these represents another opportunity for a new customer to click your link. 

3. It Turns One-Time Customers into Repeat Buyers

In the healthcare industry, trust is at a premium. Your customers must be able to trust that your products are safe, reliable, and effective. That means they must also put their trust in your brand overall.

If you can effectively build your trustworthiness in the eyes of your audience, you’ll have an easier time turning them into not just one-time customers but repeat buyers and loyal followers as well.

Trust is never built in a day. That’s why consistent online media coverage is so important. It adds up over time. Here are a few examples:

  • You consistently appear in trusted media outlets (like a reputed digital magazine or blog).
  • You continually publish high-quality content on your website.
  • You routinely get your content shared and mentioned on trusted social media accounts with large followings.

Think of each appearance, mention, and share as a vote in your favor. As your vote count builds, so does your authority and trustworthiness. 

Build Your Online Media Coverage in the Healthcare Industry, Build your Brand Rep & Revenue

Think of online media coverage in the healthcare industry as a compounding investment.

It’s one of the top ways to get your business noticed, to reach a wider audience, and to pull in more traffic and revenue.

The more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

Ready to start boosting your online media coverage? We can help. Contact us at Share Moving Media today to get started.

Why Medical Suppliers Need More Consistency in Content Marketing

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Over 97% of marketers agree that content marketing is essential to their marketing strategy in 2022. However, not everyone creates content equally. What you post, where you publish it, and how often you make content varies considerably between industries. Despite the differences, consistency in content marketing is crucial to every strategy.

Learn how often you should be creating content as a medical supplier and how to create a consistent content strategy for healthcare marketing.

Key Takeaways:

  • Medical suppliers should be creating content anywhere from daily to several times a week, depending on the platform.
  • Consistent content encourages greater loyalty, increases your exposure, and establishes you as an authority.
  • Create consistent content using a content calendar and outsourcing.

How Often Do Medical Suppliers Need Content? (It’s More Than You Think)

Healthcare Content marketing is a broad category of strategies that involve creating digital content to build awareness, educate your audience, and convert leads into customers. For the best results, consider using several channels in your content marketing.

Here is a general overview of how often successful businesses post content on each of their marketing channels:

Since these are average statistics, your actual numbers will vary. The best way to decide how often you should post content is to perform A/B testing. Change how often you post content on each channel during your tests and see what number of fresh posts gets the best response.

Benefits of Consistency in Content Marketing

If you stick to the above schedule for sharing consistent content, you will create hundreds of new pieces each year. That can quickly feel overwhelming without the proper healthcare content marketing strategy. However, adjusting your processes to handle that number is worth the effort, as these three benefits show.

Encourage Customer Loyalty

About 65% of your revenue comes from loyal customers. Your content isn’t just for bringing in new customers but also for keeping existing customers loyal to your brand. These loyal customers already follow you on social media or subscribe to your blog.

Consistent quality content ensures they continue to get value from your content channels so they can purchase more from your company.

Broader Brand Exposure

Search engine optimization is a strategy to rank your content in consumer searches. For example, when a hospital decision-maker searches for products for their facilities, your content can appear at the top of their search results, pointing to what products you offer.

The more content you have online, the more searches you can appear, which increases your online visibility. Over half of your website’s traffic comes from online searches.

Percentage of people performing online searches each day.

Image from FinancesOnline

Greater Authority in Your Industry

Brand authority comes from other people’s opinions of your company. If consumers in the healthcare industry consider you an expert and trustworthy source of information, you are considered a healthcare authority.

You must publish consistent, quality content to encourage positive opinions of your business. Each piece is another chance to establish yourself as an authority in healthcare, leading to more conversions.

How to Create Consistent Content for Your Marketing Campaigns

Use these five tips to be consistent in content marketing across all your marketing channels.

Video Embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Cb6xKZo18

How to be Consistent with Content Marketing

1. Brainstorm Topics in Advance

An expert content creator can write a 1,500-blog post in two to three hours. However, most people take significantly longer to research, create, and publish online content. Brainstorming for topics is one of the forgotten steps of content creation that many people don’t calculate into their schedule.

If you resort to coming up with topics as you create content, you risk settling on mediocre content themes to meet your deadlines. Instead, plan content ideas weeks or even months before you create and publish the content.

You can hold brainstorming sessions where you and your marketing team research common search phrases, questions your customers are asking, and the types of content your competitors post. Then, use that list to narrow done the best topics.

2. Create a Content Calendar

Content calendars keep you organized. For example, you will be working on dozens of content projects simultaneously if you run several campaigns, including a blog, various social media platforms, and email. A content calendar keeps all the projects and their due dates in one convenient location, so you never miss a deadline and create consistent content.

Content calendar example

Image from HubSpot

3. Plan Content Series

Some marketers use content series to help fill their calendars with predictable and regular content. A content series is a group of posts all on the same topic.

For example, as a healthcare supplier, you might create a blog post series on nursing homes where you cover their pain points, needs, and products that could ease the flow of nursing home activities. The next series could follow the same format but focus on a different healthcare facility.

4. Streamline the Content Creation Process

The amount of content you can create is limited by the people and time you have available. While you can’t add more hours to the day, you can reduce the time it takes to create content.

Investing in scheduling tools, content management systems, and content creation tools will streamline the process and help you create the amount of content you need with the available time and personnel.

5. Outsource Your Content Marketing

Content and marketing agencies will help you meet your content marketing goals. They can create content consistently through scalable marketing strategies that grow as you grow.

Because of the training and experience of content agencies, you are guaranteed quality content.

When you outsource your content creation, you free up your own time so that you can focus on other parts of your marketing strategy.

Are You Creating Enough Content?

Boost your sales by creating consistent content and start seeing more revenue from your increased exposure.

Do you need help understanding your market?

Our publications and training are rich with the latest industry data to help you make smarter content and more consistency in digital marketing.

Contact us to learn more about our healthcare marketing products and solutions.

Content Marketing for Purchasing: 94% of Buyers Do This Before Purchasing

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Healthcare buyers are turning to the internet to research and buy products more than relying on a sales agent. To keep up with this change in customer behavior, healthcare manufacturers must use content marketing for purchasing.

Let’s look at healthcare content marketing for purchasing and how to create copy that converts in 2022.

Key Takeaways:

  • E-commerce shopping and online product research are on the rise in the healthcare industry
  • Content marketing for purchasing is content created for every stage of the buyer’s journey
  • Optimize your content to ensure it appears during buyer searches to increase your conversions

Healthcare Marketing Isn’t the Same as it Was Several Years Ago

Healthcare marketing has looked the same for several years. Sales agents would bring products from the manufacturer to hospitals and healthcare facilities. In return, the healthcare workers would contact their sales agents when they ran low on supplies.

That pattern has shifted.

Today, 94% of buyers turn to the internet for information on new products or ordering fresh supplies. In addition, 90% of healthcare equipment buyers find their suppliers online.

Your buyers aren’t relying solely on your sales representatives anymore for information. Instead, they are increasingly going online to research options for themselves.

What Caused This Shift?

The internet is home to an ocean of information. Because of the accessibility of research, reviews, and industry data, buyers no longer rely on a middleman for information. Now they can find facts and data for themselves.

Consumers like having the ability to research their options and understand the market. It helps them make the best decisions based on their needs and budget. They can also buy with more confidence because they have reviews and data to back their decisions.

Is the Change in Buyer Behavior Permanent?

Ecommerce is booming, partially due to changes that COVID brought about in consumer behavior. People are looking increasingly to online options for their needs, even medical facilities.

With the increase in online shopping options comes an increase in online data. Consumers can view more information about different products, features, prices, and reviews.

The upward trend of e-commerce shows no sign of slowing. Most customers prefer online shopping because of its convenience, including more options, easy delivery, and quick checkout options. While traditional sales methods still have their place, e-commerce research and shopping are now a permanent fixture in healthcare buying.

The growth of e-commerce between 2013 and 2022
Image from Census.gov

How You Can Use This New Buyer Behavior to Your Advantage

More healthcare buyers going online for their research and product needs means you have a wider audience and can reach more potential buyers with your marketing content. You aren’t limited to those that your sales representatives can reach.

About 94% of B2B marketers plan to develop a content marketing strategy. Content marketing brings in three times more leads than outbound marketing strategies.

You can offer relevant information for every buyer’s journey stage through content marketing. For example, as consumers in your industry research their options, you can position your content at the top of their search results or in their social media news feed.

Strategically placing your content across the internet at critical points in the buyer journey ensures customers find your brand sooner and increases the likelihood of them choosing your products over a competitor’s.

How to Perform Content Marketing for Purchasing

These five content marketing strategies will optimize your content for purchasing.

1. Understand Buyer Intent

Buyer intent is how close a buyer is to purchasing your products. You can find buyer intent by tracking customer behavior on your website. This alerts you to patterns in customer behavior that often precede a purchase.

You can also buy intent data from third-party companies. This purchased data gives you a broader picture of buyer behavior.

Intent data helps you reach customers earlier in the buyer journey and identify the highest quality leads. It’s an essential component of a content marketing strategy that converts customers as these insights alert you to those buyers in the research and buying stages.

2. Consider All Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Content marketing for buyers isn’t just about conversion copy. It requires the full content marketing funnel. About 83% of the customer journey occurs before they are ready to buy. This period is that essential research stage that modern healthcare buyers now perform online.

Your content marketing strategy should address buyers at every stage of the awareness, consideration, and conversion funnel. Some examples of a content you can create for your buyers to aid in their research and decision process include:

  • Awareness: Demand generation content, educational content, lead generation content
  • Consideration: Nurturing campaigns, more insightful educational content
  • Decision: Customer testimonials, frequently asked questions pages, conversion copy
The buyer's journey: Awareness, consideration, decision
Image from HubSpot

3. Strategically Distribute Your Content

When you relied on sales agents to distribute your products, you sent those representatives to healthcare facilities to educate buyers and sell products. Content marketing works similarly. Except, instead of physical sales representatives going to healthcare facilities, your content acts as your agents, and it goes to where your buyers frequent.

Some typical content buyers interact with during the research process include:

  • Google search engine results
  • Industry forums
  • Customer reviews
  • Social media posts
  • Paid ads in reliable digital or print publications
  • Third-party product promotions

4. Encourage Online Feedback

Online reviews are one of the most influential content forms that buyers consider when performing their research during the purchasing process. Online reviews impact the purchasing decisions of over 93% of customers. Additionally, 91% of customers rely on online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

5. Always Include a Call-to-Action

Your call-to-action (CTA) tells buyers what step they should take next. It helps you capture prospects and keep them interested in your brand rather than moving on to the next piece of content in their research.

CTAs work with all types of content, including social media posts, emails, and website copy. For example, email CTAs can increase your clicks by 371% and your sales by 1617%.

Take Your Marketing into the Next Era

Boost your sales by reaching your buyers in the research phase of purchase. Since most of your customers no longer rely entirely on a sales agent for their purchasing information, you must adjust your strategies to continue reaching them with effective and timely content.

Contact us to learn more about our content marketing insights to help you create content for purchasing.