Do you want your marketing strategies to keep up with the times? Here are five reasons you should use webinars in healthcare marketing to reach more of your audience for a more significant impact.

About 42% of marketers plan to use webinars this year, with 83% saying webinars are an effective marketing strategy.

Let’s begin with a little background of what healthcare marketing webinars entail.

Key Takeaways:

• Webinars offer an alternative way to meet face-to-face with physicians who are too busy for sales rep visits.
• Topics in a webinar should focus on your audience rather than your products and brand.
• Video content is the most effective online method to reach and convert customers.

What are Webinars in Healthcare Marketing?

The term webinar stands for a web seminar. 

A healthcare marketing webinar is an online seminar for lead generation, promotion, and educating your audience on healthcare and medical products.

The average webinar has three distinct parts.

• Introduction (5-7 minutes)
• Presentation (38-45 minutes)
• Q&As (10-15 minutes)

In total, most webinars last about an hour. However, this time varies between industries. For example, pharmaceutical webinars average only 22 minutes.

5 Reasons Why Healthcare Marketers Should Use Webinars

Here are five reasons you should start using webinars in your business.

1. Build Brand Authority

Webinars are another avenue to promote your brand to your market of healthcare workers.

The average customer needs eight touchpoints with a product or brand before they will consider a sale. These touchpoints tell your customer who you are, what you sell, what makes you different, and why you are reliable.

If a customer only interacts with your brand through the same touchpoint eight times, they will not receive any new information to convince them to purchase from you. However, if each marketing avenue offers further information, you can move your lead closer to a sale with every touchpoint.

Some marketing strategies include:

• Paid advertising
• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• In-person sales rep meetings
• Cold calls
• Emails

Now, you can add webinars to the list. The advantage of a webinar over some of those other methods is that you have more time to promote your brand. For example, the average successful cold call lasts 5 minutes and 50 seconds, and a 1500-word blog post takes 5 minutes to read. On the other hand, a webinar usually lasts 20 minutes or longer of valuable time to build a reputation for your brand.

2. Generate More Leads

Sales reps visit hospitals in hopes of interacting personally with doctors, showcasing a product, and making a sale. However, getting that in-person meeting isn’t straightforward. The average doctor works over 50 hours a week, and nearly a quarter of doctors work 61-80 hours a week, so they have very little time to spend with sales reps.

While emails and web content can reach doctors, they don’t have the same personal effect as a face-to-face meeting. However, you can offer a close second by inviting physicians to webinars for healthcare professionals where they have a chance to network, learn, and build relationships.

When you host a webinar, be sure a friendly face is visible instead of a series of charts and numbers, so doctors can make a connection similar to what in-person sales reps offer. The live format also allows doctors to ask questions in real-time. They will then receive immediate answers.

3. Introduce New Products

A webinar is an effective way to roll out new products or promote popular products. As discussed earlier, the format of webinars gives you more time to engage your audience. With that time, you can go into greater detail about your product and its features, including a live demonstration of how it works.

Product webinars shouldn’t feel like an extended ad for a product. The average person already sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads each day. On the other hand, about 40% of viewers watch webinars all the way through. Therefore, use that time to promote your product, but in a way that keeps your audience’s attention by making it about them. The best way to do that is through addressing a healthcare pain point.

For example, a typical healthcare provider’s pain point is the extensive work involved in implementing new technology into the workplace. So, a webinar marketing example could promote a new technologically advanced device. However, don’t focus on all the latest gadgets and features of the product. Instead, recognize a doctor’s frustration with keeping up with technology and focus on how easy the device is to learn and how it only needs a few new staff members to operate it.

4. Educate Customers and Students

A marketing webinar is more than just an avenue to market your products. You can also establish authority in the healthcare industry. By showing you understand doctors and their needs, you are building a bridge of trust. Your leads now know you developed your products with them in mind.

Some educational healthcare webinar topics include:

• The latest trends in medical device technology
• How to use specific devices
• Ways to budget for medical supplies
• New healthcare challenges and how specific devices solve them

When you record your webinars, physicians can share the webinar with other employees as training material on healthcare trends or new devices, which, again, helps build brand awareness in the process. You can also use healthcare webinars to train your own sales reps.

5. Create More Online Content

Video is one of the most popular online content. For example, YouTube is the most visited website globally, with nearly 5.5 billion visitors each month. If you share your webinar on your YouTube channel, you can expand your reach further than your website. In addition, a video on your website landing page can boost your conversion rate by over 80%.

But you don’t have to keep your webinar content in a video format. You can also repurpose the content you share in your webinar for your other customer touchpoints and marketing avenues.

Some examples of places to reuse your webinar include:

• Quotes on your social media pages
• Transcription in a blog post
• Video clips in YouTube promotions

Start Creating More Online Content Today

The more content you have online, the higher your chance of future customers finding your business. Share Moving Media Inc. can help with your brand’s visibility. Digital marketing webinars are just one of many ways to reach current and prospective leads.

If your marketing team is looking to expand your online content, contact us to find out what services fit your growth needs.