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The Definitive Guide to Building Buyer Personas of IDN Supply Chain Leaders

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The healthcare market is enormous – and it’s only going to get bigger. Global healthcare spending is anticipated to increase at a compound annual growth rate of five percent from 2019 to 2023.

Medical suppliers who want to increase their share in an expanding market should act now. The right marketing campaign is the key to success. What’s the “right” campaign? It depends on your target audience.

Suppose you’re a supplier trying to sell medical masks to private physicians’ offices. In that case, your healthcare marketing techniques will be (should be!) different than if you’re a supplier selling diagnostic ultrasound equipment to integrated delivery networks (IDNs).

Buyer personas are integral to guiding your approach. A buyer persona allows you to define your target audience and better understand their buying behaviors, so you can craft your marketing accordingly.

This guide takes you through a simple three-step process to craft buyer personas for healthcare.

Why Buyer Personas Matter

The purpose of a buyer persona is to understand how your customer thinks and acts. With this information, you can better understand the decision-making process that governs what, when, where, and how they buy.

What a Buyer Persona Is

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of who is using your product or service. This imaginary profile covers details like demographics (sex, age, race, income, marital status, educational level), purpose (such as career goals), and motivation.

What a Buyer Persona Isn’t

A buyer persona is not a guess. It’s fact-based, created with detailed market research.

3-Step Checklist to Creating Buyer Personas for Healthcare

The healthcare supply market is exceptionally competitive. A well-crafted buyer persona allows you to stand out with concise, impactful messaging that attracts the buyer’s attention – and keeps it throughout the medical equipment sales funnel.

Here’s how to create buyer personas for healthcare.

1. Conduct Quantitative Analysis

Suppose your product isn’t exclusive to a single market segment (for instance, you target both individual physicians and IDNs). In that case, the first step is to break down your broader market into smaller segments.

Create a list of existing clients and group them according to details like location, contract value, and engagement (as evidenced by the frequency of orders, for instance). With this demographic and revenue information, start looking for trends.

For instance, you might find a correlation between location and an uptick in spending – indicating a gap in the market that you can step in to fill. If a competitor had an area sales rep changeover, it’s a prime opportunity.

2. Complete Qualitative Research

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when crafting buyer personas is ignoring psychographics in favor of demographics. This is where qualitative analysis comes into play. To better understand your target segments, both at the individual and organizational levels, get more intimate.

Reach out to trusted clients to arrange a chat. Healthcare professionals are busy, so keep it short. Emphasize that you’re trying to collect feedback to see how you can better serve them. 

During the interview, get a brief description of the business, the individual’s role within the organization, and their main goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Are they looking to cut costs? Have they been tasked with researching new tech? Is efficiency a factor?

Also, refer to your offering, asking what they use it for and, of course, what improvement they’d like to see in your product or service. Remember, retention is half the battle in healthcare sales.

3. Create and Socialize the Persona

You can now create your semi-fictional buyer persona based on the evidence you’ve collected. Say you sell heart stents, for example. A quantitative analysis reveals that private hospitals in the Midwest are your most significant revenue source. Your qualitative research shows that it’s the heads of cardiology departments who are the relevant decision-makers.

So, make your buyer persona the head of cardiology in a hospital setting. Let’s call her Rachel Harding. Dr. Harding will be further along in her career, at least 40 years of age, and highly educated. She must balance providing the best patient care with budget limitations set by higher-ups. 

As head of her department, Dr. Harding must stay on top of the latest developments. She does this by reading certain healthcare publications, like Wiley’s Clinical Cardiology, and attending essential conferences, like the American Society of Echocardiography Annual Conference. 

Finally, Dr. Harding is busy. She’s overseeing an entire department. Maybe she also has a family at home. Her time is precious. Your healthcare marketing strategy must take this into account.

Now you have an idea of where and how to reach a professional like Dr. Harding best. Thus, the buyer persona makes it easier to sell to your end customer without ever meeting them in person.

Find Out More About Making Buyer Personas Work for You

Share Moving Media helps healthcare suppliers reach diverse buyers through targeted content. Our publications, educational services, and associations cater to distributors, providers, and manufacturers. With our industry knowledge and comprehensive content offering, we help you increase market share.

Sign up for our newsletter for more healthcare marketing tips and tricks. Want to work with us? Then contact us today!

Influencer Marketing: Are Journals in Healthcare Marketing the New Influencers?

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Influencer marketing and healthcare don’t always go hand in hand in the mind of a marketing professional. When people think of influencer marketing, they automatically think of big-name celebrities cross-posting promotional material on their social media pages for various brands. In fact, there has been some backlash in the past regarding influencer marketing in healthcare because social media influencers “aren’t doctors” and shouldn’t be advising on medical concerns. 

So, if traditional influencer marketing is so controversial, how does the marketing trend work in the healthcare industry?

Influencer Marketing in Healthcare: Current Trends

When it comes to healthcare marketing tools, many of the “traditional” marketing tools work well for those in charge of building a healthcare marketing strategy for manufacturers, providers, etc. The same can be said of influencer marketing when done right. Studies have shown that approximately 80% of advertisers find this marketing method effective.

A screenshot of a cell phone Description automatically generated

Source: Smart Insights / Mediakix

The easiest way to break the idea of influencer marketing down is to pay careful attention to the audience that you’ll be addressing. However, when it comes to healthcare, things can get dicey. So, if you’re looking to leverage influencer marketing in the healthcare industry, you need to keep in mind that you are catering to a very specific audience made up of either doctors or patients (or sometimes a combination of both). 

So, while a creative celebrity cameo can work in some instances, you’re better off implementing one of these three current healthcare marketing strategies:

1. Healthcare Influencers

The concept of healthcare influencers works very similarly to that of more traditional influencers. The primary difference is that these individuals are experts in the industry. They can be doctors, surgeons, scientists, manufacturers, and more. 

2. Health e-Mavens 

The concept of e-Mavens isn’t exactly a new marketing concept; however, it’s not often talked about either. This concept stems from a term first coined in 1987 known as marketing mavens. Marketing mavens were known as a type of influencer who not only had a social presence but, again, a certain level of expertise or insider knowledge in a particular industry. 

In our current age of technology, these individuals are known as e-mavens, and they are considered consumers with first-hand knowledge of a subject and share their expertise online. What makes these individuals different from healthcare influencers is that while they have first-hand knowledge, they aren’t exactly “experts” in the traditional sense. 

Health e-mavens are defined as those who are “actively involved with health information acquisition and information transmission” across the internet. These are people that the public has come to know and trust for one reason or another. They are constantly searching for new information and they have a deep desire to share it once they’ve found it. 

One recent example is Lucy Hale, who has taken it upon herself to open up and share her women’s health journey and finding the right kind of birth control that suits her specific needs. 

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Source: Instagram

Helping women everywhere find the information they need to stay healthy is a passion for the young actress, so it’s unsurprising that she would open up about her story and share something so vulnerable with the public. 

3. Online Medical Journals

Did you know that approximately 7% of Google’s daily searches are in some way, health-related? That amounts to nearly 70,000 health-related Google searches each minute. Technology is an excellent resource, and with so many patients taking more control over their health and wellbeing, they are turning to the internet for information both before and after consulting with their medical team.

This is where journals in healthcare marketing come into play. Online medical journals come in many different forms, including:

  • Professional medical journals, such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
  • Digital healthcare journals for the public, including The Journal of Healthcare Contracting, Frontiers, and more.

How Journals in Healthcare Marketing Work as a Form of Influencer Marketing

So, which of these methods is the most effective for a successful healthcare marketing strategy? The right answer is to say all three have their advantages; however, online journals have a bit more edge to them than health e-mavens and other healthcare influencers. 

The saying content is king still rings loud in the marketing industry, no matter what sector you are in. This is especially true when it comes to content marketing in healthcare. Think about it for a moment – blogs and other similar online content are among the top three types of media used in content marketing today. 

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Source: HubSpot

Online journals in healthcare can and often do fall under this category. They work because they can be easily optimized for search engines, they can help draw in consistent (and relevant) traffic to your website, and when thoroughly researched, can help you build your authority on a given subject matter. 

This type of content is crucial now more than ever as more and more individuals start turning to Dr. Google for answers to their medical questions. 

Get More Healthcare Marketing Tips and Tricks with Share Moving Media

As a full-service media company, the team here at Share Moving Media understands that staying up to date on the current healthcare marketing tools and trends can be a tricky process. That’s why we do the heavy lifting for our clients. Contact us today to learn how we can help your brand.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Marketing Minute, today! 

How to Make Your Content Sell When You Never Meet the End Customer

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A guide to successful content marketing in the healthcare supply chain.

Content is a global industry and it’s more accessible than ever before. You can hammer out a blog at your computer and have your words read by someone you’ve never met, in a country you’ve never visited.

The great news is that this gives you an enormous scope. You can reach consumers across the state, the nation, or even the world. The bad news? You lose specificity. You lose personalization. And you lose trust – the same trust that is essential to successfully selling an idea, a service, or a product.

Those drawbacks might make it sound like effective content marketing – especially in the competitive healthcare supply chain market – is a losing battle. But it doesn’t have to be.

This guide lays out what it takes to craft compelling healthcare content marketing.

Hurdles to Effective Content for Healthcare Sales

In a globalized world, the key to creating content that converts is to overcome the two “T”s: Targeting and Trust.

1. Targeting

You’ve written an original blog. It’s informative. It’s eloquent. It’s a masterpiece. But if you don’t get that blog in front of the right eyes, it’s useless. Being able to sift through the massive content marketplace and get the right people looking at the right content is critical.

2. Trust

Sales used to be personal. In the ’50s, salespeople went door-to-door to peddle their wares – or, in the case of the healthcare industry, from one healthcare provider’s office or hospital to the next.

Today? Not so much. With modern technology – fast internet, fast communications, fast logistics – sales has become just as far-reaching as the global content industry.

This has created a trust issue with consumers. When it comes to content, research reveals that people distrust internet information, especially social media. That’s bad news for content marketing, which is increasingly digital-reliant.

How to Craft Content That Converts

The same tools and technologies that have created a content marketplace hampered by targeting and trust issues can be leveraged in your interests.

Here’s how to tame the beast.

Understand Your Customer

Just because you never meet your end customer in the flesh doesn’t mean that you can’t develop an understanding of who they are and what they want. Develop a customer journey map to articulate customer personas, allowing you to target different content marketing types to different niches. This helps you create content for healthcare sales that is meaningful to the end customer – even if you never meet them.

As you map out the customer journey, consider different decision-maker roles. Who makes the choices about what the consumer receives? How do you reach that audience? Determining the gatekeepers will help you define relevant brand messaging in healthcare.

Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader

There are a few essential keys to success in sales. Expertise is one. The best salespersons are experts in their fields, backed by industry knowledge. Study, learn, and establish an opinion in your area, whether it’s catheters or stents.

This opens the gates to healthcare organization thought leadership. You can become a thought leader by publishing blogs, opinion pieces, or investigator-initiated studies in respected healthcare publications. Target both digital and physical media for maximum impact.

Get Personal

Don’t rely on just one channel to sell your content. You have many avenues available to you. A multi-platform approach encompassing both inbound and outbound marketing allows you to diversify your target audience.

Speaking at events, live streaming seminars, or participating in podcasts further confirms your position as a thought leader. It also lets people get to know you. Once people have a face to the name, they feel more connected, and you start building trust. 

Run with it. Get personal. Talk about your background. Did you spend years touring hospitals as a medical sales rep? Have you spent time working in a lab in healthcare R&D? Are you personally invested in the message, product, or service you are selling? You should be. And you should make that clear to consumers.

Be Adaptive

Another trait of great salespersons is that they know when to pivot. One of the best things about content marketing is that it’s measurable. Don’t just put content out there and hope for the best—Set KPIs (key performance indicators).

How many subscribers does your newsletter have? How many people follow you on Twitter? How many unique clicks did your last thought-leader article in a healthcare online magazine receive? Did those clicks convert to new contacts or, better yet, sales?

There are many healthcare marketing tools available to help you craft and track content. If something isn’t working, reexamine your approach. Is it the medium, the message, or a combination of both? With KPIs, you can better understand that elusive end customer and tailor your marketing accordingly.

Get More Tips on Content Strategy for Healthcare

Here at Share Moving Media, we know how to craft content for healthcare sales. As a full-service media company, we create articles, webinars, podcasts, e-books, blogs, and more. Our mission is to give clients the tools they need to increase their market share.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more best practice tips and tricks. Interested in collaborating? Then contact us today!

4 Ways Marketers Can Successfully Execute Audience Targeting in Healthcare

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The medtech industry continues to grow and is expected to have its worldwide sales reach $522 billion by 2022.

With an aging Baby Boomer population and Americans facing chronic illnesses more than ever before, medical facilities need the right technology to provide quality patient care. For healthcare marketers, this means you have to get your products in front of your niche targeted audience, at the right time, if you hope to land a sale. 

With a growing need and competition saturating the industry, it’s more important than ever for medical suppliers to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that targets the right audience. Marketing to the right audience allows you to develop brand awareness, increase sales, and create trust between you and customers. 

Sounds good, right? But, what’s the best audience targeting in healthcare strategy that drives sales? Let’s take a look at a few ways you can boost brand recognition with audience targeting. 

Why is Audience Targeting in Healthcare Important?

Instead of the traditional one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, targeting specific audiences puts a clear focus on who your products will serve and why. In doing so, you’re able to allocate a budget that’s more likely to produce a high ROI. 

A target audience is a set of customers who share similar needs and pain points that your products will serve. The correct audience targets give you further insight into which customers of yours are long-term and which are one-time only so you can identify your most qualified leads to connect with. 

When segmenting audiences in healthcare, you need to not only consider the hospitals or facilities you sell to, but also their patients. The different ways you can segment your audiences include:

  • Demographic: Age, education, gender, race, etc.
  • Psychographic: Values, interests, personality, lifestyle, etc.
  • Behavioral: Brand interactions, purchase habits, budget, status, etc.
  • Geographic: City, area code, neighborhood, etc. 

4 Ways Medical Suppliers Can Market to Target Audiences

To get started targeting your niche healthcare audience, consider implementing the following tactics:

1. Produce Thought Leader Content

Did you know that 51% of B2B buyers search for educational content before making a decision? With technology that saves and improves the quality of lives across the country, your brand has a story to tell. Use your product’s story to develop thought leadership material that provides solutions to your audience’s pain points.

The right content will establish your credibility and further your brand awareness throughout the industry. Types of thought leadership content you can produce include:

  • Articles or whitepapers to demonstrate how your products benefit patients
  • Webinars that dive deeper into relatable subjects
  • How-to or about videos that speak to who you are

2. Utilize Social Media Advanced Targeting

Medical suppliers who are active on social media have a huge opportunity to improve their reputation with potential customers. With 46% of medical professionals engaging on social media, it’s essential to understand what platforms your customers spend the most time on and develop valuable content that speaks to their needs.

For healthcare sales, consider spending time on LinkedIn to connect with niche medical professionals that will buy into your brand. LinkedIn also provides advanced targeting features that allow you to advertise to specific organizations, job titles, and more to ensure you’re reaching the right person. These additional touchpoints will help you increase engagement and improve lead generation to potentially result in a sale. 

3. Develop a Website that Provides Solutions

Dealing with complex technology that saves lives, your website can’t rely on flashy imagery and witty one-liners. It needs to answer who you are, what products you sell, and why your audience should be interested. Within your website:

  • Display your mission statement on an about page 
  • Discuss the features and benefits of your product pages
  • Highlight past customer success stories and testimonials
  • Showcase thought leadership content to display your credibility
  • Drive conversions by allowing users to schedule consultations

Within your content, make sure you’re using search engine optimization best practices so your target audience can find you with a quick Google search. Consider what keywords your audience might search for and use them throughout your website to earn more organic website traffic. 

4. Stay Top of Mind with Email Marketing

Of course, audience targeting in healthcare wouldn’t be complete without mentioning email marketing. Not only does email marketing produce an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, but it allows you to send personalized messages to your leads and customers to build loyal relationships. 

With email marketing, you can send valuable content directly to your customer’s inbox about your brand or products. When targeting a specific audience, utilize segmentation to send relevant messages that speak to their challenges. For example, if you have a consultation with a family doctor, send targeted emails about how your products help family members of all ages. To sweeten the deal, include testimonials from past customers in the same audience segment. 

Additionally, utilize a customer relationship manager (CRM) to create email workflows that automatically send the right emails to a relevant audience segment. 

Target the Right Audiences with Strategic Marketing Campaigns

Developing a marketing strategy for your medical supply company has never been more important. In the ever-evolving healthcare industry, the right audience targeting is the difference in providing patients with the best technology or failing to stand out amongst the competition. 

To start developing valuable content for your target audience, contact Share Moving Media today.

3 Things Your Medical Manufacturing Ad Should Have

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Digital advertising is a booming industry as more people head online to find solutions to their various problems. So, it comes to no surprise that digital advertising in healthcare is continuing to grow at a steady rate. In fact, research has shown that healthcare companies’ global advertising expenditure has grown by 3.6% and reached approximately $36 billion.

For medical product manufacturers, transitioning to digital advertising is critical in 2020, especially with the current pandemic slowing down more traditional advertising methods, which include attending large in-person conventions and sending sales individuals directly to IDNs or physicians to speak about new or upgraded products. 

Sure, while current restrictions have made healthcare advertising difficult, for those who work in the healthcare advertising field, it is just another challenge in an ever-changing arena. 

Digital Advertising in Healthcare: What Sets It Apart from “Traditional” Advertising

While digital advertising in healthcare looks a lot like digital advertising in any other industry, it’s actually considered one of the most challenging areas of marketing. This is especially true for those in charge of medical manufacturing ads, as they are under strict supervision and must abide by various rules and regulations set by the state, various licensing boards, and even the FDA. 

So, while most ads are allowed a wide birth of creative freedoms, digital advertising in healthcare requires a little extra creativity. 

3 Things Every Medical Manufacturing Ad Should Have

While medical manufacturing ads need to adhere to various rules and regulations, that doesn’t mean they can’t make use of the most successful aspects of any digital advertisement, including the three aspects outlined below:

1. A Storytelling Aspect

The goal of any good advertisement is to get the consumer interested in your product or service. To do this, you can’t merely throw facts and data at them, even if your primary audience is a team of medical professionals. 

Storytelling is an essential element to any good medical manufacturing ad because it helps your audience put a face to the product you’re trying to sell them. For example, take the current COVID-19 pandemic. The topic of wearing a mask has been a hot one, and many brands are capitalizing on the “Wear a Mask” campaign. 

This campaign has allowed millions of individuals to express WHY they choose to wear a mask during this pandemic, and it quite literally puts faces to the campaign. These stories put all the facts and figures to shame because they are more relatable to consumers than anything else. It’s these stories that will help influence the public on the mask-wearing debate because mask-wearing is transformed into an act of humanity.

2. An Educational Aspect

Now, that’s not to say the facts and figures don’t matter, but they need to be sprinkled in appropriately. That same campaign also works to educate the masses about different topics, including:

  • COVID-19
  • Why masks can be beneficial in fighting the pandemic
  • Who the masks are really protecting and more

Many companies have taken their own twist on the “Wear a Mask” campaign and turned it into “ask why I wear a mask.” It not only helps to educate the public but helps include personal testimonials into the mix, which can play to a consumer’s emotional side as well.

This is the part of the ad that should include the facts and figures, and they should be coming from the mouths of those telling the story because it will have a more profound impact on the audience than say having Dr. Fauci talk about the data. 

3. An Emotional Aspect

Studies have shown that 95% of purchasing decisions are not only subconscious but an emotional process. That’s why so many individuals turn to testimonials before they make their purchasing decisions. They want to be able to convince themselves that the purchase is:

  • Worth spending the money on
  • Will benefit them in some way/solve some sort of problem

Medical manufacturers would be wise to make a note of this because those testimonials are where the real magic happens. With 70% of consumers stating that they trust reviews and recommendations from strangers and another 88% stating that reviews influence their online purchasing decisions, adding this emotional aspect to your medical manufacturing ad can prove extremely beneficial. 

Some key things to remember when including an emotional aspect to any ad include:

  • Make it authentic to your audience. Play to their needs.
  • Give value. Don’t simply list your features and “why they work.”
  • Show, don’t tell. The human brain processes images 60,000x faster than text.

Digital Advertising in Healthcare Doesn’t Stop Here

The goal of any good digital advertisement is to capture the audience’s attention and influence them into taking action. This is no different for the healthcare industry, which is why so many of the digital advertising best practices can work for medical manufacturers. 

Just remember, digital advertising in healthcare is only one step in the broader healthcare marketing strategy. So, when creating your medical manufacturing ads, keep the rest of your digital marketing strategy in mind.

Want to stay up to date on the latest healthcare marketing trends? Then make sure to subscribe to SMM’s Marketing Minute today!