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Social Media for Medical Manufacturers: The Top Tricks You’d Never Expect to Work

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Social media was once seen as a space reserved for teenagers to discuss frivolities like celebrity gossip. After all, Facebook – an early pioneer in the social media scene – began as a campus social experiment. Those days are long gone.

Today, social media is used by people from all walks of life, and serious discussions are taking place on social media.

While using social media as a marketing tool in the medical manufacturing space was once unheard of, this is no longer the case. Medical manufacturers can use social media to engage and connect with their target audiences – and even make valuable business connections. That’s if they use it right.

There are some do’s and don’ts when using social media for medical manufacturers.

The Benefits of Using Social Media as a Medical Manufacturer

Social media lets you engage with your target audience, whether that’s healthcare practitioners (HCPs), independent hospitals, or integrated delivery networks (IDNs). You can also monitor their activity via social media. For example, HCPs may communicate if they are headed to a conference.

You can also use social media to establish your medical manufacturing expertise. Share the latest publications and study results from your field. Demonstrate your knowledge by disseminating your own white paper or video seminar. Align social media with a publishing strategy for your blog to attract readers. These are just a few ideas.

By following others in your medical manufacturing niche and sharing your insights, you achieve social media’s ultimate goal — connectivity. What starts as a public exchange online can become a private discussion via email and then a one-on-one video chat or face-to-face meeting.

Still not convinced? Here’s one more winning reason to include social media in your medical manufacturing marketing strategy: It’s cheap. Social media doesn’t cost a thing. It also doesn’t require a lot of time and energy.

3 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media for Medical Manufacturers

The key to effectively using social media for brand messaging in healthcare is value. As with any content marketing, you want to create content that is useful.

Beyond this, there are a few tricks to making the most of social media.

1. Piggyback on Events

Healthcare conferences frequently have dedicated social media channels. Although some in-person events are canceled due to COVID-19, many have moved online. This makes it even easier to join a digital conversation.

The American Society of Echocardiography has a Twitter page (@ASE360) with 13.8k followers, for example, and hosts an annual conference. If you’re in the cardiovascular ultrasound sector, this is a valuable event for making connections. Getting a retweet from ASE gets people’s eyes on you and your company.

2. Join the Hashtag Movement

Your gut instinct might be to think hashtags are too “fluffy” for healthcare. Not so. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention include hashtags in their digital media toolkit for flu season awareness.

Another great example: In March 2020, the World Health Organization, in cooperation with the video game industry, launched the campaign #PlayApartTogether to encourage social-distanced fun in the face of the growing COVID-19 pandemic.

If there is a hashtag relevant to your industry, use it to join the conversation. Say your company is a leader in the hearing aid sector, for instance. Get active on social media on World Hearing Day (March 3) using the relevant hashtag.

3. Incorporate Visuals

Visuals make social media more personal. Videos can boost healthcare sales, for instance. Physician profiles and patient experiences are particularly captivating, giving your audience an intimate look at how your medical manufacturing products change the lives of HCPs and the people they serve.

If you’re looking for something simpler, infographics are a great option. They are a visually attractive means of providing useful information your audience will value.

A Word of Caution When Using Social Media in Medical Marketing

There are a few rules to keep in mind as you start designing a social media strategy for your medical manufacturing business. First, you have to remain HIPAA compliant and in line with medical ethics codes. Sharing patient pictures without consent would be a violation, for example.

If you are operating a social media account independently from your employer, take care to differentiate your online activity from your company’s. Including a line in your bio like “Any views and opinions are my own” is helpful.

Beware that a simple disclaimer in your social media bio won’t save your job if you mess up, however. There have been many instances of persons getting fired for sharing racially insensitive or otherwise problematic content on social media.

The point of this “disclaimer” isn’t to discourage the use of social media for medical manufacturers! Use common sense and maintain professionalism in the social media sphere. A good rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t share it with your boss, don’t share it on social media.

Make Social Media Part of Your Content Strategy for Healthcare

Share Moving Media is dedicated to helping medical manufacturers increase their market share. As a full-service media and content company, we can help you reach your target audience through articles, ebooks, podcasts, blog posts, webinars, and more.

Sign up for our newsletter to get more marketing tips and tricks for medical manufacturers. Want to use our services?  Contact us today!

Can Content Marketing Help You Squeeze ROI Out of Your R&D Process?

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Research and development, R&D, is the key to advancement in the healthcare industry. From pharmaceutical companies to med-tech suppliers, healthcare companies must continuously innovate to find new treatments to improve the patient experience. And all that innovation? It costs.

Getting a return on R&D investment is more challenging than ever. R&D leaders face numerous challenges, such as the increased complexity of global regulatory requirements. Unfortunately, this has led to dwindling investment, particularly in the med-tech field.

Companies that want to increase their market share shouldn’t be cutting back on R&D investment. They should be focusing on securing a greater return on investment (ROI). Content marketing is one avenue to do this.

This guide explains how content marketing assists R&D in healthcare and provides five golden rules for using content marketing to squeeze more ROI out of your innovation.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing uses relevant content to attract a clearly defined target consumer audience with the ultimate aim of driving profitable consumer action. The term “content” encompasses digital media, like websites, blogs, infographics, and traditional media, like healthcare conference speeches and print magazine articles. Content marketing gives you a huge toolbox of ways to reach consumers.

How to Create Content Marketing That Assists R&D in Healthcare

The med-tech industry is expected to grow at a rate of 5.6% annually in the years to come, reaching $595 billion by 2024. Now is not the time to cut back on R&D investment. It’s time to harness content marketing to increase your ROI.

Here’s how to use content marketing to reach your target audience, boost consumer engagement, and ultimately increase ROI.

1. Create Content with Value

To create content that converts into sales, you need to know who you’re selling to. Healthcare buying behaviors have changed. Physicians themselves are less influential as many now work for hospitals, group practices, or medical centers, instead of independently.

These larger organizations are the economic buyers, mainly focused on cutting costs – especially in cutting-edge segments like implantable heart defibrillators and knee implants. As a healthcare supplier, it’s up to you to understand such decision-makers’ hurdles (like tumbling product costs coupled with increased regulatory burden).

Create buyer personas to get in the mind of your target audience. You can then craft content that speaks to the points they care about. This allows you to ensure that your content adds value – the secret to success in any marketing endeavor.

2. Diversify Content Platforms

One of content marketing’s most valuable traits is its versatility. Content can consist of blogs, webpages, thought-leader articles, infographics, e-books, print books, white papers, videos, podcasts, and more. The list goes on.

Content marketing can be easily adapted to diverse purposes and target audiences. It can also be integrated with other marketing techniques. For example, you can use social media to drive consumers to a webpage or blog.

3. Create a Content Calendar

Content marketing isn’t made to be stagnant. Update your marketing materials regularly. For example, if a new iteration of an ultrasound machine you are selling is coming out, plan a publishing strategy for your blog to highlight this development.

A content calendar is an excellent way to track all of your content marketing efforts. Advanced planning allows you to roll out campaigns highlighting new R&D developments and whet the consumers’ appetites. If you know your company has a cutting-edge product that will enter the market in 2021, you should start planning content to flag this innovation in 2020.

4. Repurpose Content for Maximum Efficiency

Just because you plan, it doesn’t mean that your content marketing plan is set in stone. Again, content marketing is versatile. Finding ways to repurpose content across diverse platforms reduces costs while improving reach. For instance, a series of blogs can be adapted to a white paper or even an ebook, while talking points from a conference presentation can be used for a blog.

5. Analyze and Optimize Content’s Impact

Rely on healthcare marketing tools to create, track, and analyze content. Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) in advance will help you measure success and pivot as needed. For instance, if you publish a thought-leader article in a healthcare online magazine, you should be able to get feedback on how many clicks this drove to your website – and how many of those visitors became buyers.

Optimizing content doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing the wording of a headline or swapping out images. Even the format of a concluding call-to-action (CTA) can influence whether a consumer decides to click or not. Timing is also a factor: Sending out an email newsletter at 2:00 a.m. when your target audience is sleeping isn’t a great idea.

Learn More About Content Marketing for Healthcare

Share Moving Media can help you increase healthcare sales with comprehensive content marketing. A full-service media company, we create many types of content, including webinars, blog posts, e-books, graphics, and more. With this diverse array of healthcare marketing tools, we help your brand grow.

Subscribe to our newsletter and discover more ways to ensure your content marketing assists R&D in healthcare. Want personalized content strategy guidance? Contact us to get started.

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!