As a healthcare marketer your primary target would be connecting with relevant healthcare professionals, i.e., HCPs. Reaching out to HCPs is essential, as they are the key personnel in any healthcare facility. To promote your business to HCPs and discuss what you offer in detail, you need a solid marketing strategy tailored to suit the industry’s requirements.
Be it useful medical content or a telemedicine platform, catering to HCPs’ needs is the sure–fire way to direct their attention toward your product or service. Their dynamic functions include diagnosis, treatment, and analysis of health complications. So, a systematic marketing strategy is essential to organize these efforts and to cover all bases.
This blog will delve into everything you need to know about creating an HCP marketing strategy – audience segmentation, personalization, content development, and so on.
Why is HCP Marketing Important?
HCP marketing refers to promoting products and services catering to the needs and requirements of medical professionals, such as medical equipment, telehealth services, and diagnostic and treatment assistance.
The specialty drug pipeline under global healthcare marketing is expected to grow at 8% per year till 2025. In such a competitive environment, conducting successful HCP marketing initiatives can be challenging, given the diverse roles within the industry. For instance, a doctor might require medical equipment for executing a surgery. But, nurses might need access to medicines and services to track patient information.
Here’s the thing – healthcare personnel are short on time and are looking for convenient services. They prefer easy access to the necessary information to assist their diagnosis and treatment. So, your HCP marketing tactics must be fine-tuned to align with their time constraints.
Read on to learn how to craft an effective marketing strategy to capture their attention!
Building an Effective HCP Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is successful only when it understands and considers the audience’s pain points. An HCP marketing strategy is no different. It must focus on healthcare professionals’ pain points and requirements. It must also be multi–pronged, such that it helps physicians or nurses who improve patient care and aids stakeholders in medical institutions who are key decision–makers.
Let’s break this strategy down to multiple steps for proper execution:
1. Create an HCP Persona
Before you launch a marketing strategy, understand who your target prospects are. The first step, therefore, is to create an ideal customer profile of the healthcare professionals (HCP). For this, conduct extensive research and analysis to answer these fundamental questions:
- What is the professional’s area of expertise and current job title?
- How long have they been working in the industry?
- What type of responsibilities or designations have they handled?
- What are the various technologies and equipment they need daily?
- What does their patient base look like?
Physician segmentation and targeting are crucial aspects of HCP marketing as they enable healthcare marketers to categorize physicians per their preferences, specializations, and patient demographics. You will also require information about their gender, geographical location, age, interests, and lifestyle. With this data, create accurate personas that’ll help identify some characteristics; utilize these to identify potential requirements and needs and pitch your services at the right time.
This allows you to take a more personalized marketing approach and create video content for your segmented audience. Many physicians now use online platforms for customer interaction and healthcare education. Therefore, businesses can take this opportunity to engage their segmented audience via online video content.
2. Categorizing Your Ideal Audience
Identify the ideal target audience after gathering sufficient information about HCPs and building personas. List the prospects who might require your product(s)/service(s) the most.
Remember that the intention is to help healthcare or general practitioners diagnose and treat patients properly. So, start by focusing on how your offers can help further this goal. For example, if you provide sanitary products for elderly patients, you can market them to geriatricians. The target audience includes gerontological nurses, physicians, and geriatric dieticians.
Moreover, if you wish to target only top-level healthcare professionals, you need to strategize accordingly to bypass the mediators. A healthcare email list with updated contacts can help you get through this step seamlessly.
3. Offer On-demand Content
7% of all Google searches are about health topics, with 70,000 healthcare searches every minute. So, creating brand or product-specific content for doctors and medical executives is essential.
Tailored content is one of the most effective ways to attract healthcare practitioners to your brand. Thus, your HCP marketing ideas must be based on tailored content in different formats across various channels.
Follow these strategies for effective content creation:
- Publish informative blog posts about topics related to your brand.
- Write effective product descriptions on the main website.
- Create infographics about industry trends and statistics.
- Develop e-books and whitepapers for educating healthcare professionals.
- Send newsletters to professionals registered on your website for brand promotion.
4. Participate in Trade Shows and Corporate Events
Attending corporate events and trade shows is a great way to connect with your target audience in real-time and make deeper professional connections. Hence, including these physical events in the HCP marketing strategy can be pivotal.
While doing so, preparing your team to highlight the business at the event is also important.
- If it’s a trade show or corporate exhibition, create brochures describing your product’s benefits
- Your physical booth must have attractive visuals describing features of your product or service.
- Offer branded merchandise to professionals visiting the booth.
Have a solid digital presentation ready to describe your offers for corporate events like seminars. This will place your brand in front of interested healthcare professionals and key decision-makers.
5. Choose the Appropriate Marketing Channel
You must select the ideal marketing platform to maximize your brand awareness and outreach. If you are a new brand, experimenting with different channels can give you better visibility and popularity. Take a look at these channels below:
- Email Marketing: This marketing strategy offers multiple advantages for pharmaceutical companies, including cost-effectiveness and personalized communication. It can also help businesses build stronger and long-lasting professional relationships with multiple clients at the same time.
- Social Media Marketing: Social media channels are a great way to put your brand in front of thousands of prospects in a short period. Increase your engagement by posting brand-related videos on social media websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can also create polls and interact with your users to increase engagement.
Both strategies will provide you with valuable data and insights about user engagement. But there is a more efficient way where you can optimize your budget and get the highest ROI while creating consistent content – marketing automation.
Marketing automation streamlines the content distribution process and ensures that all your content reaches the right audience at the right time. It can help you eliminate any flaws in your HCP marketing strategy and avoid information overload at your client’s end. With optimized email and social media timing, you can hit your marketing targets while finding an effective way to leverage the most out of any social media algorithm.
Moreover, you can also make more personalized and data-driven decisions, making it easy to target your leads from multiple channels. Automation also enables marketers to analyze their results and further refine their marketing strategy.
This way, you can create a strategy to take data driven decisions and apply them by using automation. By doing so, you can compare the engagement and conversions received from all channels.
The Bottom Line
A fail-proof HCP marketing strategy is possible only through constant evaluation. Track the conversion results obtained from different strategies.
See if the target audience finds your offers valuable and enhance them accordingly. Modify the marketing budget and HCP marketing ideas to suit their needs. You can only connect with a healthcare professional if your brand helps serve patients well.
Send feedback or survey forms to understand the impact of your products on the audience. Improve your services to maintain satisfaction levels and boost your brand.