Healthcare marketers are gearing up for exciting changes in the coming year. Automation and AI will no longer be optional but essential tools, bringing fresh opportunities for growth in B2B healthcare digital marketing.
Embracing automation is not merely a choice — it’s a strategic necessity. This article will explore five key areas where automation and AI can accelerate your goals with B2B healthcare digital marketing, driving efficiency, engagement, and results.
We will explore:
1. Lead Nurturing
2. Lead Qualification
3. Account-based Marketing
4. Data Collection and Analysis
5. Articial Intelligence (AI)
Each of these examples offer unique benefits to B2B healthcare marketers. We’ll explain each in more detail, but first let’s define exactly what marketing automation is.
What Is Marketing Automation in Healthcare?
Marketing automation executes certain marketing tasks without requiring a human touch. These tools are great for creating efficiencies in workflows and standardizing processes.
The most common marketing automation uses include lead nurturing, email marketing, personalized communication, behavioral targeting, and lead qualification and prioritization.
Let’s look at the unique ways these tools enhances
1. Lead Nurturing
Not every lead is “in the market’ when they visit your website.
By creating an automated lead nurturing system, you maximize the potential of qualifying more leads with greater accuracy, increasing your ROI.
Automating lead nurturing workflows can help healthcare B2B marketers deliver timely and relevant messaging to potential buyers at various stages of their journey.
Let’s say you host a webinar on ‘”Telehealth Benefits For Employees.” After the webinar, you could send a sequence of follow-up emails, starting with a downloadable whitepaper on the subject.
A week later, another automated email could offer a special report on “Telehealth Legal Regulations and Compliance,” helping leads understand the landscape better. Finally, a third email could offer a free trial or a demo of your telehealth solution.
Using automation to deliver helpful information and guide leads through the decision-making process, healthcare marketers can boost engagement and grow the sales pipeline.
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2. Lead Qualification
There’s always a bit of healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) tension between Marketing and Sales.
Marketing teams believe Sales should close more leads every month, while Sales thinks closing rates are negatively impacted by the quality of leads they get from Marketing.
We’ve all been there, right?
Lead qualification automation is a great way to solve this dispute.
The first step is to get both teams to agree on an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that sets a clear standard for what type of organization is a good fit.
ICP criteria might include the type of organization, like clinics, hospitals, or private practices; the number of employees they have; the services they offer; and maybe even the software they use.
Once you have an ironclad ICP, you need a thorough audit of all the “sales readiness” of your website. Every company should have easy ways for visitors to express a desire to talk to Sales.
The most common ways of measuring sales readiness include:
- Forms submissions
- Chat conversations
- Number of pages view or emails opened and clicked
- Content conversions
Giving visitors a few options for contacting Sales will increase the number of opportunities to separate good leads from the bad.
These conversion points serve as triggers in automation that analyzes data collected about each lead and determines whether to qualify them for Sales. With a little expertimentation and optimization, you will ensure buyers that meet your ICP criteria reach your sales team only, increasing closing rates and reducing time wasted on bad-fit prospects.
Related Content: 5 Must-Haves In Your Healthcare Marketing Plan
3. Account-based Marketing
Using an Account-based marketing (ABM) approach, healthcare marketers can use automation to present content to specific target companies and contacts.
Start by picking the accounts that match your ICP. These target accounts will become top priorities for Marketing and Sales.
When you personalize your marketing to speak directly to their needs and challenges, you can build relationships with key stakeholders and increase your chances of converting them into customers.
Supported by automated triggers that monitor which accounts are engaging with your campaign assets and how often, you can create a living pipeline that allows teams to quickly reprioritize the prospects they focus on.
For instance, if a lead on your ABM list visits your webpage on healthcare data analytics solutions, your automated system could trigger recommendations for related blog posts, case studies, or even a demo or free trial.
These recommendations keep the prospect engaged and help them to learn, guiding them closer to a buying decision.
4. Data Collection & Analysis
Marketing automation platforms are very good for gathering and presenting data in digestible formats.
These automation tools will help you track how leads respond to your campaigns and inform future marketing efforts.
Examples of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include:
- Website Visitors
- Qualified Leads
- Organic Traffic
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Customer Retentions
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Collecting accurate data gives you a compass—it tells you what’s working and where you might need to make changes. Using automation to make sense of the data, healthcare marketers can make smarter decisions, fine-tune their strategies, and ensure their marketing stays in sync with the challenges and goals of buyers.
5. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The primary value of AI is the ability to analyze vast data sets efficiently.
It enables detailed customer profiling by examining digital footprints, predicting future behaviors, and personalizing communications automatically.
AI has taken the world by storm in a very short time, resulting in an explosion of options in the marketplace. Luckily, there are platforms out there, like Hubspot, that are building AI into their suite of tools, making it easy to find efficiencies without spending time shopping around for various apps.
Here are some areas to focus on as you refine your AI tactics for next year.
Lead scoring
AI can crunch data and help teams determine which opportunities are more likely to close. It can also streamline lead nurturing by providing automated touch points before buyers engage with sales, culminating in higher conversion rates.
Predictive Analytics
AI enables marketers to proactively analyze and anticipate customer behavior and trends, providing insights for adjusting marketing strategies. This predictive data is particularly valuable in timing decisions, such as determining the optimal moment for launching new products.
Channel Optimization
There many ways buyers might reach your website, including organic search, social media, email, advertising, and other channels.
AI aids in optimization by helping you identify which channels are most productive for lead generation. This data-driven approach enables marketers to allocate resources wisely, ensuring time and funds are invested in channels yielding the greatest ROI.
Customer Experience
In B2B marketing automation, AI-powered chatbots and service hubs play a pivotal role in the customer experience.
Using instant responses, chatbots serve customers better while conserving time and resources. They excel at addressing common queries, suggesting products, and expediting order processing,.
Marketing automation has played an important role in B2B healthcare growth strategies for years., and the rapid advancement of AI will accelerate the efficiencies these tools offer in the future.
Automating personalized content delivery, optimizing data collection and analysis, and qualifying leads with greater accuracy will enable healthcare brands to reach new horizons.
These advancements are streamlining processes and elevating customer experiences, making B2B healthcare products and services more accessible, personalized, and efficient. Embracing these automation tactics is no longer an option but a strategic necessity for healthcare digital marketers looking to thrive in the years to come.
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