Today, healthcare companies can face a multitude of challenges—ever-increasing competition, long sales cycles, customers unwilling to do testimonials and pressure to demonstrate return on investment. Saul Marquez believes the key to thriving in this industry lies in effectively utilizing digital marketing to amplify brand awareness, support feet-on-the-street selling efforts and create a flywheel of qualified leads.
With more than 15 years of experience in healthcare sales and marketing, Marquez is the founder of Outcomes Rocket—a full-service healthcare marketing agency that helps founders, leaders and brands maximize impact potential in their target markets. He recommends three strategies healthcare companies can implement to optimize their digital marketing efforts.
1. Understand your digital marketing maturity
Understanding your organization’s digital marketing maturity is essential before diving into data-driven strategies. According to Marquez, digital marketing maturity refers to the level of sophistication and integration of your digital marketing practices and processes. By assessing your company’s position on this curve, you can identify gaps and areas for improvement that can lead to growth.
“Manually evaluating your company’s digital marketing maturity can be time-consuming, and you don’t know what you don’t know,” Marquez says. To help with this, Outcomes Rocket created a framework for founders that simplifies the process. The company’s Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment is a user-friendly and efficient assessment that guides healthcare companies through targeted questions about their marketing strategy and performance. The founder adds that it’s a quick and comprehensive evaluation that allows you to implement informed, data-driven digital marketing strategies for revenue growth.
2. Don’t compete; dominate the market segment
From Marquez’s perspective, healthcare companies like Medtronic, Epic and ExactSciences don’t just compete; they dominate the industry, setting standards by implementing innovative techniques, utilizing advanced technology and prioritizing the needs of clients, patients and partners. But the founder believes that any business can lead in its niche—and you don’t have to be a billion-dollar publicly traded company to do it.
“Large companies that dominate also have lots of bureaucracy and red tape that slows down innovation,” Marquez says. “The ecosystem encourages niche domination, and this becomes the playing field for strategic acquisition of the players that do it right.” To accomplish this, he suggests taking these actions:
Clearly define your niche
- Identify and understand the unique parameters of your market segment.
- Offer educational resources to help your customers and prospects understand your niche.
- Create programs and opportunities for them to find quick wins so they believe in what you’re doing.
Utilize data-driven strategies
- Adopt new approaches to interacting with customers, such as analyzing information from Customer Relationship Management web session recordings and soliciting feedback.
- Collaborate with conference organizers, associations and other market research partners to gain data-backed insights you can leverage to keep innovating and stay ahead.
- Gather data from reviews, social media and web analytics to gain a holistic understanding of your market.
3. Measure and adjust campaigns in real time
Immediate feedback from analytics platforms allows healthcare marketers to adjust their strategies on the fly—helping campaigns stay on track and avoid unnecessary ad spend or resource allocation toward content that’s not hitting targets. Marquez recommends these tips to improve your tracking and reporting:
- Measure traffic to your website and dig deep into the analytics, looking at factors like landing page, geography, time on session and next-page behavior. With session recording software, understand on-page behaviors so you can optimize the site for conversions, and be sure to track the visitor-to-lead ratio.
- Use Urchin Tracking Module codes to help you understand where your traffic and leads are coming from. With the data you get from these UTMs, you can figure out where to double down, where to adjust your A/B testing and what efforts to eliminate.
- When measuring earned media, take a look at the domain authority and traffic to the sites you get placements on and track the ad equivalent value of eyeballs on their site. Additionally, promote your earned media and track conversion performance when it’s shared with other content.
Marquez believes implementing these three strategies can enhance the efficiency and impact of healthcare digital marketing campaigns. He and the Outcomes Rocket team aim to help healthcare marketers navigate the complexities of the digital landscape and deliver significant results.
