What should a medical technology company do if they have an exciting new product ready for the limelight, but have no brand name or marketing materials? This was the challenge that a medical software company faced when it was ready to introduce its new platform for vascular and neurovascular conditions.
Unlike any other product before, the company’s new platform enabled physicians to make faster, more accurate diagnostic and treatment decisions. Clearly, it was an exciting and much needed medical development. But how does a company that is starting from zero get known in its niche?
This company hired Kuno Creative to develop a robust, well-rounded marketing program. The results were greater than the company expected. It grew from an unknown company working in stealth mode to having its software platform in over 2,000 hospitals worldwide.
Other outcomes included:
- New organic contacts: Increased 1,373% six months after website launch
- Website traffic: Increased 147% six months after website launch
- Time on page: Increased 177% six months after website launch
- Google ranking: Moved to number 1 spot for “stroke software”
- Keyword rankings: 377% improvement in Top 10 rankings
Here are four lessons learned for medical technology companies that need to introduce their new products to the marketplace.
Embrace Content Marketing
Content marketing is essential today for any organization in any industry. And digital content marketing is critical. Just five years ago, 65% of medtech companies spent 20% or less of their marketing budget on digital marketing. But everything’s changed. By 2020, 74% had shifted more of their budget to digital marketing.
Medtech companies are embracing digital marketing, according to McKinsey. After a slow start, they have realized the many advantages of deploying digital marketing to better engage with healthcare organizations and providers.
The rise of digital marketing in medtech was accelerated by the pandemic and the resulting reduction in face-to-face meetings and trade shows. Adoption includes everything from digital marketing to e-commerce to virtual sales channels.
Pro Tip: While launching digital marketing platforms will optimize your marketing performance, don’t forget to use the power of analytics to measure your performance. Digital marketing tools’ analytical capabilities are some of their most potent for marketers and executives alike. Providing real insight you can use to fix issues and ramp up targeted outcomes is a game-changer for any sector, but especially with medical device manufacturers debuting new, innovative products.
Create Buyer Personas to Support Brand Building
Building a brand is vital for a company that has no brand recognition in the marketplace. Many important elements go into creating a strong brand — which is one that delivers a strong brand experience to buyers. One of the essential components is to fully understand the buyer who will be targeted. Enter buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a document that describes a key consumer type and includes details about how they think and act, including demographics, behavioral characteristics and psychographics. The details help shape marketing messages for a company, product or service. They also help segment potential consumers into more narrow subcategories for marketing initiatives such as email drip campaigns.
Key elements of a medical technology buyer persona might be, for example:
- Age: 40 to 50 years old
- Gender: 70% male
- Education: BA minimum; higher degree likely
- Industries: Medical, hospital, clinic
- Annual Income: $250K+
- Likes: Efficiency and cost savings
- Dislikes: Difficult to use devices
- Objectives: To overcome challenges
Pro Tip: Make your buyer personas more impactful by conducting deep research, including gathering insights from your sales team, interviewing your best customers, conducting a customer survey, study your Google search analytics, follow your followers on social media and review market research reports.
Build Customer Experience Journey Maps
Done right, customer journey maps are one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolbox. They provide a clear roadmap of the journey a customer takes to purchase a product or service — from the first interaction to discovery to long-term retention. With this map as a guide, marketers can take smart actions at every step of the journey to attract, convert and retain more prospects, leads and customers.
Companies use their customer experience journey maps in a variety of ways, including:
- Informing critical decision making across the organization
- Targeting customer segments to make campaigns more personalized and impactful
- Streamlining sales efficiencies to get to closing quicker
- Measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns’ impact
Pro Tip: With journey maps in hand, medical device companies can use them to inform a deeper exploration of customer insights. You’ll be equipped to move beyond baseline insights into your customers and deploy more sophisticated research methods. You can use this deeper insight to inform your campaigns and help create more impactful messaging.
Create a Go-to-Market Lead Generation Program
As healthcare providers have increasingly moved to virtual solutions, medtech companies have increased their use of digital marketing for lead generation. For example, McKinsey found that 45% of leaders think email campaigns are the most impactful digital channel for generating new sales leads during the launch phase of their marketing programs.
Launching new medical technologies will require highly effective lead generation campaigns. Three of the most common lead gen initiatives today for B2B organizations are:
- Organic SEO: Search remains a solid strategy for all companies, including B2B medical technology sales. The goal is to create content around the right topics and keywords to drive highly relevant, targeted leads to a website. Websites should be designed to inspire visitors to take the next action, such as downloading content or requesting a demo.
- Paid Search Ad Retargeting: Companies often launch paid social ad campaigns on Google to generate leads. But today the general belief is that you also must run simultaneous ad retargeting campaigns to increase your lead generation results.
- Email Marketing and Remarketing. Email has been and remains one of the most effective ways to conduct lead gen campaigns. Messaging is critical in email campaigns — from the subject line to the call to action. They must speak directly to the buyer personas you’ve created. Here again, remarketing has become an important partner in email marketing success because it can help bolster the impact of emails.
Pro Tip: To take lead generation to the next level, consider forming strategic partnerships with complementary product and service companies. If there’s a company that complements what you are offering, find ways to form a co-marketing partnership. This will allow both companies to double your lead generation potential.
Having the right marketing program in place is critical in selling your new medical technology. These four lessons can set you up for success.
Is marketing not your strong suit? This is where partnering with a go-to-market specialist like Kuno Creative can help you get to market faster and get better results. We can launch any or all of these initiatives, along with other ways to optimize your new product’s full sales potential — so you can yield optimal results.
Ready to connect? Schedule a consultation where we can discuss your medical device marketing needs.
