As any marketer knows, if you can’t get your product or service in front of the right audience, the chances for your brand’s success dwindle. But there’s more to a successful marketing strategy than brochures, ads and a slick website.
Medical device companies can range from those that produce tongue depressors to face masks to implantable ventricular devices and much more, and due to the increase in infectious and chronic diseases, the medical device market is expected to grow to over $600 billion by 2023.
It’s critical that medical device companies market their products effectively, but how can a medical device company do digital marketing right? Let’s take a look.
Before you jump into the marketing game, it’s important to know your goals:
While your device must pass FDA clearance to be brought to market, you still need to build other forms of trust among your audiences to be successful. This kind of trust can take many forms like having consistent messages across all your platforms — digital, print, social.
Another way to build trust is to provide your audience with non-branded information that can help them solve problems. For example, one of Kuno’s medical device clients established a blog targeting each persona we work with. While the blog provides coverage of the client’s medical devices that are used in studies, it also provides vendor-neutral information about the state of the industry, surgical news, techniques and more.
By having a blog that provides useful, mostly vendor-neutral information, this medical device manufacturer has established itself as a trusted source of industry news and developments.
Content marketing has emerged as a valuable tool for medical device companies. The important thing to keep in mind here is that, like the blog example above, the content you produce should be helpful, address the pain points of your audience and be free of any sales-pitch tone.
One thing to keep in mind when considering content for your audience is if there a niche you can fill or an issue that you can address that no one is talking about yet.
For example, one medical device manufacturer that creates hemodialysis monitors created a piece on how then-President Donald Trump’s Advancing American Kidney Care Act could affect kidney care professionals, dialysis clinics and dialysis patients.
This piece broke down how this act, which on the surface seemed beneficial to patients, could actually negatively affect patients and those who care for them. It was popular among the audience of kidney care professionals because they were worried about the legislation’s effects, but no one was talking about it.
To figure out the content that resonates most with your target audiences, you’ll need to know where they get their information and what kind of information is important to them. In the above example, we knew the above information would be helpful because the kidney care professional organizations were talking about the potential impact of this legislation.
You can figure out the type of content your audience enjoys by asking them and doing research. If you’re able, attend meetings of professional societies or look within professional groups or forums for inspiration.
Whether you’re speaking to clinicians or patients, it’s important to remember that behind the job title or patient label is a human being. Things like personalization and storytelling — as well as using a conversational tone — can go a long way in making a connection with the reader. As a medical device manufacturer, you know the importance of creating and nurturing strong relationships with your potential users.
These relationships, and what you know about each audience, can help you connect with potential customers by providing personalized content and experiences that help doctors and patients address pain points.
You might not think clinicians are active on social media, but growing evidence shows otherwise. Many clinicians use social media to keep up with trends, share insights and even provide educational information to patients. As a result, medical device companies can use social media advertising to reach clinicians. One medical device manufacturer was able to reach a wide audience that included cardio and neurosurgeons as well as hemodialysis professionals using Facebook ads. In this case, awareness for the company’s devices increased dramatically as it was able to connect with its target audience using social media.
A couple of things to keep in mind for using social media to reach clinicians:
Webinars can be a great way to engage leads while providing educational information and more information about your devices. Use webinars to address topics your audience wants more information about or showcase new study results or findings. These webinars can also be used to establish your company as an industry resource for the latest news and more.
Marketing to clinicians may seem more difficult than other audiences, but it’s important to remember that just like other audiences, clinicians are humans too. That means they will likely respond to your marketing efforts using the methods above.
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