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The Sum is Greater Than the Parts: Co-Marketing Strategies in Healthcare

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Co-marketing in healthcare can help your brand expand its audience and win new, brand-loyal followers who are likely to convert into paying customers.

Healthcare distributors that partner with other brands in their field also can take advantage of new resources, expertise, and ideas. All of this adds up to more creative, impactful, and far-reaching marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Co-Marketing

A well-executed co-marketing effort will be greater than the sum of its parts in the truest sense of the saying: A collaborative campaign between two brands is often more compelling than a single-brand campaign, as each partner adds unique assets to the equation.

If you need proof of the value of co-marketing, look at some of the world’s biggest brands:

  • GoPro and Red Bull co-branded for the Stratos campaign.
  • Pottery Barn and Sherwin-Williams joined forces for the “Color Your Room” campaign.
  • BMW and Louis Vuitton teamed up for “The Art of Travel” campaign.

These companies have the funds and expertise to run entirely effective marketing campaigns solo. So why team up? They recognize the immense value of co-marketing.

Here are some of the benefits:

Save Money

Marketing campaigns cost money. Some initiatives, like email marketing or organic search engine optimization marketing, can be reasonably cost-efficient. However, other initiatives like paid search marketing and pay-per-click advertising can require five-figure budgets.  

When you co-market in conjunction with another brand, you tend to split the costs of the campaign. This allows both sides to save, resulting in a greater return on investment.

Reach a Wider Audience of Brand-Loyal Consumers

If you’ve been in the healthcare business for some time, you probably already have a built-in audience – loyal consumers and followers form a network of connections that you’ve nurtured for years. Finding new leads to convert is often a challenge, however, especially in the competitive healthcare market.

When you co-market with another brand, you gain automatic exposure to their built-in following of customers. Of course, they gain exposure to your built-in following, too – quid pro quo.

Not only do you gain automatic exposure, that exposure is also more likely to result in conversions. Why? The people who follow your co-marketing partner presumably already trust that brand. They are thus even more likely to trust your company. You’re no longer a stranger. You’re a friend of a friend.

Target the Right Customers at the Right Time

Partnering with other brands also opens up unique opportunities to reach customers at a point in the sales funnel when they are more likely to convert.

The most obvious example can be seen when you book a vacation. As soon as you buy a flight, you get offers for hotels and car rentals. These brands are demonstrating co-marketing common sense. They are creating a one-stop shop to maximize your spending when you’re already in a buying session.

How might this scenario look in the healthcare setting?

Say you work for a medical devices company selling blood glucose monitors for diabetics. You partner with healthcare providers in the diabetes space, promoting a campaign that raises awareness about symptoms of diabetes and the importance of diagnosing and managing the illness.

The campaign will drive potential diabetics to seek testing from HCPs, bringing them business. Those diagnosed with diabetes will then already have your brand name in mind and know where to turn when they need blood glucose monitors to manage their illness.

Tips for Co-Marketing in Healthcare

Ready to implement co-marketing in healthcare? Follow these steps.

Choose the Right Partner

The value of co-marketing partnerships depends mainly on who you partner with. Choosing well-respected and well-recognized brands can enhance your brand identity. Conversely, aligning yourself with brands that have a bad reputation can harm your image. Reputation management is critical.

You also want your partnership to make sense. As a healthcare distributor, it won’t look good to partner with a tobacco brand. Now, that’s a pretty egregious example – but you get the point. Your partnership needs to be logical. You shouldn’t just pick a partner because they have a big name. The aim is to align services and products that support each other.

Set Shared Goals and Develop Your Strategy Accordingly

Both partners need to benefit from your co-marketing campaign. Define individual goals and share them to make sure your agendas are aligned. You can then develop mutual goals. With your aspirations set, you can craft your time-specific marketing strategy, including key milestones, deliverables, and metrics you will use to track progress.

Create a Co-Marketing Agreement

If you’ve determined that your mutual goals are aligned, go ahead and hammer out a formal co-marketing agreement. This will help to avoid miscommunication as your collaboration progresses.

Your agreement should cover goals, timelines, topics, promotional plans, and reporting initiatives. If you are creating co-branded content, where will each party share it? How often do they need to share it? What evidence do they need to provide to the other party that they’ve shared it? Finally, make sure to define ownership of content and assets that result from your collaboration.

Tap into Each Party’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Co-marketing campaigns are created collaboratively. Working with an external brand to craft compelling healthcare marketing strategies and content can reinvigorate your in-house marketing. Such collaboration allows you to tap into novel resources and expertise and develop new ideas.

Before you start creating your campaign, take stock of each party’s strengths and weaknesses. Maybe your healthcare marketing team is hitting it out of the park in social media marketing but falling short on blogging. If your partner has a high-traffic blog, that’s great. Once you know each side’s strengths and weaknesses, you can better divide up tasks for maximum effectiveness.

Craft Compelling Co-Marketing Content

Finally, you can get to the fun part of co-marketing in healthcare: creating actual campaigns. You and your partner should craft new content together. Brainstorm collaboratively and select the ideas you like best to carry forward. Mapping the customer journey can help ensure alignment of concepts and goals as you develop joint content marketing in healthcare.

Boost Your Co-Marketing Impact with Share Moving Media

Trust Share Moving Media to support your co-marketing in healthcare. We are a full-service media company, crafting everything from ebooks to white papers and podcasts. We can help you and your marketing partners prepare compelling content that engages and converts audiences to increase healthcare sales.

Contact us for help with your healthcare marketing.

Make Your Organization Leaner with Agile Marketing in Healthcare

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Lean organizations are focused on one thing: creating greater customer value while minimizing waste. This type of business model is a natural fit for the healthcare industry, which prioritizes getting patients the best care possible, as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost possible. As a healthcare distributor, it’s worth doing your homework into the lean approach to see how it can enhance your business operations. Agile marketing in healthcare is one way to make your organization leaner.

What Is a Lean Organization?

“Lean” refers to a type of organizational structure. It’s all about using as few resources as possible to achieve the best outcomes for customers.

In a lean model, every member of the organization will find ways to improve daily processes. When small tasks performed by individuals become more efficient, the organization as a whole becomes more streamlined. The end result is the ultimate lean goal stated in the introduction: more value for customers, less waste for companies. Everybody benefits.

Can this business model really make that much of a difference? You’d be surprised. Some big names in the business world subscribe to the lean methodology, including Toyota and Intel. 

A lean organization benefits your employees, customers, and company alike. Here’s how:

  • Employees: Lean can boost employee accountability and engagement within your organization, as the onus is put on individuals to find ways to improve processes.
  • Customers: Since Lean is ultimately all about improving customer value, it forces the company to get into the customer’s shoes. This means placing value on customer opinions, soliciting feedback, and acting on it. By catering to customers, the company can better meet their needs.
  • Company: Lean promotes growth by paring the business down to the essentials, using readily available resources without over-extending beyond existing means. Plus, more engaged employees mean improved performance, while happier customers whose needs are being met drive sales – ultimately boosting profitability.

Agile Marketing 101

How can agile marketing in healthcare contribute to a lean organization? First, let’s define agile marketing.

A Quick History of the Agile Mindset

The agile approach was initially developed as an approach for software delivery in 2001. It’s characterized by its iterative process, which is what gives agile its defining trait – flexibility.

In the past, developer teams conceptualized a product and then concentrate their efforts to deliver that final product as they had envisioned it. In contrast, the agile approach requires development teams to assess value at every development stage – not just once they’ve crossed the finish line.

What sets the agile approach apart (and made it so groundbreaking when it appeared) is the flexibility it insists upon. Agile development requires a continual feedback loop. The software development team doesn’t just define a product and deliver that end product to the market. They continually seek feedback throughout the development process, tweaking things as they go along.

This results in more innovative development and, ultimately, a more user-friendly product. Agile development has proven extremely successful in the software industry and is still used to this day.

Agile Marketing Defined

So, what’s all that got to do with marketing?

Let’s get back to that defining trait mentioned above – flexibility. This is likewise a defining characteristic of agile marketing campaigns.

Marketers have recognized that they can’t just create campaigns and shove them down consumers’ throats. By consistently soliciting feedback from their target audience, marketers – including in the healthcare industry – can craft campaigns that truly resonate with that audience.

Agile marketing is about more than just collecting feedback, however. As a tactical marketing technique, agile requires teams to:

  1. Collectively identify high-value projects and then focus collectively on those projects.
  2. Measure the impact of those projects.
  3. Tweak their efforts to incrementally yet continuously improve the results of the project.

This marketing model supports a lean organizational structure because it improves value for the customer (creating marketing campaigns that engage clients) while reducing wasted time and resources for the company through constant feedback, measurement, and tweaking.

Tips for More Agile Marketing in Healthcare

Implementing agile marketing in healthcare is easier than you might think. These tips can get you started.

Implement Sprints

Agile marketing teams rely on sprints to drive cooperative and efficient collaboration. A sprint is a short, predefined period in which teams jointly focus on a single task. For example, you might ask your team to implement a new pay-per-click ad campaign within X days or weeks.

Hold Daily Stand-Up Meetings

Agile’s flexibility means projects are always evolving. It’s thus smart to check in with your team’s progress regularly. A short, 15-minute (maximum) stand-up meeting every day is a great way to do this. Team members should bring up issues and bottlenecks (e.g., that PPC campaign isn’t performing as hoped) so they can be addressed quickly. The entire team can then collaborate on the solution.

Use a Board to Track Progress

Another key trait of agile is that it relies on visual progress tracking. You can go old school and use a whiteboard and sticky note to track progress. Alternatively, you can use a digital Kanban board. This is also a great way to enforce accountability. You can update the board together as a team during stand-ups to see who is doing what.

Measure, Measure, Measure

As mentioned, feedback is critical to agile success. Now, that doesn’t mean that marketers have to continually ask their target audience, “Hey, what did you think of that campaign?” or something similar. Modern marketing tech and tools make it easy to get feedback.

For example, the success of social media influencer marketing can be measured by metrics like shares, comments, and likes. The success of an email marketing campaign can be measured by opens and clicks.

Ramp Up Your Healthcare Marketing

Share Moving Media can help you tap into the power of agile marketing in healthcare. A full-service media company, we help our clients create content and campaigns that deliver real value to their target audiences. Our goal is to help you increase healthcare sales.

Subscribe to our newsletter to learn about the latest healthcare marketing tools, tips, and tricks.

Contact us to collaborate.

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.

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.