Is HubSpot the right tool to help your healthcare company grow in 2023?
As we all adapt to life in the post-pandemic world, it’s very obvious some changes are here to stay. One of them is the certainty healthcare brands will step up their digital marketing plans and rely less on trade shows for growth in the future.
Many of these companies will likely look at HubSpot as option for lead generation and customer acquisition, but it’s important to remember that HubSpot Marketing and Sales Hubs are nothing more than tools.
How you plan and execute your strategy makes all the difference when it comes to results, and healthcare companies are uniquely well suited for inbound marketing.
Why is HubSpot a Good Solution for Healthcare Marketing?
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing analytics and automation platform that allows you to manage campaigns and track ROI all in one place.
It offers hundreds of integrations and a suite of tools that take the guesswork out of marketing ROI. For perhaps the first time ever, your senior executives can get a clear understanding of how your sales and marketing activities are translating into earned revenue.
The fuel that drives results in HubSpot is content – lots of high quality, educational content that helps your buyers understand and solve their challenges.
This is one reason why HubSpot is often a great fit for healthcare companies, especially ones that serve HCPs. Practitioners are always focused on professional learning, and they respond to high quality content.
Here a few opportunities that will help you create a winning strategy.
1. Create Content Your Competitors Aren’t Touching.
Social Media Examiner just released their SM Marketing Trends for 2022, and one of the most important observations is that companies are still avoiding the basic essentials in marketing, and likely will continue to do so in 2022:
- Most companies are not producing videos, even though they know it’s in their best interest.
- Most business-to-business (B2B) companies are not creating content that talks about the cost of their products and services.
- Most companies have not properly aligned their sales and marketing departments to function as one brain, making their account-based marketing efforts efficient and productive.
Folks, no matter which corner of the healthcare industry you operate in – biotech, equipment, supplements, or services – there is a significant opportunity waiting for you.
When the majority of your competitors are lagging behind – this is your chance to stand out.
Video
The reason most companies are slow to adopt video marketing is they never get past the starting line. They worry their videos won’t look professional enough, or their employees are hesitant about getting on camera.
Advancements in technology have made it easier than ever to create decent looking videos, but that’s beside the point. Obsessing over perfection will hobble your progress with video.
Focus on creating great content your buyers will find valuable. Practice your on-camera delivery and make improvements to your presentation as you go.
Discussing Costs
There is no easier way to boost your website traffic and lead generation than by publishing helpful content about your prices.
Here’s a short case study. One of our clients had almost no online presence when we started working with them 12 months ago. Today, they’ve amassed 104,000 visits, 30-percent of which come from organic searches on Google.
What are the articles driving that increase in traffic? You guessed it. They’re about cost.
This blog post ranks number one on Google search, and has brought in 3,000+ views to date. Companies often resist talking about cost on their websites, but the benefits far outweigh any downsides.
But you can either benefit from the traffic and trust it earns, or you can let your competitors do it.
Sooner or later, they will.
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2. Use Sales Hub to Enhance Results.
Marketing and Sales can no longer no exist as separate entities operating independently of one another.
If your company is using Marketing Hub Professional to attract and qualify leads, your sales team needs Sales Hub to build relationships, increase efficiency, and close more deals.
Giving Sales the ability to create templated email messages and sequences will help them reach more people without sacrificing that personal touch that’s so important today.
You can also store helpful documents the team can use to answer customer questions and track how prospects engage with it.
Lastly, management can use custom reporting to hold reps accountable and track the sales pipeline in real-time.
Aligning your sales and marketing tools is a good idea – no question about it. The bigger question is whether your sales and marketing teams can communicate and strategize together.
Healthcare companies are often multi-layered organizations, which makes it challenging to keep everyone rowing in the same direction.
When Sales and Marketing commit to meeting several times a week to share insights with each other (no finger pointing or complaining allowed), you’d be surprised at the impact it has on results.
This convergence of strategy and communication helps reduce friction and improve account-based sales initiatives, which is increasingly necessary for success today.
Related Content: 3 Things We Wish We Knew Before Starting HubSpot Onboarding
3. Use Sales Video to Increase Engagement.
I mentioned above how many healthcare brands are not taking advantage of video in their marketing. I’m willing to bet even fewer are using it for sales.
Speaking for our agency, I can tell you video played a vital role in closing at least 80 percent of the accounts we’ve closed in the last two years. Video works. And it’s super easy to use in a sales email context. Here is how to do it with HubSpot:
- Download and install the Vidyard GoVideo Chrome Extension
- Click to record yourself off your laptop or webcam, or record a screenshare with your camera window in the lower corner.
- Record a short, one-to-two minute personalized greeting to your prospect, give them one valuable tip, and direct them to find a link to your calendar below.
- Copy and paste the recording with a thumbnail gif into your sales email.
- Customize your subject line to read, “[Prospect first name], I recorded this message for you.”
- Keep your email short, focused on helping (not selling) the contact, and include a HubSpot meeting link to your calendar where they can book time with you.
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This entire process takes only a few minutes, which you can reduce even further by using an email template you can personalize quickly and send.
“When you can help your customers provide marketing assistance to their customers, it opens a powerful new dimension to the relationship on all sides.”
4. Simplify Processes using Marketing Automation.
Marketing automation is one of the greatest features HubSpot offers.
You can change contact properties, send internal notifications, qualify leads, and manage other processes by building the right workflows. Not only does this boost efficiency by automating simple tasks, it can make the process of lead management a lot more effective.
For example, a lead might respond to a question on your intake form that indicates they are more likely to buy. You can create conditional logic in your automation that recognizes a response like that and channels them to the right salesperson.
This really just scratches the surface of what marketing automation can do for you. By connecting other apps like PandaDoc and Zapier, we automated several processes at once — qualifying leads, closing the sale, and delivering onboarding documents to the new customer.
These processes used to take days and involve several employees to complete. Now, the same tasks are accomplished in minutes without any manual effort.
5. Strengthen Relationships By Taking Customer Education to the Next Level.
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s the scarcity of good communication.
When the world was sharing memes about food shortages and toilet paper hoarding, who was advising people on how to suppport their immune health?
When supply chains went haywire, who helped practitioners plan and manage expectations?
Very few businesses took steps to keep people informed during this scary and chaotic time, and it presents another great to build relationships.
One of our clients provides high quality dietary supplements to practitioners, and when the pandemic struck in March, 2020, we immediately shifted our marketing strategy to “downstream communication.”
We focused on providing healthcare practitioners with email templates and one-sheets they could add their logo to and send off to their patients, advising them on how to protect themselves and their families. These assets offered specific immune support tips for people as panic shoppers swept through grocery stores.
This shift in strategy was a huge success for our client, and it taught us the value of downstream communication. When you can help your customers provide marketing assistance to their customers, it opens a powerful new dimension to the relationship on all sides.
Healthcare companies are poised to thrive with HubSpot, and taking advantage of opportunities like these is a big part.
By taking small steps toward aligning sales and marketing, tackling content topics your competition avoids, and finding creative ways to support communication to the stakeholders your client depends on — your brand will be positioned for an amazing year.
Count on it.
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