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Best Practices for Marketing to Healthcare Professionals
Some best practices for marketing new technologies or new products to healthcare professionals include incorporating email marketing and creating buyer personas.
Incorporating Email Marketing
- According to Healthlink Dimensions Healthcare Professional Communication Report for 2018, about 73 percent of medical professionals prefer being reached through emails.
- Healthcare professionals prefer pharmaceuticals and medical device manufacturers who present them with the opportunity to "learn about their industry."
- When sending emails to healthcare professionals, marketers should specifically provide educational materials such as industry studies, collected insights on patient demands, and detailed breakdowns of new products.
- The content of the email messages should be interesting and portray key features through distinct tactics. Marketers should provide a simple layout, graphs, bullet points images, and other points to make email more digestible and memorable.
- Marketers should consider focusing on peers rather than patients hence "physicians prefer a more clinical perspective when reading about new treatments and technology." They should also consider the use of video content which is engaging and mobile-friendly.
- For example, when emailing cardiologists, marketers should consider the type of cardiologist they are marketing to and obtain competent medical advisors who can guarantee that the healthcare language and "targeting in the campaigns make sense for physicians."
- Medical professionals are more inclined to open emails that they can relate to and respond to. If a marketer is sending an email about post-surgical rehabilitation, they should consider using a mix of imagery that involves surgeons and physicians.
- Marketers should consider attaching real statistics to the content and finding testimonials that show how well they can make patients feel. For example, make use of messages such as "Worker’s Compensation Specialist. Use a verifiable claim like over 85% of our patients can return to work."
- Incorporating email marketing is provided as the best practice because it's been featured in multiple authoritative sources for marketing new technologies or new products to healthcare professionals.
Creating Buyer Personas
- A study conducted on over 350 CMOs revealed that marketers who provided personalized customer experiences witnessed double-digit returns.
- A compelling way to reach medical professionals is to create buyer personas, including one for each profession. For instance, medical device firms require personas for private practice physicians, surgeons, and hospital chief information officers, at the least.
- Buyer personas are imaginary, generalized descriptions of an ideal client. Personas enable marketers to internalize the typical consumer they are seeking to attract, and relate to their clients as real humans.
- A buyer persona gives a specific perception into each target consumer's precise motivations, frustrations, key activities, key issues concerns, and opportunities. This enables marketers to use distinct approaches, messaging, images, and language on the client.
- For instance, "amidst the target audiences for the Georgia Institute of Technology are doctors and hospital CIOs. The organization created six buyer personas to market its electronic health records technology, including Strategic Steve — "Future-oriented CIO of a large urban hospital."
- Creating a buyer persona is provided as the best practice because is been proven by healthcare marketers to offer double-digit returns.
Research Strategy
To provide some best practices for marketing new technologies or new products to healthcare professionals, the team started by reviewing industrial reports, marketing articles, and blogs about these practices. We aimed to locate the top two best practices, the messaging used in them, and how they are used for this purpose. Unfortunately, we could only find general data about the best practices and nothing specific to the messaging. The team also attempted to use the available best practices and then identify any marketing campaigns that have employed them. We aimed to find the messaging used from such campaigns. For example, since using emails is considered a key practice in marketing to healthcare professionals within the industry, there were no available campaigns in the public domain or case studies for us to review in order to identify the messaging incorporated. Due to this limitation, your research team only included the general best practices for marketing new technologies or new products to healthcare professionals.