Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Marketing is changing faster than medical device manufacturers can set plans. Despite the sophisticated networks of associations and degrees of certification, the Google ecosystem is a great equalizer of product discovery. So, how do you market a new medical device in this environment?
There was a model in place to reach healthcare providers, administrators, and payers. It went like this:
Build a website.
Attract people with placement in search rankings.
Support the brand discovery with ads.
Support the brand with social media.
Capture and nurture leads with email and calls.
In the era of AI content, however, the ecosystem for being discovered is different. And there’s a major risk of doing a lot of things “you should be doing” even if they don’t make sense as part of a larger strategy.
Pivoting from Hunting to Farming
Our approach shifts from “hunting” to “farming.” In this analogy, hunting represents the effort to earn search engine placement by starting with anonymous information and gradually connecting it to real people. The work—creating content, building links, and ensuring fast-loading pages—is not tied to a specific company or prospect. Instead, the focus is on laying the groundwork first to attract visitors, and then turning those visitors into identifiable leads.
In the era of AI content, it’s good to start with a blank page and build up from there. In building up from nothing for sophisticated B2B campaigns, we find that it follows a farming model. We get the identity of the prospects first, then we surround them with resources to help them convert. Like light, fertilizer, and rain, we add content, community, and connection.
In this farming model, tactics could look like this:
Build a solid landing page for the offer that educates first, then converts.
Identify the prospects by name, email, phone, and URL.
Contact them directly with a cold email series, offering valuable content.
Contact them directly with cold calls, highlighting the content (“We shared a report we created. It’s free and in your inbox. Would love to know if you find it helpful.”)
Drop your data into a mailer and hit them with postcards with a QR code to your landing page.
Invite those people to webinars to educate them on the product.
Write a letter and put it in an envelope with a copy of your landing page reformatted as a short PDF with a QR code to learn more.
Retarget this group as an audience with retargeting ads.
Overlap search ads with social ads where geo-fencing or industry demographics make it possible to reach the right people.
Capture emails on the lander and support the offer with more content.
Then, call with the ask.
Notice how flat this structure is? It’s totally different. By starting with the right people and working outward, you have options for which tactics to use and can experiment more directly.
Understand the Buyer Landscape
Who is the real decision maker to buy your product? Are you really trying to reach everyone around an issue, or do you want to reach a subset of physicians, procurement, finance, IT, or C-suites? With targeted outreach, more is not better. More precise is better. The best exercise to go through is to list the pain points your product helps or solves, and determine who feels that pain. If it saves money, that’s Finance. If it helps patients recover faster, talk to the doctors.
Clearly, any new purchase involves a number of stakeholders in a care group. But your door-opener conversations in the era of “everything, everywhere, all at once” are going to be more effective with a subset of that entire group.
Build a Clear, Evidence-Based Value Proposition
Next, it’s important to remember that education is selling. You know who your audience is and the pain points that will appeal to them. Go deep on showing clinical outcomes, cost savings, and workflow efficiency to that group. Develop a bank of data, case studies, and regulatory credentials, such as FDA clearance and purchases by others. This content will help you create a killer landing page, and it will be the well you draw from to highlight and call out key points during your outreach tactics.
Develop a Multi-Channel Marketing Plan
Website: Even in a post-hunting marketing model, it’s good to be findable, so adding your offer to your website is a good start. As you reach out to your audience of known prospects, they will Google it. Being found easily in these searches is a good affirmation of what you send them. This page can be the same page you use as your landing page. Pro tip: a URL used in your cold outreach content can be short and related to the specific offer, and you can have any visits to that URL redirect to your product page.
Email: Collect email addresses on your landing page with an opt-in option to receive gated content. This tactic is good where there is product information you want to share to the right people but not put online, like pricing and maintenance schedule costs.
Social Media: Round out the affirmation of what you are selling by including it in recent social content. For those “checking out” who are contacting them, this is an affirmation of a professional identity.
Leverage Key Opinion Leaders and Peer Influence
For new products, clinical validation is needed. This can be started with early adopters and expanded with industry opinion leaders. But, in this farming mode, this is not content that just exists somewhere; rather, it is content you use to pepper your prospect data set with key nuggets to motivate them to action. Testimonials are essential and should be added to your landing page as they come in.
Address Common Barriers to Adoption
Today, people spend much more time self-educating. In the past, a salesperson might spend hours walking a doctor through a product, nervously hoping to keep their attention. Now, with just a bit of outreach to make them aware of a new advancement in care delivery, prospects will take it upon themselves to explore further. Strong “farming” content supports this process—resources like data sheets on training, integration, cost, and reimbursement, along with whitepapers and best-practice guides for implementation.
Master the New Era of Medical Device Marketing
Marketing new medical tech in a world of information overload requires clarity, credibility, and precision. With the tactics of farming in your tool kit, you can take a more elegant approach to marketing. If you need help getting your dataset to a level of usability, check with us—we do this every day.
