In today’s world, every business, brand, and company must have a strong online presence to be able to capture the attention of their target audience. Without an adequate social media strategy, marketing through traditional web banners and isolated email campaigns will continue to underdeliver.
What is often lacking in business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing efforts is the incorporation of medical groups and hospitals into large-scale digital marketing platforms. While patient engagement is critical to the success of any business, marketing to healthcare professionals, especially medical device manufacturers, can be challenging because of the high volume of information that they need to process and the various regulatory requirements that they must adhere to.
This is where marketing to medical groups comes in. Just like other industries, healthcare is evolving to be a more digital and a more collaborative space. Due to the nature of the work and the changing attitudes of the general public towards healthcare, this is an especially exciting time to market to medical groups.
The Rise Of Online Marketing
Just like any other industry or piece of real estate, the digital marketing landscape is changing to accommodate the evolving demands of a modern consumer. In 2019, 59% of consumers go online to research products and companies before buying products from them. That’s compared to 48% in 2018 and 47% in 2017.
Additionally, 72% of consumers look online for advice before buying a product or planning to purchase something, and 64% do the same for comparing prices. This could indicate that consumers are taking the web as a place to do business and brands are responding by providing better customer experiences through online channels.
Why Digital Marketing For Medical Groups?
From a marketing perspective, digital marketing for medical groups is a great fit because consumers have already made the transformation from offline to online spaces. If your target audience is composed of medical professionals and researchers, you can bet that they already browse the web for information.
Additionally, because healthcare is a digital space, you can use analytics and tracking tools to track the impact of your strategies and campaigns. With digital marketing for medical groups, you can gain valuable insights into whether or not your efforts are paying off and, if they are, how you can improve your strategy in the future.
Key Takeaways
With more people turning to the internet for health information, companies can gain a competitive advantage by taking the time to develop a solid online marketing strategy. The benefits of a well-executed plan include;
- Increased brand loyalty
- Generated brand awareness
- Generated leads
- Ensure customer satisfaction
- Gained web traffic
- Livestream content
- Created a digital community
- And more…
With each of these key takeaways, companies can gain an advantage by establishing and growing a community of people interested in their products or services. Once you have an engaged audience, you can better inform them about your offerings through digital marketing.
Develop A Strategy
To effectively market to medical groups, you must put in the time to develop a solid strategy. If you’re running this marketing effort in-house, you might consider engaging with a digital marketing agency to help you develop a comprehensive plan that will bring in the results you’re looking for. Alternatively, you could hire a consultant to help you develop a 5-year plan and then work with them to execute your strategy.
Before you begin to develop your strategy, take the time to study the marketplace and conduct thorough market research. Doing this will help you identify the key players and gain an understanding of the industry. Additionally, you can use tools like Google Trends to easily find relevant information about how people search for and use your product or service.
Construct A Landing Page
A landing page is a web page that gets visitors to take a specific action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. A well-designed landing page will draw the right people to your website while encouraging them to enter their contact details. The more fields you populate, the better. Make sure that all of the fields you include are relevant to your target audience.
Once you’ve garnered a few visitors, you can use tools like Google Analytics to track the actions that these individuals take on your site. With this information, you’ll be able to determine the value that your landing page is bringing in and, if possible, improve it to maximize conversion rates.
If your product or service is relatively new on the market, you might consider creating a beta version of the landing page as a trial run. This will help you determine whether or not you need to make any major changes to the page before going live.
Craft A Social Media Strategy
As we mentioned above, consumers are heavily influenced by online content and tend to prefer content that is easy to access and share. For this reason, creating high-quality and attractive content for social media is a solid strategy to employ. With a diverse social media audience, you can expose your content to many more people than you could ever reach through traditional marketing channels.
To successfully market to medical groups on social media, you’ll want to follow these steps;
- Set up a social media account for your business
- Design the account to effectively portray your brand
- Regularly publish content to the account
- Include a link to your website in all of your tweets
- Re-share content from others, especially industry experts
- Establish and engage with a digital community
- Measure the success of your social media strategy
Each of these steps will help you establish credibility with your target audience and drive traffic to your website. Additionally, these platforms are an effective way to connect with other businesses in your industry, as well as the general public. Through social media, you can gain a significant following and, eventually, monetize your account.
Create Email Marketing Campaigns
With email marketing, you can take advantage of the fact that most people have an email address and can, therefore, be contacted via this channel. Email marketing is still effective because consumers trust the message and believe that it came from a trusted source. For this reason, you should create email campaigns for medical groups that are targeted towards specific individuals or groups of people.
To successfully market to medical groups with email marketing, you’ll want to follow these steps;
- Make sure that all of your emails are well-designed
- Use a double opt-in method to ensure that only interested parties receive your emails
- Monitor the open-rates of your emails to determine the effectiveness of your campaign
- If possible, test different variations of your emails to determine which one is most effective
- Measure the success of your email marketing campaign
Building email marketing campaigns that are targeted towards medical professionals can be challenging because doctors and other healthcare professionals often have to deal with complex issues on a daily basis. In these instances, relevant and interesting information about your product or service can be an effective way to gain their trust and, ultimately, their business.
Integrate With Other Channels
Apart from the various above-mentioned channels, companies can also take advantage of the fact that people use multiple devices and locations while doing their research online. For instance, if someone is researching lawnmowers online, but also has an interest in cars, they may visit both the Lawnmower Review website and the Car Review website to form an opinion about both.
For a business to be successful, they must have all of their bases covered. Just as the saying goes, “You can’t have a best friend without having at least one other friend,” having a solid online presence is critical for any brand.