When it comes to the sales process, context is crucial for success. The same message can land several different ways depending on where, how, and how often it is presented. Selling to prospects in person, like the medical device industry and many others do consistently, addresses some of these highly valuable contextual points, but not all.
Today, prospects need higher accessibility and familiarity to take action. It takes seven touches, in fact, for a message to be internalized. They need to be exposed to your brand’s value points and important updates without exiting their current context, i.e., browsing online.Finally, in the same way that your clients’ patients look them up online before a visit, your clients will examine your online presence before deciding to engage with you. This is especially true in the post-COVID world, where face-to-face meetings are much less frequent.
This is why delivering your messages online, a space where prospects spend hours a day working, researching and engaging with others, is the right way to establish and nurture relationships with prospective users, generate interest, provide information, and initiate the sales process.
Don’t believe me yet? Here’s a stat that strengthens the argument for a renewed focus on your digital practice – 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete outside of any interaction with a sales representative.That is only going to increase as rep access declines in our “new normal.”
Makes Sense, But How?
Every company under the sun has a website. Many have a page on LinkedIn, an account on Twitter and YouTube, and maybe even a Facebook account (doctors scroll through social media, too!) Isn’t that enough?
Unfortunately, No.
In order for a digital outreach campaign to work with, and not against, your sales team’s efforts, it has to provide the doctors you are targeting with concrete, actionable information beyond a generic tagline or two sentences of ad copy. It’s got to reach them where and when they want to be reached with the content they want to consume. Oh, and it has to develop as they engage with the content. Good marketers see the interaction online for what it is – a digital conversation. If the various aspects of the digital experience don’t mesh together correctly, you won’t get the result you are looking for. In fact, you may actually harm your brand if things aren’t coherent.
The right approach to connecting with medical prospects online involves a series of micro-sites providing rich, engaging, relevant content and an organized approach to bring prospects to those sites. If the micro-site is the space where you want to talk to the doctor, programmatic display ads, social media ad campaigns, and email campaigns are the doors into that place.
Programmatic Display Ads
These include text, image, and/or video-based ads that appear above (banners), around, or within the content on web pages all over theInternet. The publisher’s goal is to match their message with the most relevant prospects by publishing their ads on the most relevant sites. Targeting in this way is as important, if not more important, to the display ad than the content itself.
In the case of medical device suppliers, who target a relatively small, specialized clientele, we use programmatic display ads to bring highly targeted doctors to those informative micro-sites that introduce the product, build rapport, and generate interest.
Social Media
Social media ad campaigns are a highly adaptable strategy for building brand awareness, sending targeted prospects through your funnel, and ultimately, driving sales. Where other outreach methods are limited to the content of a single ad and the audience of a pre-determined website (or several), social media posts can provide a broader and more compelling series of messages across multiple posts. We can reach hyper-targeted sub-groups of social media users, drive them to our content-rich micro-sites, and sharply increase a company’s online visibility for sustainable growth.
Email Marketing
Without an email marketing campaign, prospects who don’t navigate all the way through your funnel (to set up a sales call, in our case)are lost. By supplementing display and social media ad campaigns with email marketing, you can cultivate an audience of “warm” prospects.
This is your “second chance” to provide more helpful information, build awareness with these prospects, and send them to the content-rich microsite with a clearer understanding of your offerings.
It All Comes Through the Micro-sites
Up until this point, we’ve established micro-sites as the end goal for all of our highly targeted ad channels, but why are they so important?In our case, they provide an opportunity to deliver highly specific messages that a main website’s copy is too broad to address. They speak directly to the prospects about your product. Micro-sites can be built and re-purposed in much less time than a larger site, and they yield clear and actionable results regarding each prospect’s interaction with the product. It is because of these micro-sites that Jairus, our micro-marketing sales enablement platform, is capable of actively shaping and responding to each prospect’s digital conversation with the content.
With the help of compelling copy and design, Jairus’s outreach channels (programmatic display ads, social media postings and email marketing)are instrumental in both driving traffic to these micro-sites and increasing brand awareness in their own right. When utilized correctly, Jairus will broaden the mouth of the funnel without sacrificing conversion.
Context, Remember?
The Coronavirus outbreak may have heightened the need for digital outreach in the medical device market, but this need will persist long after the quarantine ends. Healthcare consumers will continue to learn, connect, research new products and make purchasing decisions online. They will conduct a significant portion of their business within this environment, and will therefore be in the mindset to consider and follow through on purchasing decisions online. Properly leveraging this opportunity will directly translate to greater reach, revenue, and long-term growth for your medical device company.