- Healthcare organizations may may all be in the same industry, but their priorities, technology environments, and buying situations are usually very different.
- Strong marketing can connect a specific initiative to a clear use case that a customer is dealing with and can gives each person in a buying committee the information they specifically need to make a decision.
- This blog is just a preview of what’s covered in Exact Market’s Marketing Professional’s Guide, a deeper look at healthcare priorities and how marketers can turn them into more relevant go-to-market strategies and campaigns.
Healthcare technology is always moving. AI, cloud, computing, connected devices, and analytics are creating new ways to deliver care and run healthcare organizations, put putting new choices in front of people responsible for making it all work.
How will this work with the systems we already have? What happens to patient data? Who’s going to train the staff?
Those are the kinds of questions healthcare buyers ask when they start looking seriously at a new technology. The bells and whistles may get their attention, but if your offering doesn’t connect to what the organization is trying to accomplish, your marketing may not get you very far.
The Marketing Professional’s Guide from Exact Market shows you how to align your go-to-market strategies with the initiatives healthcare organizations are focused on today.
Here’s a preview of what’s inside.
Start with a specific customer problem.
Healthcare organizations are focused on solving very different problems.
A hospital system with patients moving between locations cares about different things than a small practice with a handful of staff. One may be focused on keeping systems available and information secure, while the other may simply be trying to take repetitive work off a limited staff. A health tech company or insurer brings another set of priorities.
That means giving marketing something to build a story around, and a specific problem to explore before the sales conversation ever happens. Instead of saying “We help healthcare organizations,” start with: “We want to reach hospital systems expanding telehealth that need a more manageable way to manage routine patient communications.
Give each person in the buying group a reason to care.
The next steps is to think about who will have a say in the decision inside the organization, and what will each person in the buying committee want to know? Everyone is looking at your solution from a different angle.
- Security leaders need to know how patient information is protected and whether the vendor can back up its security claims with the right controls and documentation.
- CIOs and CTOs are looking at fit. Will the solution work with what they already have? What will it take to integrate, keep available, and support over time?
- Compliance leaders need information they can use in their own review. They want to understand applicable requirements, potential risk, and where the vendor’s responsibilities end and theirs begin.
- Security practitioners are thinking about what happens once the solution is connected. How will it affect monitoring, access management, and incident response?
- IT operations teams will have to implement and support the solution, so they want to know how much work it creates, what training is involved, and what ongoing support will be required.
This doesn’t mean you don’t need a different value proposition for each person. It just means giving each person the information they need to evaluate your product.
Translate features into a use case buyers can evaluate.
The next steps is to show the buyer what your technology actually helps them do. A list of features won’t do nearly as much as putting the product into a real healthcare workflow. With technologies including AI, cloud, and connected devices moving quickly, it’s each for technology itself to become the story. But buyers still need to understand what it actually helps them do. Cloud capabilities might support access to information and collaboration across locations. Connected devices might support remote patient monitoring. Automation might help manage certain administrative tasks.
From there, get more specific. Identify the capability, show where it fits into the workflow, explain the benefit, and give the buyer something that supports the claim. For instance, if your offering uses natural language processing (NLP) to support patient communications, “advanced NLP” tells the buyer what the technology is. But you can give them something they can actually picture and evaluate when you say, “Supports routine preoperative questions and instructions within a defined patient communication workflow.” From there, you can get into more detail with a demo, implementation materials, and relevant customer stories.
Make adoption questions part of the campaign.
The next steps is looking at the campaign itself. Does it answer the practical questions that come up when a buyer starts thinking seriously about bringing your solution into their organization?
A buyer worried about adding more work to an already busy staff may need an overview that spells out responsibilities and training. Someone looking at interoperability will want specifics about supported systems and integration requirements. A team short on resources may want a clear picture about how maintenance and support will be handled.
In addition to giving prospects enough information to decide whether the solution can work for them, this content also gives an internal champion something useful to work with when colleagues start asking for more details.
Build a campaign around one recognizable scenario.
In the NLP example. Instead of building a broad campaign around AI in healthcare, you a tighter brief focused on supporting telehealth and digital nursing for patients undergoing surgery can be more impactful:
- Customer challenge: A hospital system wants to support preoperative communication as it expands its virtual care offering.
- Offering: A solution that uses NLP to support patient instructions and routine questions.
- Marketing goal: Start qualified conversations with organizations actively evaluating this type of workflow.
- Audience: The technology, security, compliance, and operations stakeholders who have a role in evaluating your offering.
- Core message: Help patients get answers to their routine pre-surgery questions while supporting your care team’s existing communication workflow.
With a focused brief, campaign assets can be stronger. A blog can introduce the communication challenge and the questions organizations should be asking. A webinar can show the workflow in action and make clear when the care team needs to step in. A landing page can cover the use case, implementation considerations, and next steps. Emails can direct different stakeholders to the information most relevant to them.
Decide what success means before launch.
Before the campaign goes live, decide what you expect to accomplish. Otherwise, it’s easy to end up with a dashboard full of numbers.
If you’re trying to build awareness, look at relevant reach, organic traffic, and brand engagement. If you want buyers to start evaluating the solution, content engagement, qualified inquiries, and requests for demo or consultations tell you more. If customer acquisition is the goal, conversion acquisition cost matter, along with clearly defined attribution assumptions about what marketing gets credit for.
Put the Guide to Work
Dive into the Marketing Professional’s Guide to help transform your organization’s healthcare priorities, audiences, and use cases with more focused positioning, messaging, and campaigns.
A: Specific enough that a buyer can recognize their organization, initiative, and challenge in the message. “We help healthcare organizations with AI” gives buyers very little to evaluate. A message tied to a workflow they’re struggling with, such as managing routine patient communications gives them something concrete to consider. From there, a case study or demo can show how your technology fits into that workflow and what it can help them accomplish.
A: You don’t need to change the central value proposition, but you should change the supporting information. A CIO may want integration details, security needs evidence of controls, compliance needs documentation, and operations needs to understand implementation and ongoing support.
A: Start with the campaign goal, then choose metrics that show progress toward it. Awareness campaigns may focus on relevant reach and engagement, while evaluation campaigns should look more closely at qualified inquiries, demos, and consultations. Just as important, look at what buyers to and ask next. That can tell you where the campaign needs more information or a stronger case.
