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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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Value of Brand Loyalty

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

Why the shift?

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

Ideas for Boosting Brand Loyalty in Healthcare Manufacturing

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

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

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

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

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

Why do these techniques work?

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

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

3 Metrics for Measuring Brand Loyalty

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

Let these three metrics be your guide.

1. Content Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

2. Repurchasing Figures

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

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

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

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

Conversely, follow up on orders that have decreased.

3. Reported Customer Satisfaction

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

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

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

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

Get Support for Your Brand Messaging in Healthcare

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

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

Want help with your healthcare marketing? Contact us.

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

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

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

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

What is ORM?

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

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

Cycles of ORM in Healthcare 

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

ORM can follow one of two cycles:

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

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

Why Your Healthcare Company Needs ORM

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

ORM enables companies to do this in several ways.

Online Reputation Has a Long Shelf Life

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

Mitigate False Information

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

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

ORM Empowers You to Impact Your Online Reputation

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

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

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

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

Entrust Your ORM in Healthcare to Share Moving Media

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

4 Reasons Email Marketing is the Cornerstone of Healthcare Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

Why Email Marketing is Invaluable for Healthcare Marketing

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

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

1. Email Provides Useful Data

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

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

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

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

2. Email is Highly Targetable 

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

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

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

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

3. Email Builds Brand Awareness and Customer Loyalty

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

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

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

4. Email is Affordable 

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

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

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

Rely on Share Moving Media for Your Email Marketing Needs

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

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

Email Marketing for Healthcare: Reaching the Right Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Gather the Right Data 

Any successful email campaign begins by gathering user data. 

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

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

2. Familiarize Yourself with Your Audience 

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

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

3. Use Audience Segmentation

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

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

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

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

4. Employ Audience Mirroring 

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

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

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

5. Personalize All Content 

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

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

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

Develop Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns with Share Moving Media

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

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

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