B2B healthcare marketing has changed more in the last two years than it has in the last ten, and the pace is likely to accelerate. Marketers will need to start rethinking the big picture.
Innovations in artificial intelligence are the most obvious example of the changing landscape, but other trends point to the changing relationship between Marketing and Sales as well.
Here is a quick rundown of trends we are seeing.
1. B2B Healthcare Needs Account-Based Marketing
Marketing has become so intrusive and ever-present in the lives of physicians and healthcare admins that “traditional digital marketing” channels are becoming less effective.
Marketing and sales teams have been conditioned to push out content, advertising, and cold outreach at scale, and the results are declining. Even the most qualified leads are often lukewarm and avoid serious consideration to solving a business challenge.
Account-based marketing addresses these problems with smart data collection and personalization.
The first step is defining your ideal buyer profile, including the attributes and behaviors that make a clinic, hospital, or other healthcare organization the right fit for your company. Then, you can build a target account list to focus your marketing and sales activities on, prioritized in real-time by using engagement and buying intent signals.
When you focus on organizations most likely to buy from you – especially the ones who show signs they are in the market to purchase a product or service like yours – and deliver personalized experiences to key stakeholders, you will achieve far greater results.
As a side benefit, you may find Sales and Marketing can work together as well, which will blow the minds of your senior leadership.
“Marketing teams have gotten comfortable with the idea their job ends when they hand off a qualified lead to Sales. It’s time we retire that notion.“
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Offers Great Advantages and Some Risks
AI is tricky in today’s business world. On one hand, it is transforming healthcare marketing on many levels, but it can also sabotage your results when it’s not used correctly.
Some of most common use cases include:
Analyzing and Interpreting Data
Automated data analysis is one thing AI excels at. You can use it to quickly identify trends, attributes, and behaviors among your target buyers in healthcare. This information can help you make “semi-educated” decisions about campaign optimization, sales engagement, and even product development.
I used the term “semi-educated” because you have to take any insights you get from AI with a grain of salt unless the information can be verified.
By the same token, you can use AI to quickly segment audiences based on your ideal buyer profile and use those segments to create personalized communications.
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Predictive Data
If there’s one thing AI is good at, it’s harnessing historical trends and summarizing them to predict future behaviors among clinical decision-makers. It can also be used for operational purposes as well, optimizing inventory and predicting utilization rates.
Marketing and Sales Automation
AI controls can recognize trigger events and initiate automated communications or data management in your CRM, saving you the step of enrolling healthcare contacts manually.
For all the benefits of AI, the drawbacks are also well documented.
First, AI tools are a serious data privacy risk, especially when it comes to GDPR and HIPPA compliance.
Make sure your team follows a protocol that ensures any protected health information (PHI) is not used in your marketing tech stack, especially AI tools.
Content creation is another problem area.
No matter how tempting it is to ask ChatGPT or your app du jour to write that blog article or email, don’t do it unless you are willing to tear them apart, remove the nonsense and plagiarism, and create something valuable people can learn from.
In our experience, AI is best used for brainstorming ideas and generating outlines for content. Using it to create content for you will not get the results you are looking for. Instead, it will only add to the noise online and ensure your content goes ignored.
Related Topic: Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy for B2B Healthcare in 5 Steps
Healthcare Marketers Need to Support the Entire Sales Journey
Over the years, marketing teams have gotten comfortable with the idea their job ends when they hand off a qualified lead to Sales.
It’s time we retire that mistaken notion, especially in complex selling environments like B2B healthcare.
Marketing and Sales are responsible for growth, and that means goals are not achieved for either until the revenue gap is closed.
Now, I want to qualify that statement by saying I know first-hand how overworked marketing teams are today. Senior managers must find ways to remove time-consuming tasks from their plate to allow for hands-on support as deals move through the pipeline.
What role should Marketing play beyond demand generation? Here are a few ways.
- Speeding Up Connections – Marketers can set up automated 1:1 sales sequences that help salespeople book discovery calls faster. One easy step is to embed a meeting calendar where prospects can select a time to meet right on the “thank you page” they go to after filling out a sales consultation form.
- Personalized Buyer Experiences – Marketing should have a vast reserve of great educational content for generating demand. They can also prepare assets to help healthcare buyers in the consideration phase of a purchase, which they can put to good use in 1:1 communications with the prospect. An example may be a detailed overview of your onboarding process, including costs and the timeline.
- Optimizing Deal Velocity – Using an advanced marketing platform like HubSpot, your marketing team can collect data from various sales pipeline stages, identifying areas where deals tend to slow down or die. By isolating weak areas in the process, Marketing and Sales can collaborate on ways to test new approaches and improve outcomes.
The proliferation of AI-based tools will increase the number of tasks humans no longer need to execute on their own. At the same time, collecting and managing data while staying compliant will be equally important. And lastly, marketers will need to work with sales reps to deliver hyper-personalized, valuable experiences to prospects until they land in the “Closed Won” column.
B2B healthcare marketers who take these steps now will be much better positioned for growth in the months ahead.
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