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Manufacturer’s Quandary, Buyer’s Puzzle: Do Buyers Believe Brands?

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Buyers buy brands.

Look for the top marketing tips for any industry and you will find advice on the importance of building a strong, recognizable brand. A 2017 study in the UK found that 71% of consumers consider the brand when making a purchase decision.

But what happens when buyers no longer trust brands?

When it comes to healthcare branding, this trust is especially important because buyers are often committing their health and wellbeing into your hands when they choose your products and services.

An annual brand trust survey conducted in 2019 states that trust in brands is waning. In fact, 41% of respondents said that they do not trust brands to be truthful and accurate, and that 1 in 3 people did not even trust all of the brands they bought from.

Knowing this, your challenge is to figure out how to build the kind of trust that many brands have failed to instill in buyers.

The Importance of Maintaining Trust in Healthcare Branding

Branding, whether in healthcare or any other industry, is about creating trust and familiarity with consumers. If a brand is done well – as in the case of Uber, Airbnb, or even Kleenex – it has the potential to become synonymous with certain services, lifestyles, or products. Think about this: How many people use “rideshare” or “facial tissue” in day-to-day conversations?

Building trust with consumers could make you a household name. But building trust is not a quick or easy process. 

Reasons that buyers trust brands include:

  • Quality products and services
  • Good reviews from customers
  • Fair prices
  • Positive interactions with customers
  • Acknowledgment and action concerning problems or complaints
  • Exceptional workplace culture and treatment of employees

Maintaining all of those things is crucial, but in a world of transparency and openness in brand marketing, any wrong step could set you back.

Take the example of Ellen DeGeneres. She built an entire brand around her name – a brand that was all about joy, positivity, and kindness towards others. When workplace harassment complaints came out, she lost trust with her consumers because they saw that the values that she promoted were not being upheld within her own work environment.

Regaining broken trust is even harder than building it. 45% of consumers say they would never be able to trust a brand again after a scandal like that. 

A buyer’s belief in your brand is hard to come by, but surprisingly easy to lose. 

How Buyers Form Beliefs About Healthcare Brands

Since buyers often do not trust branding itself to be truthful, they will spend a lot of time doing their own research and formulating their own opinions before engaging with a healthcare brand.

Although this is not always the case, B2B buyers have been known to get as far as 90% of the way through their decision-making process before speaking directly with a sales rep. With the increasing availability of resources and reviews for products and services online, buyers feel less and less the need to go to the brands themselves to get relevant information.

Rather than trusting the brand to give them helpful and honest facts, buyers look to these sources instead:

1. Customer Reviews and Shared Experiences 

Buyers do not want to trust marketing gimmicks to tell them which products and services are going to be worth their while. Most prefer the alternative of first-hand customer experience. More than 90% of customers online rely on reviews, and many people place an equal value on personal recommendations that come from people they know and trust.

2. Industry-Related Publications

The appeal to authority is a strong factor in decision making (this is why doctors and lawyers are never chosen to serve on juries). However, when those authorities are peers and experts in the field of healthcare, their opinions and feedback on a brand’s products or services can be extremely useful in choosing the best purchase to make.

3. Influencers 

Although the use of influencers is a relatively new marketing approach, 63% of consumers would trust an influencer’s opinion of a product over the brand’s statements. This is in spite of the fact that influencers get paid to promote products. The most trusted influencers, however, are the ones who build platforms on relatability and not celebrity. Buyers see them as peers, as people who are just like them and therefore can offer them a valuable and honest opinion.

How to Make Your Healthcare Branding Relevant and Trustworthy

In all of these things, the common thread seems to be a human voice that is relatable and that offers genuine, relevant insights.

If you want to build buyer trust for your healthcare brand, then you need to engage with customers earlier in the decision-making process through relevant and valuable content.

That could look like product reviews on your webpages or partnerships with social media influencers. It also means providing the kind of content that your customers are looking for in the earlier stages of their search. If you can give them relevant and valuable information on solutions to meet their present need, then you will have a greater chance of getting them to engage with your brand sooner.

Ready to create some relevant content that will help buyers to believe your brand? Contact us to find out how. 

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!

What Medical Suppliers Can Learn from the Backlash Against Ellen DeGeneres

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Seen as progressive – in part due to being an LGBT personality – Ellen DeGeneres has up until recently maintained a positive public persona. However, it seems like there are new “working for Ellen” horror stories every day.

Medical suppliers might ask, “What does this have to do with us?” We can learn a lot from paying attention to current events, whether it’s by observing Super Bowl ads or following celebrity news. 

What Happened to Ellen DeGeneres — and Can It Happen to Medical Suppliers?

It’s easy to forget that The Ellen DeGeneres Show is relatively new. She’s been in the limelight since the ‘80s. When she came out as a lesbian, it was a huge deal. Ratings of her sitcom dipped, and the series was canceled. It wasn’t until 2003 that DeGeneres found her footing in Hollywood again. 

America empathized with DeGeneres as she rose, stumbled, and got back up. That’s a compelling story! But it also laid the groundwork for what’s happening today. 

In a sense, 2020 marks her second fall from grace. 

Building trust is powerful – but when people fall in love, betrayal can sting. What could be more hurtful than finding out that someone preaching kindness is a mean person?

What her plight teaches us is that even great brands aren’t untouchable. Anyone can be brought down by a bad reputation.  Bad things usually happen fast, just think of 3M getting called out by President Trump a couple months ago in the Rose Garden.

3 Tips for Medical Suppliers to Avoid a Fall from Grace Like Ellen’s

When business leaders think of reputation management, their minds often go to damage control after the fact. The idea is actually to get ahead by influencing what people think of you in general.  

This way, unexpected messes can be cleaned up with ease. An excellent reputation could also be the deciding factor that gets a consumer to choose your hospital equipment over those offered by your competitors.

How do you take care of your reputation? Here are three tips gleaned from observing Ellen DeGeneres’ current PR battle.

1. Track What People Say About You Online

In 2016, comedian Kathy Griffin wrote a memoir. The book revealed that it was an open secret in Hollywood that a well-loved daytime TV host had a mean streak. Griffin later confirmed that she was talking about DeGeneres.

That wasn’t the first time people heard unpleasant descriptions about DeGeneres. Remarks on social media platforms surfaced from time to time, finally coming to a head this year.

So medical suppliers: Listen to your audience. Did you know that a business can lose over 20% of its customers if users find even one negative post about their brand online? 

That doesn’t mean you need a full-blown social media presence. Just know where your target audience hangs out online and monitor that space. 

You can also work with key opinion leaders to boost awareness. Let people know the basics, like:  

  • What types of products do you manufacture or distribute? 
  • How can IDNs learn more about your offerings? 

2. Don’t Ignore Customer Feedback

Respond to comments, especially if they’re bad reviews. 45% of consumers note that they’re most likely to visit a business that takes the time to address negative feedback. 

Rumors of the toxic work environment on The Ellen DeGeneres Show have been going around for more than a decade, but the TV host never confronted them. It took an official investigation into the franchise’s workplace culture for DeGeneres to apologize to her staff and acknowledge the issue.

Allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct by the show’s top executives also surfaced. Some former employees believe executives shielded DeGeneres from the gory details and controlled what she knew of the set’s day-to-day activities.

Ignore a problem, and this is what happens. It grows! Medical suppliers, let this be another teachable moment. Do you read the Amazon reviews of your products?

It’s not enough to know what goes on online. The real world is still out there. Participate in industry events. Subscribe to and get your name in trade publications. Volunteer in industry workgroups, and most of all: respond quickly and recalibrate your work processes when needed.

3. Build Trust and Get to Know Your Audience

This is not so much an observation as it is advice for DeGeneres. Building trust back with her fans — not to mention her current staff — is key, but it’s not going to be easy. 

Whether you’re avoiding having something similar happen to you or you’re in the middle of some reputation troubleshooting yourself, the key is to know these two things: your target audiences and value propositions unique to each one. 

Decision-making during a B2B transaction involves six people on average. Do you have custom-tailored value propositions for those six stakeholders, or are you only focusing on clinicians making medical equipment purchases? Do your reps come from diverse backgrounds, able to deftly interact with different consumer bases – or are they all middle-aged men? 

Brand messaging in healthcare is crucial. When you know your audience, it’s easier to figure out your brand identity. When you know who you are, you’ll be that much more convincing when you talk about why your company matters and why your customers should remain loyal. 

How Can Share Moving Media Help Medical Suppliers?

Share Moving Media is a full-service content and media company committed to helping medical suppliers gain or increase their market share.

Interested in finding out more information about what we do and how we do it? Contact us and let us know what you need.