Best Marketing & Sales Best Practices for Med Device Companies
1. Assess your audiences and customer persona’s
Whether you are on the B2b side of med device or targeting consumers, you need to completely understand who your target audience is and what persona’s they have. When attempting to assess and find out who your target audience is composed of, think about how they feel emotionally, what they may value, and what drives their daily activities. A few ways that you can analyze your audience is by doing the following:
A. DEVELOP THREE BUYER PERSONAS
In marketing there are three types of persona’s you can build. These include, buyer, website and user persona’s. Buyer personas play a significant role in developing marketing and communication strategies since they have the closest relationship to your company’s revenue. They are a representation of your company’s target customer and are those who are involved in buying your service or product offering.
Website personas are similar, but specifically represent those who your company’s website is intended to serve. These personas ultimately guide your medical device website design. They are a lot more specific and include audiences that buyer personas are not built around. Some examples would include present day consumers, your customer’s clientele, investment groups, employee’s, etc.
In comparison to buyer and website personas; user personas depict the people who will be using your medical device or service whether they are the decision maker who influences the buying decision or not. These kinds of personas are traditionally used to direct your medical device product design and improve marketing communications regarding product advantages.
B. BUILD INSIGHTS BY PERFORMING CUSTOMER INTERVIEW SESSIONS
You can do qualitative research by conducting customer interviews which will allow you to discover new insights about your medical device product and/ or service. Doing this will let your team continue to test for market demand, allow you to further your knowledge on your customer’s buying cycle and also enable you to find market gaps and new opportunities.
C. CONDUCT SURVEYS AND ALWAYS REFINE SURVEY TACTICS
The saying something is better than nothing, is sometimes seen to be true depending on what the topic of conversation is. But when speaking about understanding your medical device audience, you want to receive as much targeted feedback as possible to help your team make the necessary adjustments. Our team recommends that rather than focusing on one stand alone survey with a larger quantity of questions, learn to segment your target audience by value stream or product family, and send shorter surveys at least once a quarter. This would help you receive feedback on a consistent basis, and allow your team to understand the current market state and emerging applications for product and/ or service refinement.
2. Drive customer engagement with educative and informative content
When you have a good understanding of your customer personas, and their different variations it is important that you begin to curate compelling content that will speak to them and help drive connection. We would suggest that you develop a content marketing plan that will be consistent and help build industry credibility. Brands without consistency tend to lack and/ or lose credibility within the medical device industry. A few topics that have proven to drive engagement include technical current data revolving around FDA compliance, ISO and quality management, traceability and risk reduction. These are only a few of many that have shown real impact, and attract audiences within the med device industry.
As the years continue to pass, new technologies are developed and social platforms continue to gain adoption at a historic high. Recent reports show that 77% of companies say they have a content marketing strategy. Medical device companies all across the world are recognizing that the ways of consuming content are rapidly changing and they need to jump on the bandwagon before they get left behind by competitors. With consumers utilizing digital platforms to consume content more than ever before, it is crucial that your medical device company develop a lead nurturing program and implement a content strategy to provide both educative and informative content at every stage of your customer’s buying cycle.
3. Understand who decision makers are and Nurture equitable relationships
With the medical device and healthcare industry being as big as it is, with a variety of medical professionals, it is very important that you understand where your end customer lies. This could be a contract manufacturer, individual consumer, a hospital, individual clinician and/ or another third party group. Depending on who your audience is composed of, depicts what they value and how you need to approach them. Healthcare referrals help drive adoption in hospital environments, and ensuring that you implement education programs post-sale, can advance use cases, increase return on investment (ROI), and create value.
In some cases, product features are the primary interest that drive engagement and in others they are entirely irrelevant. It is critical to understand when elements such as ROI, equipment capabilities, daily workflow and overall standardization are valued most in any given interaction. Customer adoption is most successful when you understand the medical device target audience from A to Z and know what market segment you service and/ or product serves best.
If you are in need of any creative services and/ or guidance to help you penetrate your new markets within the med device industry , feel free to contact us to see how our team could potentially help push your company forward.
