Medical device marketing is a specific marketing category that highlights and promotes medical devices which aid in vast healthcare solutions. The devices range from bare essentials such as bandages to highly modified ones like surgical robots and MRI machines.
The global market value for the medical device industry will expand to $671.49 billion by 2027. The popularity and significant demand for high-tech medical devices for advanced diagnosis, virtual treatment, and user care have skyrocketed.
Considering the emerging demands, medical device manufacturers are excited to bring their products in the market but face many challenges while doing so. High development cost, regulatory issues, increased demand satisfaction, and high competition makes these device manufacturers struggle to market their products.
With a well-vetted medical device marketing strategies, businesses can overcome these challenges and increase brand awareness. It will help in capturing their potential client’s interest and represent as a well establish industry leader.
Let us walk you through a overview of medical device marketing strategies and offer solutions to address associated challenges in this blog.
8 Actionable Tactics to Elevate Your Medical Device Marketing
Though every medical device is unique, medical device companies should follow a systematic approach to market their products. Follow the below tactics that will aid in getting potential prospect’s attention and convert them into your clientele.
Conducting Market Research and Identifying Target Prospects
The first step in any effective marketing strategy is identifying a target client to promote your medical device. Analyzing your target patron will help in developing the suitable device.
Businesses should conduct extensive market research and analysis through:
- Customer surveys
- Feedback forms
- Stakeholder interviews
The primary consideration is determining who will benefit the most from their services.
In this case, the target clients can include doctors, nurses, physicians, surgeons, medical researchers, and other medical executives. However, narrowing down this segment can help ventures find the right prospects.
Suppose a company sells high-tech MRI scanners. Neurologists and neuroscientists would be the ideal prospects. Market research enables businesses to learn what features these doctors need in their medical devices.
Market research can also help construct customer profiles with the following details –
- Expertise or professional domain
- Equipment or apparatus they use daily
- Years of experience
- Associated medical institutes
Pro tip: Expand your market research to include secondary b2b audiences that may influence the key decision-makers. In the present case, this may consist of office admins, hospital management professionals, and nurse practitioners. Ensure your strategy aligns with the requirements of these individuals as well.
Better Engagement with the Healthcare Professionals (HCPs)
Identifying and comprehending your targeted patron’s requirements is key to developing a customer-user rapport for marketing your medical devices. List your client’s pain points in this scenario; they are HCPs. Healthcare professionals are the key elements of healthcare industry. Create a solid HCP marketing strategy personalized to their needs.
Understand their daily challenges and persuade them to be interested in your developed products via marketing campaigns. Influence their decision makers and foster a long-lasting business relationship.
Opt for Digital Techniques
Digital marketing methods are also vital to enhance medical device marketing outcomes. The first step can be website optimization to boost online presence.
You may already have a website or have decided to begin working on one. Here are some things you should ensure:
- Enhance the user-friendliness and seamlessness of the website.
- Ensure all category pages and product pages are neatly organized.
- Conduct extensive keyword research and embed it within the web content.
- Check whether your page has a swift loading time and straightforward navigability.
- Highlight pricing pages and special offers to attract visitors.
Seek an Edge over Your Business Competitors
With numerous market competitors, it is crucial to formulate a marketing strategy that will highlight your brand and make you stand out. Corporations can represent their brand as industry experts for their targeted crowd by emphasizing build quality, user care results, and technological advancement.
Staying Updated With the Latest Technology in the Industry
The growth that is being witnessed in medical technology is exhilarating. HCPs must stay updated with modern technology advancements to deliver superior user care. Developing your marketing strategy with a similar intent to educate and emphasize coverage of the latest updates can help your business gain the trust of your target patron. This speaks volumes for your corporation in the medical industry.
Developing a Positive Reputation and Impression
‘A brand is what business does; reputation is what people remember’ – Red Rubin
Working on establishing a strong brand image can get your foot in the door amidst the vast domain of the medical healthcare industry. Staying updated with the latest ongoing trends in the industry can attract the attention of the decision-makers to consider your brand as a reliable corporation for developing any future business partnership. Obtaining credibility across various distributors, vendors, decision-makers, and healthcare experts is essential for developing a positive resemblance in the cut-throat market.
Concoct an Effective Content Marketing Plan
Over 70,000 users search for healthcare information on search engines every minute. Every business related to the healthcare industry needs to develop a strong content strategy to achieve higher SERP rankings in the search engines. Operating marketers must lay out a strategic plan and curate content based on the targeted client’s interests to obtain relevancy and interest from the targeted crowd.
Suppose your business sells and distributes medical lab equipment. In that case, you can produce an SEO-optimized blog on the trends of advanced lab equipment—present user manual guides of the technology, techniques involved in developing the product, and best practices. Including a case study on your websites and social media handles can strengthen your marketing strategy for marketing a medical device.
Embrace Social Media Platform Usage
The emergence of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook has strengthened marketers’ arsenals for developing positive brand images in their user base’s vision. Displaying content on social media platforms can elevate the brand’s online presence via infographics, carousels, video posts of upcoming products, and more.
Businesses can leverage social media platforms by accessing data metrics and other factors, including the impression rate, engagement percentage, comments, and likes count. Furthermore, extract the data results by conducting polls and proceed according to the demand from the user base. Modify your strategic approach based on your audience’s preferences and witness the magic of wonders in your company’s online presence.
Achieve Visibility in Conferences and Tradeshows
Businesses often need more brand visibility to pump their sales growth. This creates a sense of distress amongst the users who are still willing to consider your brand for the partnership.
Seeking substantial opportunities in pertinent exhibitions and tradeshows can push your business to enrapture the individual’s interest, prospective leads, and future investors. Brainstorm outside your comfort zone, identify the relevant opportunity, and invest in creative ideas and designs for structuring the booth at the tradeshows to leave a striking first impression. Ensure your experts take on the Q&As effortlessly to demonstrate your product effectively.
Improve Decision-Making through Analytics
Medical device marketing can immensely benefit from data analytics. For instance, after launching a campaign about a new medical device, CRM can offer valuable data about response rate, conversion rate, customer engagement, and ROI.
Businesses can also analyze data from social media, email marketing, and even paid advertising to understand their prospects’ behavior and preferences. Website analytics reports can better organize organic traffic and visitor activity data. Marketers can optimize the website and content by focusing on metrics like pages per session, bounce rate, page view, and traffic source.
Collaborate with Renowned Institutions
When it comes to marketing medical devices, partnering with medical institutions helps improve brand awareness. These collaborations can help small and medium-sized device manufacturers explore the global market. These institutions can function as distribution channels to expand user engagement, assist during product trials, help certify medical devices, and gain compliance approvals.
Challenges Encountered During Marketing of Medical Devices
Medical devices companies face multiple business challenges like compliance issues and technological innovation. Here are some prevalent challenges and some solutions to tackle them.
Managing Regulatory Compliances
Along with tackling market competition, businesses must factor in regulatory compliance requirements. Adhering to the regulations ensures safe, high-quality, and reliable device development.
To illustrate, compliance with the ISO 13485 quality management standard proves that the manufacturer has produced equipment with safe design and adequate testing. However, many companies need to gain proper knowledge about these regulations. Lack of knowledge makes the product unfit for further distribution and directly affects marketing.
Solution –
Device manufacturers must hire employees with sufficient knowledge of regulatory compliance and ensure proper procedure is followed. The manufacturers must conduct relevant workshops for firms still in the initial phases or lacking adequate training.
Adhering to Changing Needs for Innovation
Many traditional device manufacturers need to be more technically advanced. They cannot adopt technologies like IoT and AI to enhance their devices. Modern devices also use patient data to offer better treatment results, which these companies lack.
A lack of proper technical infrastructure and skilled employees limits the innovation of such organizations and hampers their research and development.
Solution –
Manufacturers should look for the services of a technical service provider who can assist in the digital transformation.
The Bottom Line
The global medical device manufacturing industry will continue growing with new clientele requirements. So, businesses need to stay updated about the latest industry trends. They must also adhere to government regulations to avoid compliance issues while executing medical device marketing strategies.
In addition, conducting competitor analysis and in-depth product assessment can refine product quality. However, as the industry grows, the most crucial tactic is staying adaptable and informed.