There are two challenges that characterize MedTech marketing. The first is to educate patients and healthcare providers, and the second is to position oneself as a legitimate actor in a highly-regulated industry. Current strategies suffer from serious bottlenecks that exacerbate costs and strongly limit the speed at which MedTech companies can grow. Presscast.io offers a viable alternative.
Marketing on Two Fronts
The challenges faced by MedTech marketers are unique because MedTech itself is a unique industry. Unlike most industries, MedTech companies are fundamentally B2B2C plays with two distinct audiences: healthcare providers (the second “B”) and patient-consumers (the “C”). In the healthcare industry, providers play the role of gatekeeper to the patient, ensuring that products and services passed down to the patient pass muster.
Selling to these gatekeepers is fundamentally an exercise in trust-building in which the marketing team must fully appreciate the reputational and regulatory stakes. We’ll say it again: for healthcare providers, buying into MedTech plays involves a great deal of risk, so the marketing & sales process must not only articulate a value proposition, but also prove their competence. To this end, successful MedTech companies invest heavily in soft-touch marketing and Public Relations.
To wit, MedTech companies spend the bulk of their SG&A expenses on (A) explaining their value proposition and (B) signalling a thorough understanding of the legal, technical and social liabilities that characterize the industry. Doing so legitimises the MedTech companies in the eyes of these educated partners, and in the ideal case converts them into powerful allies for closing deals.
Where patient-consumers are concerned, the challenge involves creating demand. MedTech companies need to market to this group by highlighting the value proposition and focusing on the benefits of a provider that offers their product. Such operations more closely resemble traditional marketing, but it’s nevertheless fraught with its own product-specific complexities.
Content Marketing and Programmatic Ads: Two Stones and no Bird
The nature of the MedTech industry means that a programmatic advertising strategy is simply off the table. Regulations and the importance of legitimacy in the eyes of expert providers results in programmatic ads being ineffective at best and damaging at worst.
It is therefore unsurprising that MedTech CMOs depend on content marketing to achieve their goals of educating their audiences and signalling professional legitimacy. Longform content such review articles and whitepapers are popular approaches, but execution is critical; the content creation process needs to involve both the marketing team and individuals with intimate understanding of the product (potentially even C-Level officers). A separate content strategy is also needed when marketing to consumers, which exponentially increases the complexity, sluggishness and cost of the process.
While content marketing is the clear winner (if not the only serious contender), the complexities of MedTech throw quite a wrench in the works. A better approach is sorely needed.
Presscast to the Rescue
Presscast is uniquely suited to service tricky industries like MedTech. It’s innovative process allows CMOs to execute relevant strategies immediately:
- The expertise is already out there, instead of developing all content from inception, Presscast enables you to leverage content from qualified experts that already exists.
- Because marketers no longer bogged down by the editorial process, they can reach both healthcare providers and patients with ease and agility. They need only cherry pick the content that satisfies each audience.
- By using other publishers’ content, you can develop legitimacy through third-party endorsements, after all “your reputation is what others think of you”