Over the past two years, my company, Jairus Marketing, has worked with dozens of medical device, healthcare IT, and medical service companies in this new era of business. There are three things that separate the companies that are succeeding from those that are struggling. These three characteristics will help your MedTech company take flight and keep it soaring.
1. Mindset
Companies that are waiting for things to go back to how they were are faring substantially worse than those that have embraced this new environment as something to explore and thrive in. We are in a period of testing and learning – so much has changed, and the winners are those who are trying to build relationships through new channels, educate prospects in new ways, and deepen penetration in existing accounts with new approaches.
2. Metrics
There are several critical metrics companies should measure to understand the health of the pipeline. While the specifics may vary slightly, there are a few that are universal:
Share of Wallet
How much of a current account’s business is being captured by the company?
Lead to Customer Efficiency
This is a simple measure but an extremely valuable insight into the effectiveness of the company’s sales and marketing engine. To calculate this, divide the number of new customers by the number of leads generated over a set period of time. It is a lagging indicator since the sales cycle takes time, but it is extremely valuable to understand the investment made into the front end of the business. A leadership team can look at this metric by salesperson to understand differences in selling skills or by product line to determine which are most ripe for growth. They can also look at this as a measure of marketing efficacy by channel – which efforts develop into customers versus just wasting money. The insights are endless.
Length of Sales Cycle (by Step)
I find that most companies have a vague sense of their sales cycle but are frequently wrong about how long each step takes to complete. By tracking new opportunities across the various steps of the sales process, bottlenecks and gaps become very clear, very quickly.
Cost per Lead
This is a commonly measured metric and a good one as it relates to marketing investment. The actual number isn’t a full enough story, though. To use this metric, it’s critical to view it in the context of close rate. To illustrate the point, if the lifetime value of a new customer is $100,000 and 10% of leads become customers, a cost per lead of $150 versus $200 is irrelevant. Instead, the company should invest as much as they can into generating new leads, even if the cost per lead doubles or triples.
3. Marketing
Historically, the only person with insight into prospect engagement was the sales professional. Marketing’s job was to make brochures for the sales team. As we’ve been forced online, we can now leverage tools to see what a prospect is doing over time without having to rely on manual reporting. Companies who see an investment in marketing (most notably, digital) as worthwhile are seeing substantial ROI from those investments. To make marketing work, it’s important to target correctly with a value proposition that the prospect cares about. Additionally, it’s critical to store information on prospect engagement in the CRM or a marketing automation system. This sets the company up for long-term growth with its prospects.
Over the next five years, we are going to see continued upheaval in the industry. By aligning to these three factors, you can prepare yourself and your organization to win.
In today’s crowded media marketplace, there are hundreds of options for placing your marketing budget, and it can be challenging to sort through the clutter to identify the best channels for your specific target audience.
It’s widely recognized that social and digital platforms offer great ROI with effective targeting strategies and the ability to pinpoint success with robust metrics. But do those opportunities translate to successful B2B outreach, especially for niche audiences such as physicians? In today’s post-pandemic world, the answer to that question – how to effectively reach medical providers – has become more critical than ever.
Scott Alexander, CEO of iVelocity Marketing and Jairus Physician Micro-Marketing, recently shared insights into that question and others related to targeting physicians on the Medical Device Success podcast.
Kim Kardashian is famous for being famous. It’s the fact that she’s seen on magazines, TV, and online continuously that makes people interested in her and demand to know more about her. Her ascension to media maven is tied to her adept usage of social media to build an audience of followers, whose hunger then spilled over to other media – leading to the cultural phenomenon we now have. But it’s more than just fame that this marketing effort created. This “fame from being famous” has made her, and her younger sister, Kylie Jenner, both billionaires.
How is this relevant to the medical device industry?
For too long, as an industry, we’ve relied on individual sales representatives to spread the message of the latest product or service available to healthcare decision makers. While a sales team is a crucial part of any medical device company, relying on one-to-one, individual conversations to drive adoption of new technology is an expensive, time-consuming effort and with COVID, it’s not really much of an option. The “push” strategy of medical device marketing isn’t relevant anymore.
But don’t worry – there is a better way.
Healthcare decision makers are people, too. They react to social media, to banner ads on ESPN.com, and to the other forms of digital outreach that marketers have used for years to drive awareness and interest in consumer products.
There is an opportunity to take a page out of the Kardashian book and create effective “pull” strategies for medical products and services. The formula is easier to utilize than one might think, so let’s walk through how to do it:
First, define the audience. Who are the doctors, administrators, and other clinicians involved in the evaluation and acquisition of a given healthcare technology?
Second, determine where those individuals spend their time online. The average American spends more than 3 hours a day online. Doctors, nurses, and administrators are no different. They check their Facebook feed in between cases and watch YouTube when they are at home. With advanced audience building techniques, it’s possible to be where your prospects are. We just need to determine where those locations are.
Third, develop content to catch their interest. Medical professionals are a dedicated bunch. Even when they aren’t on the clock, they are willing to engage in relevant materials for their specialty. A well-placed banner ad on the latest ECG will get the attention of cardiologists online. A Twitter ad on new developments in fixation screws does get orthopedic surgeons to lean in.
Fourth, provide additional digital assets to engage prospective customers and lead them towards requesting more information from the company. These assets can be immediate (micro-websites with very specific information) or longer-term (drip email campaigns, for example).
Fifth, engage the sales reps on qualified opportunities to convert prospects to customers. It’s easier to convert warm leads than cold ones, so let’s serve up as many warm qualified leads as possible.
This is admittedly different from how medical devices have always been marketed in the past, but there are substantial benefits of a “pull” strategy:
It’s cost effective. For less than the cost of marketing at a trade show, a company can run a national campaign targeting tens of thousands of prospective customers for several months, generating qualified sales opportunities that far surpass the “drive-by” leads that trade shows produce.
It’s scalable. There are dozens of ways to get messaging in front of healthcare decision makers. Campaigns can focus on only a few channels or can be scaled out to create “surround sound” for a new product launch or a growth campaign.
It eliminates geographical constraints. Digital pull strategies can cover the entire country, identifying prospective customers who may never have been called on previously. Every rep has parts of their territory that aren’t consistently called on. This approach allows the company to nurture those areas without burning precious rep time.
At Jairus, we built a technology platform to facilitate pull marketing for medical companies, based on our deep knowledge of the healthcare industry and our decades of experience using digital outreach systems.
If you’ve been in medical device sales or marketing for any period of time, you’ve been to more tradeshows than you can recall. We’ve all experienced the hours of standing around on concrete floors having the same conversation over and over with unqualified prospects who are barely pretending to be interested in what you have. At the end of the conversation, you scan their badge and POOF! you’ve gotten a lead in the system.
We all know what happens to those leads. They get sent to the rep for that prospect and are (mostly) ignored.
The tradeshow routine is tired, unproductive, and a waste of money.
Luckily, 2020 is the year of No Tradeshows.
Now, while we mourn the loss of that right of passage, let’s talk about an alternative to tradeshows that actually does drive brand awareness and qualified opportunities for the sales team – the Jairus platform.
For less than the investment in one tradeshow, it is possible to run a robust marketing campaign through the Jairus platform that only targets your pre-vetted, qualified prospects for an entire quarter – generating substantial brand awareness and dozens of qualified sales opportunities for the team.
The Jairus platform is built on years of experience in the industry and a deep understanding of cutting-edge marketing & sales enablement techniques.
There are “fluke” outbreaks that fade out of our historical consciousness soon after they pass, and then there are globally disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic, which is sure to produce a loud and clear paradigm shift that changes the world permanently. Expert projections as to what a post-COVID-19 landscape will look like vary slightly, but most agree that we will see “more contactless interfaces and interactions” across all industries, as Bernard Marr of Forbes wrote in his list of predictions (Link to the article).
In terms of the medical device industry (and many other industries), this shift will pull focus from the long-reigning sales call. In order to seamlessly pivot away from this focus to a world with less face-to-face interaction, you need to strengthen your “socially distanced” sales and marketing channels.
This means beefing up your digital outreach campaigns far beyond a static site here and an occasional social media post or newsletter. Instead, you need to encompass the entire buying experience in all of its phases.
In the relative absence of face-to-face interaction following the outbreak, buyers will have to take more onus in the buying process. If the supplier doesn’t provide the framework for that higher level of engagement to occur, then it simply won’t occur.
How to Ramp Up Your Digital Outreach Effectively
As mentioned, most agree that businesses will need to emphasize digital interfaces more from now on, but the real question is how? The answer involves a multi-faceted approach that includes strengthened email communications, web properties, and marketing campaigns that actively respond to each user’s engagements to optimize their experience. Let’s start with email.
Purpose-Driven Email Campaigns
For demonstration purposes, let’s use a tiered ranking system to show the differences between low-quality email campaigns and more engaging and comprehensive campaigns.
Tier 1—You send your list messages on an inconsistent basis that pitch products directly to them and announce promos, sales, etc.
Tier 2—You send your list messages on a semi-regular basis that pitch products/sales and provide some pre-launch product info and helpful guides.
Tier 3—You send your list messages that provide useful information on their own (guides, evidence-based support for your products, etc.) while directing them to content-rich microsites designed around their specific interests and needs.
Up until now, teams with tier-1 or tier-2 quality could at least survive, even though they were missing out on profits. As the rug is being violently pulled out from underneath us, however, we all need to strive for tier-3-quality email communications.
This means using this channel as a way to generate interest, strengthen relationships with prospects, inform them of relevant developments, and send them to highly optimized content instead of trying to force sales prematurely.
So, if email won’t be a sales vehicle first and foremost, then where on earth will we send these people?
Introducing the Content-Rich Microsite
Anyone on the web can access your homepage, so it stands to reason that your main website banks on broad appeal.
Nothing compels conversions, however, more than a content-rich microsite that speaks directly to the prospect, which is why we target email users based on their specific interests and affiliations.
Let’s say our avatar is a director of orthopedics who wants to find a specific hip implant that will improve surgical outcomes at her hospital. Could she find it on your homepage? Hopefully, yes, but the supporting content will not likely be enough to encompass the entire sales process.
If she were driven to a site focused on this exact product,however, lush with evidence-based justifications, video guides, and a way to contact a sales representative about this exact product she’s just learned about, she is much more likely to convert.
Even a highly effective microsite can still be rendered ineffective by the deadly “wait-and-see” pitfall, however. Your prospects need to be guided through the process in a way that speaks to their exact preferences, which the mindful marketer will be able to identify based on how they engage with the content.
So, instead of just churning prospects through an email list and microsite and hoping money comes out on the other end, jump in and become an active part of the process.
What does this look like? First, it requires that you structure your funnel so that it brings the prospect right to you. The microsite’s job is to prime the prospect for the sale with compelling content, and your sales team’s job in a post-coronavirus world will be to close a sale that has been in the works long before the prospect meets with you. This will de-emphasize interaction while still allowing your team to get those touchpoints and important messages across for steady sales.
Keeping Awareness at the Forefront
Finally, it’s vital that marketing and sales teams working to fit into this quickly shifting landscape remember to utilize all marketing efforts for brand awareness purposes. Regardless of what you’re trying to do in any particular communication, whether it’s providing pre-launch product specs, posting important updates on social media, etc., there’s always an opportunity to increase brand awareness by structuring the content to emphasize your company’s presence in all niche-related happenings. When we layer this over our active, sales-driven approach to physician marketing, the result is a steady rise in revenue.
When it comes to the sales process, context is crucial for success. The same message can land several different ways depending on where, how, and how often it is presented. Selling to prospects in person, like the medical device industry and many others do consistently, addresses some of these highly valuable contextual points, but not all.
Today, prospects need higher accessibility and familiarity to take action. It takes seven touches, in fact, for a message to be internalized. They need to be exposed to your brand’s value points and important updates without exiting their current context, i.e., browsing online.Finally, in the same way that your clients’ patients look them up online before a visit, your clients will examine your online presence before deciding to engage with you. This is especially true in the post-COVID world, where face-to-face meetings are much less frequent.
This is why delivering your messages online, a space where prospects spend hours a day working, researching and engaging with others, is the right way to establish and nurture relationships with prospective users, generate interest, provide information, and initiate the sales process.
Don’t believe me yet? Here’s a stat that strengthens the argument for a renewed focus on your digital practice – 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete outside of any interaction with a sales representative.That is only going to increase as rep access declines in our “new normal.”
Makes Sense, But How?
Every company under the sun has a website. Many have a page on LinkedIn, an account on Twitter and YouTube, and maybe even a Facebook account (doctors scroll through social media, too!) Isn’t that enough?
Unfortunately, No.
In order for a digital outreach campaign to work with, and not against, your sales team’s efforts, it has to provide the doctors you are targeting with concrete, actionable information beyond a generic tagline or two sentences of ad copy. It’s got to reach them where and when they want to be reached with the content they want to consume. Oh, and it has to develop as they engage with the content. Good marketers see the interaction online for what it is – a digital conversation. If the various aspects of the digital experience don’t mesh together correctly, you won’t get the result you are looking for. In fact, you may actually harm your brand if things aren’t coherent.
The right approach to connecting with medical prospects online involves a series of micro-sites providing rich, engaging, relevant content and an organized approach to bring prospects to those sites. If the micro-site is the space where you want to talk to the doctor, programmatic display ads, social media ad campaigns, and email campaigns are the doors into that place.
Programmatic Display Ads
These include text, image, and/or video-based ads that appear above (banners), around, or within the content on web pages all over theInternet. The publisher’s goal is to match their message with the most relevant prospects by publishing their ads on the most relevant sites. Targeting in this way is as important, if not more important, to the display ad than the content itself.
In the case of medical device suppliers, who target a relatively small, specialized clientele, we use programmatic display ads to bring highly targeted doctors to those informative micro-sites that introduce the product, build rapport, and generate interest.
Social Media
Social media ad campaigns are a highly adaptable strategy for building brand awareness, sending targeted prospects through your funnel, and ultimately, driving sales. Where other outreach methods are limited to the content of a single ad and the audience of a pre-determined website (or several), social media posts can provide a broader and more compelling series of messages across multiple posts. We can reach hyper-targeted sub-groups of social media users, drive them to our content-rich micro-sites, and sharply increase a company’s online visibility for sustainable growth.
Email Marketing
Without an email marketing campaign, prospects who don’t navigate all the way through your funnel (to set up a sales call, in our case)are lost. By supplementing display and social media ad campaigns with email marketing, you can cultivate an audience of “warm” prospects.
This is your “second chance” to provide more helpful information, build awareness with these prospects, and send them to the content-rich microsite with a clearer understanding of your offerings.
It All Comes Through the Micro-sites
Up until this point, we’ve established micro-sites as the end goal for all of our highly targeted ad channels, but why are they so important?In our case, they provide an opportunity to deliver highly specific messages that a main website’s copy is too broad to address. They speak directly to the prospects about your product. Micro-sites can be built and re-purposed in much less time than a larger site, and they yield clear and actionable results regarding each prospect’s interaction with the product. It is because of these micro-sites that Jairus, our micro-marketing sales enablement platform, is capable of actively shaping and responding to each prospect’s digital conversation with the content.
With the help of compelling copy and design, Jairus’s outreach channels (programmatic display ads, social media postings and email marketing)are instrumental in both driving traffic to these micro-sites and increasing brand awareness in their own right. When utilized correctly, Jairus will broaden the mouth of the funnel without sacrificing conversion.
Context, Remember?
The Coronavirus outbreak may have heightened the need for digital outreach in the medical device market, but this need will persist long after the quarantine ends. Healthcare consumers will continue to learn, connect, research new products and make purchasing decisions online. They will conduct a significant portion of their business within this environment, and will therefore be in the mindset to consider and follow through on purchasing decisions online. Properly leveraging this opportunity will directly translate to greater reach, revenue, and long-term growth for your medical device company.
