Marketing in the digital era is no longer a ‘spray and pray’ business. Marketers have to work very hard to create accurate user personas, distill messages targeted to each, and convey them over the platforms that each persona uses.
With so many tools and channels available, the task of focusing your messages and ‘apprehending’ the right ones becomes even harder.
The arsenal at the disposal of the marketer is enormous. Some are more generic; others are more accurate or focused. Sometimes the combination of them is what makes them most effective. The true art is knowing how to use each and when.
Creating general awareness
When you have defined a target audience that is not yet familiar with your medical devices or technology, the tools you use must create awareness. Sometimes they may even have to make the audience realize that they have a need that your product can satisfy.
The most obvious tool here is LinkedIn. It is very easy to use LinkedIn to find professions, job descriptions, organizations (for example, physicians, nurses, hospital administrators) and target them and only them.
Other tools can support LinkedIn in creating even more distilled target groups. One such tool is skrapp, which helps you to build directories of verified email addresses (for example, hospital administrators, health center managers) for your outreach project.
If you’re targeting a market where Twitter is widely used as the United States, you can create campaigns that target thought leaders, followers of specific pages, or hashtags, creating a buzz and wider exposure. Social-media listeners like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are effective in understanding existing trends and finding relevant information about potential targets.
With our medical-devices customers, we use these channels to study who publishes medical devices-related materials, who responds or comments and then contacts them directly to establish a touchpoint.
Driving the message home
If your target audience is already familiar with your product or technology, then you’re in the nurturing stage, when you should be using tools that drive conversion.
LinkedIn is very useful to create lead-generation campaigns. If your project targets large organizations like hospitals, you can use account-based marketing tools like Demandbase to manage audiences in large target accounts and measure your progress and effectiveness. Here you have to serve relevant content and adapt your marketing activities to the account level.
Marketing automation and AI-based tools are also very effective. AI can help analyze customer intent and find people according to their alignment with hospitals, medical conferences, medical researches they peruse, portals they visit, and diagnostics they look for. In addition to Demandbase, tools like EverString use artificial intelligence to automate the nurturing process and help you score leads.
Driving the message home
Obviously, the more you use and the more you combine, the better off your marketing efforts will be. Start by targeting a large number of people and creating many remarketing lists. Then decide on the parameters that show the maturity level of each persona and the pool you want to get more engaged with you.
Finally, nurture and drive conversion by inviting specific professionals to a webinar, for example, those that read three of your landing pages in the last month, or dentists that saw a specific ad and then repeatedly visited the product’s page on your website.
At Xtra mile, we help medical devices’ companies take their marketing to the next level with the right tools, the right messages, and the most effective channels.
