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Capturing the interest of healthcare providers and decision-makers to raise awareness of your medical technology or device can be an overwhelming endeavor. Every medtech needs to be marketing itself, but your focus is likely on seventy-odd other critical tasks, perhaps only a few of which contribute to generating leads through marketing. Yet the goal of marketing comprises such a spectrum of initiatives, it’s common to be uncertain about what deserves your investment — of time and of budget.
It’s true that marketing can be an ever-evolving field, and no expert will tell you the same advice. But in the field of medical technology, we can offer some insights on where you should and shouldn’t be spending your efforts.
Do’s and Don’ts of MedTech Marketing
1 - Build, Protect, and Maintain Your Brand
Do: Your brand is the visual and metaphorical embodiment of the promise your product or service offers. Through your company’s growth, it will become recognizable and unforgettable, sometimes even envied and copied (hello trademarks!). Take the time to enforce branding, maintain your look and feel, and ensure you’ve protected what’s yours.
Don’t rush to produce anything that’s not on-brand. In the hustle to meet the needs of sales executives who are educating prospects, it’s common to crank out materials that lack consistency with your brand. But each watered-down piece that leaves your hands can be like a leaky faucet — it’s not a problem now, but over time the impact grows.
2 - DO Spend the Effort To Make Your Collateral Perfect
Whether you’re strictly digital or provide printed leave-behinds, use pitch decks or mostly videos, gather feedback from your customers and your sales leaders, build beautiful sales tools, and commit to using them for a few months.
DON’T cut corners on sales presentations, brochures, and other sales collateral like case studies and ROI summaries. Don’t jump to revise them every two weeks for every negative feedback. Gorgeous marketing materials are memorable. Rushed materials get mentally and physically discarded.
3 - DO Track Your Leads
It’s not the sexy part of marketing, but the data wisdom that can be gained from a robustly built and consistently utilized CRM or lead-tracking system can lead to massive insights within just a half-year. Healthy systems — those where marketing and sales inputs are equally maintained — will reveal patterns of prospect decision-making that can directly steer your next years’ strategy and positively impact your company’s growth. For example, you might learn that small hospitals close deals in a fraction of the time of larger accounts, but if a clinical champion advocates, the larger accounts close quicker and at significantly higher ticket sizes. Projecting insights like this can influence hiring, targeting, and training. Ideally, they will also attribute marketing efforts’ impacts and guide where to reinvest marketing spend.
DON’T invest in a pricey automated marketing platform that you won’t use thoroughly. They are wonderful, but they require a considerable amount of time, training, and consistent effort to pay off. It’s often worth it to outsource this outbound effort.
4 - DO Embrace PR for Credibility
Earned media is the fastest way to earn credibility for your medical innovation. Research, clinical evidence, and even simple trial results are far more important for validation, but they can take time. Being covered by an outlet that your prospects respect, especially if a current customer is quoted, is an instant stamp of validity. Then, that article is an evergreen proof-of-concept to share with prospects.
DON’T overpay for “sponsored” or “advertorial” space to get that coveted coverage unless you have a powerful story to tell and you cannot get it placed through traditional PR efforts.
5 - DO Cultivate Strong Customer References
An unspoken truth of most healthcare purchasing decisions is the litmus test of the reference call. Each hospital knows that it is unique in its needs, and though your medical technology might solve the same problem no matter where it’s used, hospital administrators know that their adoption of new technology isn’t always smooth. They will want to speak to (or just email with) a customer who has been through implementation of your system or service. It’s sometimes a mandatory requirement of their procurement process. So when you have a customer that’s happy, your marketing team should know them, profile them and memorialize their experience in a case study (even a strictly internal one, for example), to store in a library with others. When sales executives need a reference, this library will be invaluable. DON’T exhaust these references with several calls per week, or leave them feeling inappropriately rewarded for their time. Yes, there are rules about giving hospitals gifts, but no rule that says you can’t give them a next-year discount, sponsor their department Christmas party, and give them early access to product upgrades.
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