Expanding Your HealthTech Business in the Digital Healthcare Market

The major goal of every healthcare technology CEO or Director is to expand their business in the digital healthcare market. One of the best ways of growing any business is to have an effective marketing and sales strategy. Traditional marketing relied on spilling money into newspaper and magazine ads, and other forms of display advertising. Likewise, conventional sales involved cold-calling and making sales pitches to people who aren’t ready to hear about products and features.

However, in recent years a more effective way of growing in the digital healthcare market is through a new method coined the ‘Inbound Methodology‘. This marketing and sales strategy focuses on attracting prospects online (when they are researching), and converting them to customers using helpful, relevant content and effective nurturing techniques. A recent study by Hubspot revealed that 93% of companies using this Inbound Methodology reported a higher return on investment (ROI).

Here are 7 ways you can expand your business in the digital healthcare market using the Inbound Methodology:

Understand and define your ideal customer

Expanding your digital healthcare market share will require a thorough understanding of your ideal customers. This typically can change a bit as a company evolves and develops its offerings. Take time to create Buyer Personas of your ideal customers. This should be an in-depth exercise, but on a basic level ask yourself the following questions:

· What are their job responsibilities?

· What are their unique goals?

· What are their biggest challenges?

· How do they make decisions?

· Where do they get information?

Once it becomes clear who your healthtech company is targeting, your marketing and sales teams can work together to strategize content to educate and nurture leads accordingly.

Establish clear goals for digital healthcare market growth

If you don’t have a goal, it’s difficult to score. Set clear goals that you would want to achieve within a specific period of time. For example, you could set a target of attracting 300 leads in the next six months. This translates to 50 leads per month and 12-13 leads per week. Similarly, you need to set goals concerning the number of customers you would like to acquire and your desired revenues. Keep track of your progress and make adjustments as necessary.

Create a targeted content strategy to engage

A proper content strategy will help attract visitors to your site and convert them to leads. You need to ensure that the content your marketing and sales team produces is aligned to each stages of the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.

Potential customers at the Awareness stage are just beginning to realize that they have a need or problem. Content at this stage should provide as much information as possible to identify your potential customers’ problems with little or no sales pitches. Blog posts, educational videos and infographics would be appropriate for this stage. A recent State of Marketing study by Hubspot revealed that 92% of companies that blog several times per day acquire customers through their blogs.

Prospects at the Consideration stage are more attuned with their need and are now looking for a solution to the problem they’ve identified. To help them lay out possible solutions, premium content such as eBooks, templates, guides, slideshares and checklists would be appropriate for this stage. You could ask prospects to submit their contact information in exchange for these resources. Continue sending them more helpful information via email as you nurture them towards converting them to customers.

At the Decision stage, prospects have compared their options and are now ready to buy. This is where you can talk about your product or service and show them why they should choose you over others in the digital healthcare market. You can back up your claims using case studies, white papers and reports.

Find the keywords ideal customers are searching for

According to a study by GE Capital Retail Bank, 81% of buyers research online before making a purchasing decision. Optimizing your content for search engines will boost your website’s ranking and thus make you more visible online. Your marketing team should carry out some research to find out which keywords your prospects are using when searching online. These keywords can be included in your page header, page text, meta description, page URL and image alt texts. Just a tip: long-tail keywords that have less competition will enhance your chances of success. However, avoid the temptation to stuff keywords since this could only result in being penalized by the search engines.

Promote your content through the right channels

Having helpful and optimized content will not automatically result in visitors flooding to your website. You will need to promote your content extensively in order to generate traffic. Share links to your blog posts on your social media channels. Premium content such as eBooks and white papers can be promoted via your email list. Targeted social media advertising can also be a very effective way of promoting your content.

Leverage marketing automation responsibly

According to Hubspot, marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as campaign management, customer data integration and customer segmentation. The use of marketing automation allows processes that would have been carried out manually to be performed more efficiently. You can choose between a wide range of marketing automation platforms including Marketo, MailChimp, GetResponse, Hubspot and Eloqua. Most of these platforms come with great features for Lead Nurturing, website visitor tracking, CRM, social media, and reporting and analytics. Using automation will help streamline your marketing activities, save you valuable time, boost your revenues and increase your digital healthcare market share.

Align your marketing and sales teams

It’s important to produce good content to stand out in the digital healthcare market. It’s also important to strategize effective lead nurturing. Nonetheless, if you have a marketing team and a sales team whose goals and efforts are not aligned with another, you’ll experience some trouble. That’s where ‘smarketing’ comes in. As a director who oversees all activities, it’s recommended that you hold weekly or monthly meetings for your marketing and sales team to help them update each other with new info, discuss the goals and be on the same page overall. Always make sure they are working with each other rather than competing with another by giving incentives that benefit both your team.

The Bottom Line

There you have it: 7 awesome ways you can expand your healthcare technology company. Inbound Marketing and Sales is fairly new, and if you take full advantage of it you will not only be able to scale your business but also have happy workers who collaborate excellently with each other.

We’ve helped many founders and CEOs incorporate Inbound into their marketing and sales procedures. Feel free to request a free strategy session now to help you evaluate your assets and get free insights and suggestions to help you and your team grow your company!