The MedTech Marketing arena has evolved over the years and like so many other industries is facing the transition from offline, outbound marketing practices of the past to the online practices of the here-and-now. Should it be a full transition or just a partial one? Are the people who are most likely to become leads and customers spending their time online or not? Should the full range of product and service information you offer be presented on the web or should everything only come from direct contact with your sales representatives?
Here are the 3 things your MedTech Marketing approach must have in order to answer these questions and drive strategy to get more leads and sales:
A marketing inventory to examine the tools, content and resources at your disposal. You'll need to see what you have and how to adapt it for use as part of a new strategy aimed at the online marketing environment of attracting qualified leads to you. It will involve shifting your thinking away from the old school method of hunting for them with a variety of outbound tactics. You will need to learn how inbound marketing works, objectively looking at written copy you have with an eye toward using it on your website, as marketing content offers for people to download and for sharing through social media channels, lead nurturing email campaigns etc.
A clear set of business goals that are realistic, attainable and measurable. Most businesses have goals but when it comes to involving online marketing efforts for reaching them the lines get fuzzy. Often the approach is vastly over simplified, the goals are based more on fantasy than real data and tend to lack a realistic strategy for making them work in the online environment. Another common mistake is getting caught up in a wide range of online analytics, simply because they are there, that really don't contribute to moving the needle toward meeting actual business goals. Mostly it will be a matter of setting priorities and layering in activities over time to deal with every area that needs attention.
A well thought out inbound marketing plan that uses the marketing assets on hand, paves the way for those that are in the works and doesn't employ tactics that actually do harm. When it comes to online marketing there are many moving parts to assemble and they work best when they are all contributing to an overall strategy. To be successful it should take advantage of the inbound marketing methodology to attract qualified traffic to your website, convert traffic to qualified leads by offering content that provides enough value that people are willing to further engage with you in order to get it. Once you have a solid list of engaged, qualified leads, close the sales by bringing people down a logical buyer's journey path in stages. The final step is aimed at customer retention. Your comprehensive online set of tools in play to provide access to everything people need to get the most from your product or service long after the sale. All of this magic happens along online paths; blog articles to attract qualfied site visitors, a user friendly website, relevant social media messaging, nurturing email campaigns, customer relationship management tools and so on.
This isn't a long list but it is a demanding one and usually results in complete confusion in figuring out where to start and how to fold in the pieces to build a long term marketing strategy while today's goals get attention. MedTech marketing seems particularly challenging when so many different prospect and client needs might be in play all at one time. The whole notion of trying to create the online content that meets each of them, individually, seems totally out of reach.
Since a website is the lynchpin of the inbound marketing effort the best place to start to get some immediate traction for meeting your goals is to make sure it rises to the quality standards dictated by the search engines. Actually, Google is the primary point of focus since most online searches for information start on their website. The downside is the seemingly endless range of opinions and misinformation to sift through for deciding how to make sure your website will be presented in search results. SEO (search engine optimization) is not the practice of running through a laundry list of tasks aimed at trying to rank on page one of search results. That is completely outdated thinking and what's more can actually cause serious harm.
The first step is arming yourself with some basic information about SEO, what's outdated and what the current standards are so you are prepared to find a path for getting your website up to snuff without wasting time, money and effort following outdated methods. Getting your website set up correctly will pay off in big ways as more of your inbound marketing plans fall into place.
