Anyone who follows the healthcare market has read about the impact of healthcare reform and the associated focus on reducing healthcare delivery costs. You’ve also seen the ripple effects of this new focus; as healthcare providers focus on costs they now demand proof that new technologies or “solutions” offered by medical equipment manufacturers provide a measurable improvement in the service they are trying to deliver to the healthcare consumer. Long gone are the days when providers were willing to pay for new products that weren’t clearly differentiated from existing offerings.

Healthcare Providers Are Becoming Savvy Researchers

Healthcare providers are also becoming savvier. They have a better understanding of their purchasing needs. This is due to the proliferation of peer-to-peer forums, group purchasing organizations and information from medical equipment manufacturers. And then there is the internet. Now providers – like consumers in many other industries – have a wide array of online resources at their disposal to research the landscape of products available from a wide array of manufacturers.

In my recent blog post entitled The End of Solution Sales: What This Means for Marketing I discussed the impact of B2B customers becoming savvier in gathering information. The title of the post was somewhat disingenuous – the solution sale isn’t dead. Assuming that B2B customers come to the bargaining table with little information? That’s dead.

Inbound Marketing in Healthcare

Today’s B2B customer (including healthcare providers) does their research before engaging with vendors. This puts pressure on medical equipment manufacturers to deliver proof points about their products and services in the venues that purchasers use the research offerings.

If this all sound very familiar it’s because this is the basic tenet of inbound marketing which relies some key steps:

1. Creating information (content) that answers your prospect’s questions
2. Syndicating that content such that when prospects search for answers during their consideration process your content gets found.
3. Continuously creating engaging content that reinforces how your product/solution addresses their needs.
4. Driving prospects to a solution (yours) or location (your sales rep or website) where they can continue the evaluation process or purchase.

The key, of course, is understanding the questions healthcare providers will have about these products. These questions usually revolve around clinical and economic evidence. Therefore, content will usually take the form of clinical studies, procedural videos, key opinion leader papers, clinical webinars and product specific collateral. Once the right content is ready the next step is ensuring your content is available where your prospects are looking for answers.

For consumers this search typically begins with Google, YouTube, blogs or socially-powered product review sites. Healthcare providers, being consumers as well, initiate their searches in similar locations but also turn to industry specific resources as well. This is where it becomes important that content strategy, search engine optimization, social media and customer marketing teams are closely aligned.

Breaking Down Marketing Silos

In her blog post Why Only Adaptive Marketers Will Survive Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group writes about the impact of different marketing functions acting fiefdoms:

“Real-time insights, optimization, and shared learnings that inform other initiatives (not to mention that inform their own work) are an impossibility in vertically organized, hierarchical organizations. Enterprises must be able to move as quickly as their customers do. This requires bold realignment as well as informed empowerment.”

Her example focuses on combining centers of excellence in strategy, content creation, search engine optimization, syndication, social media and analytics into a combined demand generation function. The benefit of this COE approach is improved execution speed and effectiveness while reducing duplication.

This is not an easy task – nothing worthwhile is – but the benefits are clear. When inbound marketing is done right and executed in sync with a solid content strategy, customers will seek out your solutions because through their research it has risen to the top of the list; often, before they’ve even engaged with you.