In the past, many medical device marketers have been slow to adopt digital marketing strategies. With many complicated products with long-winded descriptions, traditional medical marketing tactics relied on in-person meetings or constant trade shows to drum up interest. While this type of marketing can still be beneficial, there is a laundry list of other marketing strategies to help your business gain traction within the market.
If you want to find new clients and market your medical device, you must think smart. Think outside the box and step away from any stale tactics that may not provide you with the sales and exposure you need. If you are looking for new ways to land customers or are fresh to the market and are unsure where to start, these five medical device marketing strategies will help you educate and find new clients.
Build Your Online Presence
Create an online presence, and build a website first. When you develop your product up through search engines (SERPs), you provide potential customers the ability to find your business and product. When you create a website, you are not just building it for one specific purpose. As the "doormat" of your business, your website is the start of your communication with potential customers. It is where you begin building relationships and tell the world about your product.
The more information you have about your business, the more you can help influence customers into making a buying decision. Use your website to communicate your value proposition. Your website should be both informative and concise, providing customers with a place that answers their questions and begins the relationship between you and them.
Work On Communication
Your communication platform begins with your website, and from there, you can reach potential customers from all over the world. However, building a website and waiting for people to come to you isn't enough. You must actively find your customers.
Unfortunately, many medical devices have a small margin of potential customers. With such unique products, finding the right customer can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, when you know how to communicate your value proposition and narrow your scope correctly, the task becomes less overwhelming. Two essential strategies that rely on good communication tactics are engagement and lead nurturing.
Engagement: How do you engage new and current customers? Within your niche medical device market, engagement with customers is tricky. Effective engagement has become personal and highly targeted, and the best strategy is to develop a connection between the customer and the product. To successfully engage with a customer, the connection must include personalization, storytelling, and building relationships. Messaging and targeting should be tailored to specific audiences versus one mass email blast. Creating customer personas and identifying the customer journey down the sales funnel must start with an engagement campaign.
Lead Nurturing: To continue engaging your customer, you should incorporate lead nurturing into your strategies. Lead nurturing is a campaign (typically email) that offers your prospective customers relevant, valuable content. These emails are not self-promoting, nor should they be all about "buy this" or "we are the best because," but rather, a combination of helpful and relevant content. The main focus of lead nurture campaigns is to provide instructional content and communicate with your potential leads. Communicate your product, build your relationships, and then follow up with relevant content to guide them back to your product to buy.
Build Trust
How can you build trust with your clients? How will they know that the medical device you are trying to sell will benefit their business? How will they know if it even works? To answer these questions and build trust, present case studies or any impactful demonstrations of the product. A good case study helps promote your product, shows positive outcomes, and demonstrates specific statistics and examples about the benefits of your particular device. Other ways to incorporate educational content are in the form of free downloadable materials such as e-books or even long-form articles posted on your website.
Impactful Webinars
Let's face it. Medical devices can be challenging to explain. If you are not within the field, or you are not a sales rep for the company, a medical device may need more than an infographic to get its true purpose across. While having the "hows" and "whats" explained by the website or within a document are an essential part of selling a product - these one-dimensional examples are sometimes not very impactful.
To fully explain the potential of your medical device, you should create and offer webinars. Webinars provide a platform that helps support your product through education. Within a Webinar, you can educate your customers about the device usage, procedures, or specific cases where the device works. Hosting a webinar will strengthen your brand and also help inform customers about the product you are selling.
Always Optimize
Perhaps you have been in the business for years, and your business has become stale. You do not see any movement on your website, and sales have gone down. This might not mean that there is suddenly a lack of need for your product. This could be that it's time to overhaul your process and take a look at your business as a whole. Analyze your strategies, collect up-to-date data and identify areas that are showing signs of weakness.
Perform a business "audit" on your internal and external processes and once you identify the areas that need assistance - optimize. Some simple ways to optimize could be to upgrade content, refresh your brand, tweak your value proposition. Try to innovate your sales and marketing approach and see if that stirs up some new business.
Partner With An Agency Who Knows Medical Device Strategy
The ability to scale your business is one of marketing's best advantages. From websites to webinars and lead-nurturing email blasts, remember that no matter how expensive, complicated, or specialized your device - you can successfully market and sell your product. Following these strategies will keep your customers interested, informed, and engaged across a variety of channels. However, with the amount of work and strategy that goes into a successful medical device marketing campaign, many companies turn to fully operational medical device marketing firms like Icovy.
Using a well-established medical device lead generation firm, like Icovy, will guarantee that you will receive expert strategy from day one. At Icovy we know what it takes to stand out in this heavily saturated field and we have a team of developers, SEO specialists, designers, and strategists to get your brand in front of qualified leads. We know medical device marketing strategies and are ready to put them to use for your business.
To learn more about our process and in-house medical device strategies, contact us today!
