Over half the world’s population is on social media, giving healthcare workers a powerful platform for reaching B2B customers and patients. Social media and the healthcare industry aren’t a new combination. Many medical businesses took to the platform during COVID-19 to educate patients in the middle of medical uncertainty.

Even though the height of the pandemic is over, healthcare companies are keeping up with their social media strategies because they see the value in this creative and personal platform.

Learn the role of social media in healthcare and five ways it’s changing healthcare marketing.

Key Takeaways:

• Social media reaches 59% of the world’s population and 72% of US adults.
• Facebook and YouTube are the top social media channels.
• Use social media to build personal connections through creative interactions.

How Does Social Media Apply to Healthcare?

In July 2022, 59% of the world’s population was on social media. The average time users spent on social platforms was 2 hours and 29 minutes. In America alone, 72% of adults use at least one social media platform.

The sheer number of social media users should be enough to convince healthcare companies to start using the platform to reach their audience. However, there are other reasons to consider it, such as the platform’s purpose.

Here are some of the most common ways consumers use their social accounts:

• Connecting with others
• Reading news
• Sharing information
• Entertaining themselves

While many social media channels started as places for individuals to connect, today, consumers use them to learn, shop and discover. What makes healthcare social media such a valuable channel for discovery is the access businesses have to information.

When social media users and businesses create accounts, they share demographic and firmographic data. Social media uses this data to personalize each user’s experience by offering relevant insights based on that data.

For example, a consumer that visits healthcare businesses on social media is more likely to see healthcare-related topics on their feed.

Which Social Media Platform Is Best for Healthcare?

You don’t need to market on every social media channel to be effective. Instead, consider these top channels for your healthcare strategy.

Facebook is the most popular social media platform, with 2.94 billion users. In the US, 69% of adults say they use Facebook. It’s a versatile channel for connecting with potential customers and educating your audience.

YouTube is the second most visited site, just under Google and before Facebook. Even though YouTube has 1.7 billion users, it sees 14.3 billion visitors monthly. On YouTube, you can reach your audience with creative long-form video content.

Instagram reaches an audience of 1.3 billion users. Through video stories and images, businesses can share quick snippets of information with an audience of patients and companies.

TikTok deserves an honorable mention because it has a higher engagement rate per post than Instagram or YouTube. In 2022, TikTok reached one billion monthly active users, including several notable healthcare TikTok personalities. Use the platform to educate and connect through short-form video content.

LinkedIn is the top social media channel for B2B marketers. LinkedIn has 55 million business accounts and users who are key decision-makers from leading businesses. Use the platform to share your thought leadership content and educational articles for a targeted B2B audience.

5 Ways Social Media Is Changing Healthcare

Here are five ways those social media channels are transforming healthcare marketing today with new social media marketing opportunities.

1. Building Personal Relationships

Social media is a chance to turn business partnerships into relationships. You’ll also see greater brand loyalty when there are relationships between you and your customers.

Through social media, you can communicate with your customers and patients using comments and social chat. You can also interact with posts from related businesses to build brand awareness.

Cardinal Health shows another way to invest in building relationships. It regularly highlights its employees and customers. These personal stories and pictures put a face to the brand, focusing its business on people and solutions rather than medical supplies and sales.

2. Motivating Actions

Healthcare companies are at the frontlines of medical battles as communities strive to diagnose early, find treatment, and raise awareness of diseases. Social media can be your battleground to fight for a healthier future and motivate change one patient at a time.

Johnson & Johnson uses its social platforms to raise awareness of common and rare diseases and help people seek treatment early.

3. Reaching a Larger Audience

Social media advertising grew to $137 billion, overtaking paid search at $135 billion. Through social media’s more advanced algorithm, businesses can target a niche audience and reach more of their market. When more of your intended audience sees your ads, you’ll also see greater returns from your advertising investment.

One of the most popular forms of social media advertising is retargeting. 77% of B2B and B2C marketers use retargeting on Facebook and Instagram. Retargeting ads connect with leads and website visitors interested in your brand but didn’t convert yet.

4. Connecting Directly with Patients

Patients are growing increasingly interested in their healthcare. Healthcare manufacturing businesses are seeing a rise in patients researching them directly instead of only connecting through healthcare facilities.

Social media allows traditional B2B healthcare companies to connect directly with end-user patients. Through this channel, healthcare companies can educate patients and provide resources so patients can make more informed healthcare decisions.

For example, patients know what new treatments or equipment are available on the market and can ask their primary care providers about these care options.

5. Creatively Educating Your Audience

Webinars, blog posts, and email marketing are all highly effective at reaching your audience with educational content. However, marketers can see more results by diversifying their approach with more creative content.

Social media is a creative outlet that allows healthcare marketers to break away from the norm. For example, Doctor Mike on YouTube addresses trending health topics from a trained medical perspective. He takes TV shows, news stories, and social media claims and dives into what’s accurate and misleading in pop culture.

Incorporate Social Media into Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Share Moving Media offers the latest insights and trends in healthcare marketing. Use our leading news and resources to build a creative and highly effective social media strategy that perfectly complements your healthcare marketing campaigns.

Contact us to learn more about our healthcare marketing solutions.

Is print marketing dead? A quick Google search will fill the results page with a resounding NO. Despite the dominance of digital devices, print ads and content still hold the reader’s attention and continue to entice new audiences with authoritative content. So, marketers who want to stay relevant in 2023 must consider ways to invest in a print marketing budget.

Explore five reasons print marketing should remain near the top of your marketing strategies next year.

Key Takeaways:

• Print marketing works best alongside digital marketing strategies for the greatest efficiency.
• Marketers use print marketing to stand out in a digitally saturated society.
• Readers rely on print content for authority content and a chance to unplug from digital devices.

Print vs. Digital Marketing

There’s no questioning the importance of digital content marketing. However, digital strategies don’t replace print marketing. Instead, Digital builds on print marketing campaigns. When marketers combine print and digital marketing, the campaigns are 400% more effective.

So, while print marketing has changed, it hasn’t gone away. Instead, marketers are just shifting what print marketing looks like by creating digital and print advertising efforts that build on the strengths of the other.

For instance, marketers can use print marketing to reach a target audience, hold their attention, and introduce a brand. However, digital campaigns take over to nurture those leads through email and direct marketing that businesses customize to the audience.

5 Reasons to Invest More in Your Print Marketing Budget

Consider these five proofs of print advertising effectiveness and why print should be part of your marketing budget in 2023.

1. Capture Your Audience’s Attention

There was once a time when an email notification excited people while the mailbox was swimming in letters and magazines. Today, the tides have changed. Now people’s inboxes are drowning in messages, and consumers are excited when there’s direct mail.

Print marketing stands out because it differs from other content marketing forms.

In addition, print capture’s people’s attention more because of its format. Printed material requires 21% less mental effort to read and digest, helping with brand recall and increasing motivational responses by 20%.

On average, readers will spend 20 minutes looking at publications, which is five times as long as what readers spend on ad websites.

2. Share Content in a Fresh Format

Businesses are always looking to find new ways to distribute content instead of doing what everyone else is doing. For example, creating blogs and having social media business accounts was once an innovative marketing strategy. However, now that these methods have become the norm, businesses must find other ways to remain fresh.

Trends often move in circles. What once was old always comes back in a fresh new way. For example, print book sales increased by 8.9% in 2021 after sellers said print books were going out of style in favor of e-readers and audiobooks.

In the same way, marketing techniques are making a full circle. As digital strategies are growing in popularity, print strategies have become new again, which helps businesses appear fresh and different from their competition.

3. Inspire Your Readers

According to one well-known statistic, 93% of online experiences start with a search engine. Customers are going to Google and performing 8.5 billion searches per day.

However, those searches don’t start with Google. First, there has to be a need, question, or concern that inspires a consumer to search. For example, a medical professional might have read a new idea or seen a new product in a magazine that prompted them to search for more information online.

So, while search engines are a place for answers, print is where your audience goes to find questions to ask.

Use your print marketing budget to focus on inspirational content that sparks new ideas and introduces new products or solutions that your audience might not have thought of before. This content will attract new visitors to your digital content as medical professionals seek out more information on the questions introduced in your print content.

4. Excite Your Audience

Print has more authority than digital content, and audiences tend to trust it more. Many reasons contribute to the authority of print ads and content, but perhaps one of the strongest is privacy. Digital ads pop up everywhere online and collect data as customers interact with them. However, print content is a private experience that customers can control.

In addition, digital content is faster and easier to make. For example, anyone can post a social media post or write a blog article. However, only the best content appears in publications because magazines have more quality control standards than online content channels, and print content requires more investment. So, publishers don’t accept content lightly.

Print content also holds authority because it reaches a niche audience. Online, audiences usually have to scroll through several search results to find an article with helpful information. However, when subscribers pick up a publication, they know everything inside is relevant to them. Therefore, they start their browsing experience trusting each article and ad to deliver value.

5. Connect with Readers Offline

When professionals aren’t on the clock, they like to unplug. However, 54% of people say they struggle with unplugging. From emails to text messages, today’s professional is always pulled back to the phone or laptop for information and to communicate.

The more people depend on a digital connection–the more people try to find ways to unplug. When COVID-19 hit, people were plunged into an even more immersive digital world as workers switched to remote jobs and events moved from live to online platforms like Zoom. Soon, digital fatigue took over. Despite all the new ways consumers can connect with information and audiences online, 74% of people prefer print over digital.

Print magazines are one of the ways that professionals can gather information without relying on digital channels. In addition, magazines continue to reach consumers even when they unplug. So, while digital marketing might end when professionals clock out, print magazines can reach audiences as they unwind in the evening or when traveling on vacation.

Invest More in Print Advertising This Year

Share Moving Media connects medical manufacturers with key decision-makers in the healthcare industry through our leading publications. Help your marketing content stand out and increase your brand authority through print content that we distribute to an audience of health systems suppliers, distributors, and purchasing organizations.

Contact us to learn more about our print marketing solutions.

The healthcare distribution market is booming, and experts project it to reach over $1.048 billion by 2024. With that need also comes openings for more medical supply distributors.

If you are interested in joining an incredible team of medical manufacturers and distributors, then consider working with them in healthcare contracting as a medical sales representative.

Key Takeaways

• Working with medical supply distributors is a meaningful and fast-paced career.
• You can either sell products from manufacturers to distributors or directly to healthcare facilities.
• Medical distribution is an ideal job for those with degrees in healthcare.
• A successful healthcare sales rep invests hours in training.
• Medical sales reps can earn six-digit incomes with enough work.

There are 2 Types of Medical Suppliers

As a healthcare sales representative, you will often hear three terms: medical suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors.

A medical supplier is a broad term for both manufacturers and distributors. These are businesses and organizations which create and sell all medical supplies. For example, suppliers can provide anything from tongue compressors to the machines used in surgery. So when you see an item at a healthcare facility, it most likely came from a medical supplier.

Healthcare Manufacturers

A healthcare manufacturer is the one who creates the medical equipment and products. Often manufacturers will sell their products directly to hospitals and healthcare facilities through their healthcare sales representatives.

If you are looking to work with a manufacturer, you must be familiar with B2C sales.

Some of the top healthcare manufacturers are:

• Olympus
• J&J
• Stryker
• Medtronic
• Boston Scientific
• Jockey Scrubs

Healthcare Distributors

Other times, manufacturers will not sell their products directly to hospitals. Instead, they sell them to distributors, who then sell them to the customer. If you are working in this type of model, you will need knowledge of B2B sales.

Some of the top healthcare distributors are:

• McKesson
• AmerisourceBergen
• Henry Schein
• Cardinal Health
• Medline Industries

Prerequisite Education and Knowledge

The medical supply distributor career field is broad, which means there are different educational requirements for healthcare sales reps.

Of the 137,653 medical sales representatives in the U.S., 82% have a bachelor’s degree, while 7% have a master’s degree. Meanwhile, some suppliers don’t require any prior higher education.

However, you are considered a product expert and need the appropriate training and education. Those with advanced medical training and experience have a higher chance of getting positions selling medical devices. With these devices also comes the responsibility to help hospitals learn how to use them, which could mean joining a surgery.

On the other hand, other sales representatives may focus on distributing scrubs or paper products, which wouldn’t require as much expert knowledge. Either way, if you are working in the medical field, you need to be on top of the latest healthcare rules and regulations – which is why healthcare sales reps often make a higher income than other industry sales jobs.

You can give yourself a competitive advantage when looking for a sales job in healthcare by completing healthcare sales training.

What Working with Medical Supply Distributors Looks Like

Day in the Life of a Medical Device Representative by Medical Sales

Every medical supply distributor’s job will look different depending on the products you sell, where you work, and who your leads are.

One nurse shared her experience and said her days include:

• Calling leads
• Dropping off equipment
• Following up with customers
• Attending surgeries
• Offering pre-and post-purchase support
• And so much more.

The Greatest Challenges in the Industry

Because of the nature of healthcare sales, it comes with its fair share of challenges. One of the most challenging parts of the job is keeping on top of the latest healthcare regulations and knowledge. You need to know accurate and updated information so you can answer any questions your leads have.

Another challenge is the fast-paced and unpredictable schedule of reps. You will find yourself nearly always on the go, traveling from facility to facility for hospital distribution sales. As a result, each day will offer new challenges and different schedules.

The Biggest Benefits of the Industry

Even with those challenges, the industry offers more significant benefits. For example, the fast-paced environment may intimidate some while it excites others who thrive in that type of workplace. You will also get to be part of an industry that continues to grow and present new opportunities for advancement.

Another benefit is the high salary. If you devote time and effort to your job, you can make over six-digit incomes every year. Additional training helps give you the tools for success. For example, you can learn the latest sales strategies to sell medical supplies.

The best benefit of working with medical supply distributions is the impact and relationships you build. Each day you meet heroes working on the frontlines of hospitals and medical facilities. You will also have a chance to impact the lives of others by giving those medical workers the tools they need to succeed and save lives.

No amount of compensation or benefits equals the lasting impact of changing someone else’s life.

Share Moving Media Works With the Best Medical Supply Distributors

Are you looking to start a meaningful and fast-paced career that will change people’s lives?

At Share Moving Media, we have the opportunity to work with some of the best device and medical supply distributors. These healthcare suppliers create and distribute everything from medical-grade gloves to life-saving diagnostic devices.

Whether you are a medical supplier looking to train your current team or want to join a manufacturing company, contact our staff at Share Moving Media to help you reach your healthcare business goals.

Across industries, the internet has changed the way people do business. Today’s consumers turn to the internet to find the answers to their problems, making healthcare inbound marketing more important than ever.

Marketers used to reach out to consumers to peddle products and earn business. Now, buyers have access to a wealth of information to conduct their own research and seek out solutions to their unique needs. In fact, 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine. 

To stand out from the competition and capture market share in the healthcare supply chain, today’s medical sales professionals need to adopt a healthcare inbound marketing mindset.

Keep reading to learn about healthcare inbound marketing and how it can help boost sales and generate revenue.

Key Takeaways:

• Inbound marketing is the use of tailored experiences and content to attract, engage, and delight your audience.
• Inbound marketing involves a powerful content marketing strategy that includes materials ranging from blog articles and whitepapers to videos and podcasts.
• Healthcare inbound marketing is essential to alleviating customer concerns in a complex industry, targeting the right people, and positioning yourself as an industry leader to stand apart from your competition. 

What Exactly is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a tactic in which businesses attract customers to their website by creating customized user experiences and content tailored to the audience’s specific needs. Rather than sending out potentially unwanted information to your target market, inbound marketing is all about building meaningful relationships that last. This is important because 65% of a company’s sales come from existing customers.

Types of Inbound Marketing Content

Inbound marketing can take many forms, including:

• Blog articles
• Whitepapers
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Search engine optimization

Goals of Inbound Marketing

With inbound marketing, the focus is on serving the customer. This means delivering a positive user experience through valuable content that resonates and fills a need. 

Healthcare inbound marketing achieves three main goals:

• Attract the right people: Draw people in with meaningful content that builds trust and interests your audience.
• Engage your audience: Provide solutions and expert insights that align with consumer goals and compel people to purchase from you.
• Delight visitors: Offer the support and resources your customers need to ease their pain points and solve their problems.

The more people you satisfy with your inbound marketing, the more those people will spread the word about your business, helping you to expand your reach and cast a wider net. This makes success cyclical. The more you put into your inbound marketing efforts, the more you’ll gain in the long run.

The following video further explains inbound marketing and provides helpful tips and tricks to maximize this tool:

3 Reasons Healthcare Inbound Marketing is a Must

Whether you’re trying to attract hospital distributors, healthcare suppliers, or group purchasing organizations (GPOs), inbound marketing can help generate qualified leads and drive quality traffic to your site. Here are three reasons you should adopt a healthcare inbound marketing mindset.

1. Alleviate Concerns and Boost Confidence

The world of medical distribution can be a highly complex industry. Between technical lab equipment, newly released and updated medications, and ever-evolving government regulations, medical and hospital purchasing often comes with lots of questions. Buyers want to be sure they’re making the best purchase for their company. Healthcare inbound marketing enables you to provide the content they need to build their confidence and influence their purchase decision. 

Through audience surveys and research, you can learn what questions and concerns are affecting your target market. Use that information to create content that allays their worries. Publish expert articles, link to reputable resources, and deliver whitepapers and case studies that address specific concerns. Create videos to demonstrate equipment or further explain the features and benefits of the products you sell. 

Healthcare can be complicated, but you can help your customer base navigate rough waters through custom inbound marketing.

2. Target the Right People

Buyers are out there right now, searching for the very solutions you provide. Inbound marketing allows you to connect with those people. If you can reach those searchers, who are already in a buying mindset, and convince them that your offerings can solve their problems, you increase the likelihood of conversions and sales. Inbound marketing enables you to not only create powerful content but also optimize that material, so you have more opportunities to align with buyer searches.

Through search engine optimization (SEO) like keyword placement, meta titles, and quality content that delivers value, you can earn higher search engine ranking placement. Since 75% of people don’t scroll past the first page of Google’s search results, ranking among the top results can help boost visibility and maintain a front-of-mind presence among prospective buyers. 

Healthcare inbound marketing lets you take a more targeted approach to connecting with potential customers and, as a result, yields more effective results.

3. Position Yourself as an Industry Leader

Knowing what questions your target audience is asking helps you create content that addresses their unique needs. It also enables you to hone in on highly specific topics and conduct in-depth research (and possible case studies) to not only find the answer but to become an expert on that issue. 

Delivering expert-level content that links to credible resources and includes factual, current data helps set you apart from your competitors. You’ll position yourself as an industry leader and gain credibility and trust among your readers and your industry peers.

All of this helps you attract a wider audience for a farther reach. You can get your readers to continue following you for more valuable information and recommend you to their own contacts who have similar questions and needs. You’ll broaden your reach, increase brand awareness and recognition, and drive more traffic to your website. From there, you can guide them through the sales funnel with more custom content that meets their needs and helps them achieve their goals.

Develop an Effective Healthcare Inbound Marketing Strategy 

Share Moving Media is a content and media company that provides communication and educational resources to businesses in the healthcare industry. Whether you’re in physician office supplies or group contracting, our team can help you create a healthcare inbound marketing strategy that captures market share and sets you apart from the competition. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help you create a powerful healthcare inbound marketing strategy!

The healthcare industry experienced a massive upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic – hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, there were global product shortages, and all unnecessary interactions were put on hold.

In response to these sudden shifts, medical suppliers have had to adapt to years’ worth of digital growth in the space of a few months. Instead of being able to meet with customers face-to-face like they were used to, many sales representatives were thrust into digital meeting spaces. This caused many people to lose some customer engagement in healthcare.

As the industry begins to reshape the definition of customer engagement, you can use your expertise to your advantage and deliver quality communication and optimized content, whether that is virtually, in person, or a combination of both.

This guide will bring you through some steps you can take to jumpstart your customer interactions.

Key Takeaways

• Create a customized experience for your customers by getting to know their needs and expectations.
• Use genuine emotions and customized content to give customers a personalized, engaging buying experience.
• Follow the customer’s lead when it comes to planning meetings, whether virtual or in-person.

Why Is Customer Engagement in Healthcare Important?

As a medical supplier, the products you sell are designed to improve a person’s health. You believe in your products, and you need your customers to believe in them too. If you or your customers are not engaged during the sales process, sales are going to suffer, and patients may miss out on valuable products that could improve health outcomes.

In our modern, digital world, it is important to use whatever technology options you have available to you. Use tech options like virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D visuals to demonstrate products in a virtual environment. This will keep healthcare decisions makers engaged and help them visualize how your medical supplies will work in their clinical settings.

Engaged customers will feel more of an emotional connection with your company. This will lead to better sales, more referrals, and improved loyalty.

6 Strategies You Can Use to Improve Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is one of the most important factors in selling medical supplies and equipment. Use these strategies to improve customer engagement in the digital healthcare environment.

1. Get to Know Your Customers

Your customers are real people. They have unique interests, family relationships, and learning styles. When you learn about these people, you may discover things you have in common, or at least things you can relate to. 

To help you keep track of all your customers, create customer personas for each person. These are individualized sheets or digital files where you record specific information on each customer, such as the following:

• Demographic information
• Job title and level
• Pain points and how you can solve them
• Values and goals
• Hobbies 
• Learning style (visual, written, etc.)

Use this information to refresh yourself before each interaction. Update these personas when you learn new information.

2. Connect with Genuine Emotions 

Healthcare is an emotional industry. Patients can experience every emotion imaginable while interacting with healthcare professionals. To match this level of emotion as a medical supplier, you need to keep patients’ needs at the forefront of all interactions. This can help you connect honestly with your customers.

The following video touches on five genuine emotions that business representatives can use to engage with their customers:

• Kindness
• Surprise
• Sincerity
• Creativity
• Empathy

When customers feel appreciated and understood, they are more likely to reward you and your business with more sales.

3. Meet Your Customers on Their Terms 

If your customers prefer face-to-face communication, try to make that happen. Others may still want to meet virtually. According to a 2021 report from Veeva, many healthcare professionals have found they prefer virtual meetings with representatives. In fact, the average duration of meetings has increased 133%, when you compare face-to-face meetings with remote meetings.

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Remote meetings can be a versatile tool that you can use to meet with healthcare professionals who have tight schedules. Since it eliminates any travel time, you may have more freedom to plan for longer meeting times.

No matter what the preferences of your customers, you will likely end up using a hybrid approach. The key is finding the ideal balance between remote and in-person interactions.

4. Follow the Customer Path 

To understand your customers, you need to see the medical supplies sales cycle from their perspective. Put yourself through the sales funnel and try to identify any bottlenecks where customers can get stuck or drop out of the cycle.

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You can also speak to your customers directly and ask them what they expect from the sales experience with you.

To broaden your customer base and increase engagement, you should consider using an omnichannel approach. This allows customers to learn about your company and products using their preferred channel, whether that is your business website, a blog, or even social media.

5. Create Customized Content 

With multiple channels for your customers to connect with you, your business needs customized content for each channel. While this content can have the same overarching theme, different channels require different approaches, especially for social media. You want to deliver content that is relevant and engaging to your customers. This will ensure a more personalized experience.

Rely on the personal preferences of your customers when choosing which content to share with them. Compare analytics from your customer tracking systems to determine the best approach to take with certain types of customers.

6. Thank Your Customers

No matter the outcome of your customer interactions, you should thank them for giving you some of their time. Whether you send them an email, a handwritten note, or some other form of appreciation, it can go a long way toward improving your customer engagement. Even if you didn’t close a sale, your act of kindness may encourage them to think of you the next time they are looking to buy.

Improve Your Customer Engagement with Share Moving Media

By focusing on your customer’s needs and connecting with them on an emotional level, you can improve your customer engagement. Share Moving Media is a great resource to help you reach more customers where they are.

We are experts in creating custom content for medical suppliers with a variety of publications and other marketing channels.We can help you expand your market share and stay engaged with your customer base.

Contact us today to get started.