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How Can Medical Manufacturers Use Inbound Marketing?

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Marketing is all about engaging your target audience. To do that, you have to establish contact and start a conversation. You might think that the best way to achieve that goal is to target them with marketing materials proactively.

However, flooding people with unwanted information will likely annoy them – and may even leave them distrustful of your brand. The majority of consumers already report that they don’t trust brands or their advertising.

As a marketer, distrust is the last thing you want to inspire in your target audience. This is especially true in the medical manufacturing field. You are responsible for healthcare products that literally change – or even save – lives. So, how do you reach consumers without inundating them with unwanted messaging?

Inbound marketing is the answer. This methodology brings customers to you by offering them valuable content tailor-made to their interests.

Find out how to implement inbound marketing for healthcare manufacturers below.

Inbound Marketing 101

Outbound marketing techniques like phone calls, email spam, and media buys are more likely to annoy than convince consumers. In contrast, inbound marketing attracts consumers organically. How? Content.

Blogs, websites, e-books, podcasts, long-form articles, and white papers can provide valuable information. By creating educational, informative content that meets your target audience’s needs, you can spark their interest — and then drive them to your website, your primary sales platform.

Effective content also helps to demonstrate authority on a subject and to establish trust. Authority marketing is a must in the medical manufacturing field. Healthcare provider networks, physicians, and patients need to trust your company and its products.

Implementing Inbound Marketing for Healthcare Manufacturers

Inbound marketing shares the same end goal of any marketing tactic: to generate leads and convert them to customers – and, ideally, loyal followers. The difference lies in the first step, as inbound marketing subtly attracts consumers instead of aggressively pursuing them.

Here is a step-by-step guide to inbound marketing for healthcare manufacturers.

Know Your Customer

If you’re going to create content your consumers find valuable, you have to know what they want. Understand their pain points, challenges, and motivations. Developing a customer journey map can help you make your content sell even if you’ve never met the end customer.

For example, in the current climate, understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic impacts healthcare providers and networks can help you generate relevant and timely content.

Create Niche-Specific Content

Odds are you work in a highly specific field, whether it’s cardiovascular stents, stethoscopes, or ultrasound machines. Many medical manufacturing professionals will stay in the same sector for years or even decades.

Leverage your knowledge. Content marketing in healthcare should be focused on your area of expertise, allowing you to create genuinely informative blogs, white papers, e-books, and more.

Perfect Your Website

The content you put into the world to attract your target audience should always link back to your leading sales portal – your website. Include a call-to-action with links to your platform, ideally after the content. Promoting upfront can deter consumers.

When consumers get to your website, they should be greeted with a streamlined, user-friendly platform. Create a robust portal that will drive healthcare sales. It should feature straightforward navigation and content that is crisp, clear, and informative.

Finally, make sure to develop a mobile-friendly version of your website. Many people now prioritize smartphones over desktop computers for internet access, and Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher in search engine results.

Automate Your Marketing Processes

Inbound marketing is all about delivering an improved consumer experience. This comes in part from great content and in part from efficient processes. Use marketing automation tools to streamline operations.

Say a consumer visits your website, for example. They download a free white paper on a topic of interest to them – say, cardiovascular stents – in exchange for providing their email address. A marketing automation system will capture, sort, and store that email. It can further be programmed to tailor future mailings according to the individual’s expressed interest (in this case, cardiology).

What does this accomplish? The consumer gets more meaningful content more quickly. Meanwhile, your marketing team saves time and effort, which they can then dedicate to other measures – like creating more great content.

Tap into the Power of Inbound Marketing Today

Share Moving Media is a full-service media company specializing in medical marketing and distribution. From podcasts to e-books, blogs, and more, we can help you create and place valuable authority content to drive your inbound marketing efforts.

Subscribe to our newsletter for more healthcare marketing tools, tips, and tricks. Ready to revamp your inbound marketing? Contact us.

8 Essentials of Contract Law in Healthcare Equipment You Need to Know

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Healthcare is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country. 

Every action related to healthcare involves some type of written contract—whether between doctors and patients, suppliers and hospitals, nurses and doctors, and so on.

As a supplier or manufacturer, you deal with contracts between all parties in one form or another.

Understanding the intricacies of contract law in healthcare is key to avoiding massive problems and keeping healthy relationships.

What Types of Laws Impact Healthcare Equipment and Technology Contracts?

Regulations impact everything from pricing and expirations down to locations and usage. 

Stark Law

On the surface, Stark Law seems easy to avoid. Stark Law prevents conflicts of interests, prohibiting physician self-referral anywhere the physician might have a financial interest. 

Different clauses fall under Stark Law as well, such as the Anti-Kickback Statute. 

Dig deeper and you’ll find Stark Law covers a wide range of scenarios—including some relating to equipment and leasing. 

HIPAA

HIPAA contracts and regulations protect patient information. Years ago, HIPAA was the last of worries for most equipment suppliers and manufacturers. The explosion in digital records and smart equipment, however, has changed the game. 

Certificate of Need

Certificate of Need laws require a hospital or physician office to prove there’s a legitimate market need before expanding, building, or even acquiring new equipment like beds in some cases. 

CoN laws vary widely by state. Meanwhile, some states don’t even have CoN laws on the books. Although tempting to assume the burden falls on your buyer to establish need, it’s smart to familiarize yourself with the laws in states you operate. 

What You Need to Know About Contract Law in Healthcare for Equipment and Facilities 

41% of people already don’t trust brands to remain truthful. The stakes are especially high in industries like healthcare supplies and equipment where trust is literally a matter of life or death.

Physician and hospital reputations also depend on your knowledge of regulations and contract law in healthcare. Look at the auto industry: The Takata airbag recall sent shockwaves through every major manufacturer’s reputation. 

Similar mishaps with healthcare equipment or supplies happen all the time. 

Keep the following essentials in mind to protect yourself and build trustworthy relationships with your partners.

1. Outsourcing Your Contracts Could Earn You a Violation

When you outsource your contracts, you’re also outsourcing compliance. Keeping your contract work in-house ensures transparency. You’ll always have control over the details.

2. Automatic Renewals Can Work Against You

Some types of contracts require renegotiations or inspections. In these cases, auto-renewing your contracts could put you in violation of Stark Laws or other compliance regulations. 

3. Unsecure Technology Puts You at Risk

Equipment with smart software that integrates patient records poses a huge risk with data breaches. Make sure to review how HIPAA applies to your technology and which contracts in healthcare to work out with physicians and hospitals in terms of responsibility and data sharing.

4. Certain Technology Requires Licensing Fees

Commercial licensing violations are extremely costly. Depending on the copyright law, both suppliers and physicians could be responsible for paying licensing fees or royalties. 

5. Innovative Equipment Might Require a Certificate of Need

Hospitals have huge legal teams to manage CoN laws. Doctors at small practices, however, rely on your knowledge to make smart decisions. Set yourself apart from competitors by doing the research yourself and helping buyers navigate the local regulations.

6. Marketing Matters

Influencer marketing might be tempting, but tread carefully. Healthcare influencers like physicians could create a huge conflict of interest and violation of Stark Law, although currently a legal gray area.

Likewise, how you market your products, the language you use, and the conditions you treat all require careful configuration. The FTC cracks down on false claims and subtle marketing language in healthcare all the time. You don’t want to put your contracts in healthcare at risk from a simple marketing mishap.

7. What About Repairs?

As a healthcare supplier or manufacturer, you deal with high-value contracts. Losing a contract for a hospital system, for example, could be a disaster. 

Imagine a hospital assumes repairs are covered for a year and a $20,000 piece of equipment breaks down. Not negotiating contract terms for things like repairs and maintenance could ruin that relationship forever.

8. Comprehensive Writing is Key

When legal issues arise—no matter the entities involved—you don’t want anything left to interpretation. 

If there’s any uncertainty in terms of pricing, relationships, shipping, or maintenance, always assume it could be used against you. For example, who holds the burden of risk if a physician harms someone while using your equipment? 

You need a team of writers and law professionals on your side to draft proper contract law in healthcare.

Enhance Your Sales and Marketing with Comprehensive Content

Useful and relevant content shows your audience that you’ve done your research and you understand their biggest concerns. In an industry like healthcare supplies, building authority is key to earning trust. 

Doctors and hospitals are busy. Don’t wait for them to research your organization’s history and expertise. Show them right away with high-quality thought leadership content in your industry.

At Share Moving Media, we provide regular healthcare content tips, research, and advice backed by decades of experience. Sign up for our Marketing Minute to stay updated.

The Changing Face of Content Marketing

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Content marketing in healthcare has changed quite a bit as the world rapidly adjusts to upcoming technologies and all that it has to offer. While digital journals in healthcare aren’t exactly a new concept, they are quickly becoming the expectation when it comes to publishing relevant information in the world of healthcare.  

Digital health is quickly becoming the new norm, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This term refers to the practice of using various technologies to provide data access to everyone in the healthcare industry – patients included. The end goal of digital health is to foster an equal patient-doctor relationship. 

With digital health on the uprise, does that mean that print media in the industry is on the way out?

Is Print Media Dead in the Water?

Is print media dead in the world of healthcare? Absolutely not – but it has its time and place. In the healthcare field, medical professionals must be able to find information in a moment’s notice, and nothing makes that easier than digital journals. They are also an excellent resource for medical teams to share with their patients when they need answers to their questions.

Here’s the thing – print media is still a relevant option when it comes to healthcare marketing tools. In fact, a study by MarketingProfs showed that print ads were not only easier to digest by the public, but that consumers trusted print ads 34% more than search engine ads – something worth noting when considering digital advertising in healthcare.  

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However, when it comes to creating and sharing relevant information amongst professionals and patients alike, digital media is the way to go. It is the most natural solution as far as digital health is concerned. Digital journals in healthcare give instant access to doctors, marketers, patients, and the general public when it comes to sharing relevant updates in the world of healthcare. 

Not only that, but it’s the perfect solution for medical facilities that are turning their focus to sanitary marketing. Again, sanitary marketing isn’t a new concept; however, in light of the current pandemic, it’s never made more sense. The concept, in a nutshell, is the safe delivery of marketing communications and the sharing of information in a way that informs without manipulating. 

Since more people are now restricted from in-house visits with their physicians and rely heavily on telehealth, it makes sense to have digital journals available. This allows healthcare professionals to share the materials with those who ask for more information or better references. It also helps medical facilities move away from unsanitary marketing practices that leave consumers with more questions than answers. 

Why Digital Journals in Healthcare Make Sense

Now, when we talk about digital journals in healthcare, we are talking about the genre as a whole. When most people think medical journals, they often think of the big wigs, including:

  • The Lancet
  • New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
  • Journal of American Medical Association

These journals have a heavy focus on studies of various practices and theories. What they can lack, however, is the simplicity in language that is required for the general public. The good news is that there are dozens of other reputable digital journals available for the public, including:

The goals of these digital journals are to keep the public informed of the goings-on in the healthcare industry – an industry that can get extremely complicated, very quickly. They break down the complicated jargon and turn the content into something that is not only easily sharable but much easier for the average reader to understand. 

Using Digital Journals to Foster Relationships Between Professionals and the Public

Now, the general public is very unlikely to head to Google and start searching for digital journals to help them with a medical problem. Instead, they’ll likely talk with their doctor and ask them for more information. The medical team will then provide them with relevant sources to help guide them on their search.

While digital journals can be very technical in nature, they are still an excellent source of content when optimized correctly. Remember, the goal of these journals is to foster positive relationships between medical teams and their audience. So, that means these journals need to be answering essential questions that patients are likely to ask and use both a language and tone that are easily understandable to those who will be reading them. 

Translating the complicated jargon used throughout the healthcare industry can be challenging for some, which is why it’s crucial to have the right team on your side to help you break it all down into something that can be shared with your audience. 

Share Moving Media Can Help

Here at Share Moving Media, we understand that creating the right content for your audience can be somewhat challenging. Our team of trained professionals has the knowledge to help you create amazing content to help your business reach its goals. 

Curious how we can help you create outstanding content? Then contact us today to learn more!

7 Tips to Improve Web Traffic Conversion in Healthcare

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Having a large number of website visitors doesn’t mean your marketing campaign is successful. You’ve got to convert them into leads fast.

With the diminished attention span of most people, you need a way to get them hooked quickly. Otherwise, they’ll end up jumping to one of your competitors’ sites. Even if they stay on your site to read your content, you need to be subtle in encouraging them to leave their personal information.

In marketing, subtlety is even more crucial when it comes to web traffic conversion in healthcare. Your focus is running a business, but you must also adhere to medical ethics when marketing your products.

Honest marketing communication coupled with effective lead generation techniques can help boost your conversion rate.

How to Boost Conversion in Healthcare Websites

Getting prospects to visit your website using an effective content marketing strategy is only the beginning. While a good website design and relevant content can help retain their attention, you want to convert them to potential leads before they leave your site. 

Here are proven techniques to encourage your visitors to take action:

1. Offer Value Upfront

A pop-up window about exclusive offers and discounts in exchange for an email address doesn’t cut it in the healthcare niche. It’s too aggressive, and it doesn’t give immediate gratification to your visitors.

Your visitors will tend to leave their email addresses if you offer them something in return upfront. Some of the added value you can give them are:

  • Case studies
  • Videos
  • Educational guides
  • White papers
  • E-books

While you already have relevant informational articles on your site, these incentives offer more specific information. Solutions to challenges your prospects are experiencing can provide an enticing offer without being too pushy.

2. Use the Power of Testimonials

In alignment with the principles of medical ethics, testimonials can help provide honest marketing to potential leads. Showing testimonials on your website’s home page or landing pages can help build trust and credibility quickly.

Testimonials from doctors and healthcare professionals about your excellent service quality are powerful tools that can sway even the most skeptical visitors.

Did you know that 79% of consumers trust online reviews and treat them the same way they would personal recommendations from family and friends? Reviews can help boost your trustworthiness and generate leads effectively. It gives your visitors a second and third opinion from other health professionals about their experiences.

However, never show any fake testimonials or over-inflated reviews. Potential customers can see right through them and can easily verify the truth through other online platforms.

3. Make Your Content Visually Appealing

Having long and well-researched content articles on your site is not enough to engage visitors. If the presentation is dull, they’ll tend to leave the website immediately. Leave the wall of text to downloadable white papers and case studies.

A visually appealing content can help address the short attention span that plagues most online users today. Aside from breaking paragraphs to a maximum of four to five sentences only, you can also add more color to your content using:

  • Infographics
  • Embedded videos
  • Colorful graphs and charts

Don’t go overboard with this technique.. Keep your website looking very professional, but don’t make it boring.

4. Optimize your Call to Actions

A call to action (CTA) should balance being conservative and effective in the  healthcare niche. Aggressive CTA buttons, such as “Buy Now” or “Get Your Free Trial,” are too sales-y. Instead, you can use CTA texts such as:

  • Check out our services
  • Learn more about our products
  • Subscribe to our newsletter

Make sure that the nature of the content goes well with the CTA text. If your content is about “Essential Equipment in Nurse Stations,” a CTA button with the text “Learn more about our equipment” is more appropriate than “Subscribe to our newsletter.”

5. Improve your Landing Pages

When potential customers click your banner ad, they’re expecting to see detailed information about what’s shown in the advertisement. As a truthful advertising component, your landing page should offer the specific product or service you advertised.

Use your landing page to provide a concise explanation of your products and services. Provide reviews and testimonials and a CTA at the end. Don’t make the common mistake of showing sidebars and a navigation menu on your landing page.

The effectiveness of your landing page drops when there are too many choices presented to the visitor. In line with Hick’s Law, the more choices a person has, the more time it takes to make a decision. This behavior leads to analysis paralysis and can cause you to lose a potential lead due to overwhelming choices.

Keeping your landing page brief makes it more effective than overloading it with information. 

6. Make Forms Easy to Fill out

Potential leads can still choose to leave your site if you give them a tedious form to fill up. You don’t have to get all the information at once since doing so can make them uncomfortable. Your form field should initially collect these three information only:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Location

If you need them to answer a question, try to provide a drop-down list to make it more convenient for your visitors.

7. Provide Live Chat Features

No matter how extensive your content is, there will always be specific questions that medical suppliers need to answer before signing up for your services. While an FAQ page can help answer some of the most common questions, a live chat feature can help you build trust quickly.

Live chat has the potential to increase conversion by 20% and help shorten the sales pipeline. The immediate assistance you give helps build credibility fast, resulting in better lead generation.

Setting up live chat on a website is an offshoot of the traditional over-the-phone approach. While potential leads may still choose to place a call instead, a live chat feature adds another convenience level for those from another state.

Turn Clicks into Leads with These Tips

Follow these seven tips and convert your visitors into customers. While these approaches may be simple to apply, they help improve your lead generation results.Share Moving Media provides marketing training that boosts your business further. Contact us for marketing training geared for healthcare suppliers and manufacturers.

Lean Marketing in Healthcare: 5 Strategies to Help Small Suppliers Beat Big Brands

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The healthcare industry is a highly competitive market. In the United States alone, 784,626 healthcare companies are vying for consumers. Small healthcare suppliers have a big challenge ahead of them when competing with big brands. They don’t typically have the marketing budget that large companies do, so they don’t have the same brand recognition and visibility. But that doesn’t mean that small suppliers can’t compete in the industry.

Through lean marketing in healthcare, smaller companies can maximize their budgets to earn more success with potentially smaller funds. Lean marketing allows room for adaptability, allowing small suppliers to adjust their efforts along the way for more impactful results and a higher ROI. 

While big brands have several advantages when it comes to marketing, they’re not unbeatable. To compete with big brands, small healthcare suppliers must develop lean marketing strategies that yield big results.

What is Lean Marketing in Healthcare?

The lean philosophy began in the automobile industry with Toyota Manufacturing Systems (TMS). They believed that, through a framework of efficiency, repetition, testing, and quantifying metrics, they could outperform their competitors. 

Although the lean philosophy was initially used in terms of manufacturing, businesses in other industries began adopting it into their marketing plans. It’s especially helpful in the healthcare industry, where multiple departments often have to work together on complex projects with a shared budget. 

Lean marketing allows for departments to work seamlessly together, helps to simplify complicated projects, and provides flexibility for a smooth project workflow of continuous improvement.

With lean marketing, small businesses in the healthcare industry can:

  • Improve delivery time: Larger tasks are broken up into smaller pieces that are easier to manage. This lets you test and launch campaigns more quickly, seeing results sooner. Additionally, by performing a task repeatedly, you can make improvements each time for a more efficient and effective marketing plan.
  • Better connect with members of their team: To become lean, staff must meet daily to give status updates on the projects they’re working on. Such transparency not only keeps everyone on the same page. It helps identify potential pitfalls and provides an arena for peer-to-peer problem solving, continual learning, and growth. 
  • Narrow their focus on single tasks: Multitasking takes focus away from several projects at once. In lean marketing, people are encouraged to focus on one thing at a time. This helps people work more efficiently and yields a higher rate of productivity.
  • Pivot their strategy mid-stride: By constantly measuring your efforts, you can see what parts of your plan are working and what needs improvement. Workers are encouraged to make data-driven adjustments to ensure they’re working as proficiently and effectively as possible. Pivoting a strategy mid-stride helps to reduce waste of time and resources on a plan that simply isn’t working.

5 Lean Marketing Strategies for Small Healthcare Suppliers

Through careful strategy, small companies in the healthcare supply chain can gain a foothold in the industry’s marketplace. Whether you’re a hospital distributor, a member of a group purchasing organization, or in charge of purchasing physician office supplies, here are five lean marketing strategies that can help you beat big brands.

1. Set SMART Goals 

To function more efficiently, it’s important to know what you’re aiming for and how well that plan is working. By setting measurable goals at the onset of a project, you can stay on track while adhering to your budget. SMART goals help define your intentions and keep you driven toward success.

SMART goals are:

  • Specific: A narrowed scope yields higher rates of efficiency.
  • Measurable: Metrics and their reassessment will reveal areas of accomplishment.
  • Attainable: A series of smaller goals gain more success and propel you forward to more rewards.
  • Relevant: Objectives should be in line with your long-term plans.
  • Timely: A realistic deadline helps prioritize your course of action.

Setting manageable and achievable targets will launch you and your team toward success while maximizing your work efficiency.

2. Amplify Your Strengths 

It’s common for companies to invest marketing dollars into a campaign that just doesn’t work. They try to capitalize on too many products, services, and promises. This leads to wasted money, time, and effort, and that’s not what the lean philosophy is all about. When developing your marketing strategy, think about the things your business does well. Focus on those aspects and use them to create your marketing plan. 

With lean marketing, quality is more important than quantity. Invest your resources into whatever will make the most impact. Avoid tactics that aren’t performing and focus on what yields results. It’s better to focus on a few things and be exceptional than several things and be mediocre.

3. Leave Room in Your Marketing Plan for Adjustments 

From acquisitions and medical research to government policies and technological advancements, the healthcare industry is constantly changing. That’s why flexibility is so important to a marketing campaign. Through constant evaluation, you’ll know which of your marketing tactics is underperforming. With lean marketing, small suppliers have the opportunity to adjust as necessary. 

When you set your marketing plan, remember it isn’t chiseled in stone. Allow opportunities for creative solutions and new directions so you can pivot freely without hesitation.

4. Constantly Review Your Budget 

Lean marketing encourages constant assessment of what is and isn’t working in your marketing plan. This should also apply to your marketing budget. Set long-term goals for the year, but make frequent assessments as you determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Find areas in your budget that need to be adjusted, eliminated, or reconfigured to meet the needs of your flexible marketing goals.

5. Outsource Projects to Save Resources 

It’s not always most efficient to do your own marketing. If you don’t have a dedicated promotional team, balancing those responsibilities can take time and focus away from other projects that need your attention. This goes against the lean philosophy. Consider outsourcing some of your projects to a medical manufacturer marketing agency.

Hiring an outside expert can sometimes be more efficient and cost effective than trying to manage it all yourself.

Rely on Experts for Lean Marketing in Healthcare

Lean marketing can give small healthcare suppliers the competitive edge they need to surpass big brands. Share Moving Media is a full-service media and content company that specifically helps businesses in the healthcare industry meet their marketing goals.Contact us today to develop a lean marketing strategy that can help increase your market share.