Healthcare organizations, whether they are direct patient care, provider services, pharma, or medtech, face unique challenges that can impact the success of their sales and marketing initiatives.
A few include:
- Extensive regulations for patient and physician protection, such as HIPAA and FDA approvals
- An always-shifting marketplace driven by reimbursement models that involve both public and private institutions
- Clinical guidelines which are slow to adopt new measures, products, and approaches
- Customers who are often skeptical experts and require extensive education, documentation, and peer-reviewed studies before adopting something new
- Extensive regulations for patient and physician protection, such as HIPAA and FDA approvals
- An always-shifting marketplace driven by reimbursement models that involve both public and private institutions
- Clinical guidelines which are slow to adopt new measures, products, and approaches
- Customers who are often skeptical experts and require extensive education, documentation, and peer-reviewed studies before adopting something new
Navigating your way through this environment to build effective marketing campaigns can get complicated. Smaller organizations have the advantage of being nimble and can be more responsive to constantly evolving market conditions, new medical advances, and updated regulations. However, they often lack the necessary resources to effectively reach prospects and customers.
Large organizations have the scale needed to navigate a changing market, with dedicated commercial sales teams, seasoned product managers, and more marketing resources. With that bulk, though, come additional coordination, collaboration, and decision-making time that further complicate this already complex field. This can lead to slow, siloed, ineffective marketing campaigns that can be confusing to customers, clinically inaccurate, or full of over-promises and under-deliveries.
Fortunately, there are some simple steps that you can take that can help disarm some of the market and organizational challenges before they become issues, regardless of your size.
- Establish an inclusive campaign planning process
- Include both the product and commercial sales teams in the planning of a campaign, in both strategy and messaging. This early alignment helps ensure that you move beyond the technical and clinical details, drawing in key market, audience, and product perspectives to validate positioning, segmentation, and value—all critical elements in meeting and managing healthcare market complexities. It also minimizes potential later-stage disagreements or misunderstandings during the campaign.
- Cultivate commercial sales champions
- Ask the sales leadership to appoint a few field members to participate in the campaign, monitoring its effectiveness and gathering the voices of customers in real-time. This gives you direct feedback to respond to the evolving market while encouraging broader adoption and engagement by the sales team.
- Build flexibility into your marketing initiatives
- Give your assumptions and solutions a chance to breathe and respond to insights gathered from the field and initial analysis. Try not to let your processes become obstacles to innovations and discoveries that emerge over the course of campaign development. Build in moments to evaluate your work and enough budget to pivot or double-down based on new learnings.
- Elevate marketing accountability
- Work with all the stakeholders to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect the broader organizational objectives. Typical marketing measures, such as clicks, click-through rates, and site visitation are important, but so are revenue, new accounts, and pipelines. These business metrics are valuable commodities for building your credibility for future campaigns and engagement, while building stronger relationships with your peers and partners.
- Recognize the wins and understand the losses with your partners
- During and at the end of the campaign, share results with your partners. Taking a moment to recognize the contributions to the success of the campaign can go a long way to building better relationships that lead to more effective campaigns in the future. Don’t shy away from campaign failures either – leverage them to identify key learnings and help elevate future campaigns.
Taking an inclusive approach to your marketing campaigns can deliver several benefits beyond those measured by KPIs. By creating a culture of collaboration, you become an important guide to maximizing the opportunities for promoting uptake, adoption, and ultimately, revenue.
Make Healthcare Marketing Easier
Healthcare providers don’t have the time to bring their marketing partners up to speed. That’s why it’s crucial to partner with agencies that already understand the nuances of healthcare. At The Simon Group, our staff eats, sleeps, and breathes healthcare. We continuously refine our understanding and sharpen our insight.
We also make it easy to get started. We roll up our sleeves and collaborate right away, crafting intelligent solutions that can help you reach healthcare providers effectively.
