As the purchasing power of B2B healthcare buyers grows, with a 2022 study revealing up to 67% of buyers spending more, understanding how to market your healthcare B2B is more important than ever. With telehealth businesses booming and 5% of all Google searches being health-related, you must understand how to make your healthcare business stand out amid the noise.
This comprehensive guide will help your team grasp what makes B2B marketing in the healthcare industry unique. We’ll also delve into what challenges marketers face and what strategies give the best chance for success in this competitive marketplace.
How does B2B in healthcare work?
When it comes to healthcare, many are familiar with B2C marketing efforts like ads for new drugs, but B2B efforts help bring groundbreaking technology and systems to a doctor’s office near you. B2B marketing positions your business before healthcare facilities to benefit their customers and patients.
Because B2B healthcare marketing targets organizations, the audience is more familiar with what they need from their providers. Thus, the messaging can be more complicated and detailed than if you were marketing to individual consumers. Having a level of shared understanding and vocabulary allows B2B marketers to build a richer picture of what they’re selling while fostering a deeper connection with their clients.
Here’s what makes B2B healthcare marketing unique
Focus on education rather than visibility
Healthcare marketing, especially in the B2B sector, doesn’t share the same goals as consumer marketing. While other industries may focus strictly on visibility and sales, healthcare B2B marketing should focus on education and credibility. The healthcare industry has higher standards for marketing, especially with HIPAA regulations. Any pushy sales language can derail your efforts and make impressing accounts difficult.
Taking a delicate, informed approach that facilitates client understanding is most effective. You’re convincing accounts that your solution will make a difference in their organization’s efficiency and efficacy. Thus, they’ll want to know exactly how you can be incorporated best.
Healthcare organizations are the audience, not individuals
The primary audience isn’t necessarily businesses, unlike other kinds of B2B marketing, but healthcare organizations. These organizations can include hospitals, nursing homes, birth centers, urgent care, mental health facilities, pharmacies, and more. They inherently have much more on the line than just their bottom line—their business decisions can be life or death in extreme cases.
B2B marketers can also assume a much higher level of understanding about healthcare products and the healthcare system than the average consumer. Marketing materials can be more in-depth and explicit while safely assuming a certain base level of knowledge.
Digital advancements are transforming the industry
Tech continues to move at lightning speed, and those innovations are coming to the healthcare industry. There are more opportunities for healthcare providers to offer more advanced tests and treatments, and the industry has heavier competition among B2B marketers.
There are electronic health records that let patients access their records at any time, mobile health apps for smartphones and tablets, and wearable tech that can track steps and sleep, not to mention the rise of AI and chatbots that work to give patients answers to their queries in real time.
Because all of these advancements are a lot to keep up with, marketers must prepare to educate prospective businesses on both the health benefits and how the tech works. Similarly, understanding how your products and services work with this new tech can be one of the most valuable insights in your marketing arsenal.
What challenges do B2B healthcare marketers face?
As with any industry, marketing in the B2B healthcare space has its roadblocks. Here are a few of the most common challenges for marketers.
HIPAA compliance difficult to navigate in marketing
B2B marketing in the healthcare industry follows the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA regulations protect sensitive health information by ensuring medical records are kept private and that patients have the right to access their health info at will. Healthcare providers and their business partners must follow these regulations, so marketing efforts can be tricky.
Marketing efforts must navigate the use of personal information carefully unless you want to pay a hefty fine or risk the compliance of your business. HIPAA also requires “individual authorization for all uses or disclosures of protected health information for marketing purposes with limited exceptions.” Popular marketing tactics like testimonials or social proof aren’t options here, meaning marketers must establish credibility creatively.
Public perception of healthcare industry
Even though B2B marketers speak directly to providers, they still need to be highly conscious of the public perception of the industry. People are generally suspicious of healthcare marketing, and high-profile lawsuits like the one against Purdue Pharma aren’t doing anything to help. Getting buy-in from patients will be more complex, and the businesses you’ll speak to will be well aware of that.
This fact can affect almost every aspect of marketing, from the tone you strike to the type and amount of information you share to the kinds of events you host. It also means you’re working to build trust with your target audience and, on some level, individual patients simultaneously.
Limited funds tighten marketing budgets
Healthcare businesses often suffer from strict budgets because of the research and development involved in getting the product or service off the ground. That product or service may also need to meet guidelines set by HIPAA or the FDA before it can go to market, extending the development process and eating into the overall budget.
It’s more important than ever for marketers to look at the most cost-effective ways to market. Because content in the healthcare space is far more informational and detailed, you may not have the capacity to produce it yourself. Opting for a full-service healthcare marketing agency like Ranq might be smarter than spreading yourself too thin or paying an in-house marketing team.
How to conduct healthcare B2B marketing: 5 key steps
Step 1: Define your target audience
Your first step should be to create an ideal customer profile (ICP) and work forward from there. That means collecting every piece of data on your target audience, which will be narrowed down to healthcare organizations in whatever geographic region you choose. Using your ICP, you can find potential targets that most closely fit the bill.
It’s important to mention that for B2B, account-based marketing (ABM) is a fantastic approach. This type of marketing targets accounts—specific companies or even individuals in those companies—who are high-value and best match your ICP. These connections become partnerships, which creates a symbiotic B2B relationship between you and the organizations you work with.
Once you have a collection of accounts, you can organize them by priority, which helps you give your marketers a road map. Then, you create highly tailored campaigns to engage directly with your precise target audience.
Step 2: Establish a strong understanding of your organization
In addition to understanding who you’re targeting, you need a more thorough understanding of who you are—specifically, what your company is. A great way to do this is with a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,” and it’s a great way of assessing your key attributes. This way, you can understand what you’re best at and where there’s room for improvement to create a plan for moving forward.
Strengths and weaknesses refer to internal factors you can directly control. How are you allocating resources? What does your budget look like? Are you adequately staffed for what you want to accomplish? Meanwhile, opportunities and threats should be considered external forces: market trends, the economy, competitors, and new regulations. All of these combined will help you understand your company as fully as you understand your ICP.
Step 3: Determine what success means to you (KPIs)
Determining your key performance indicators (KPIs) is a great way to measure your business’s progress. Setting KPIs helps you focus on realistic goals with specific paths toward achievement instead of loose, vague generalizations. Your KPIs will work together to measure all aspects of success for your business and should ladder up to your company’s overall business goals.
For instance, if your company’s goal is to increase revenue by 20% this year, then some examples of good KPIs might be to track your conversion rate, order value, or even website traffic.
You should create both primary and secondary KPIs. The primary KPIs should measure your company’s overall results, while secondary KPIs should focus more on correlated goals. If your primary KPI is about boosting sales, your secondary KPIs might focus on returns and repeat customers.
Step 4: Choose the proper marketing channels
Choosing the ideal marketing channel is a core priority because no matter how great your message is, it’s worth nothing if it doesn’t reach your audience in distribution. You can choose from many different channels, some being more effective than others.
Your website is your business’s home base, so it’s obvious why you’ll want to make it the best it can be. That means ensuring all technical elements are sound, optimizing your site for search engines and mobile devices, and creating regular, high-quality content. Need assistance with any of that? Ranq can help.
Since trust is a huge issue in the world of healthcare marketing, creating a strong and reliable referral network is a fantastic way to combat that. A customer referral network here is ideal because nothing says trust, like a satisfied client genuinely recommending a product or service.
We’ll discuss these strategies more in a little, but make sure you’re evaluating the most lucrative channels for your business.
Step 5: Create content that answers key questions
Before you start creating any content, research some of the core questions about your particular area of expertise. Understanding what your target audience doesn’t understand or what they’re the most curious about will help guide what kind of content you create.
This is partly where SEO can come in handy because you can see what questions are being searched for and look for ways to answer them directly. Ranq creates unique, custom website content based on what your target audience is actually searching for.
Best marketing strategies for B2B healthcare industry
Content marketing in B2B healthcare
Content marketing is king for B2B marketing in the healthcare industry. We’ve discussed it a few times throughout the guide already, but it really is one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools in your arsenal. In fact, over 74% of companies surveyed in this study agree that content marketing increases lead generation.
That’s especially helpful for healthcare marketers because it’s a great way to share information about your company in a way that can actually help build trust. Lack of proper informative, educational (not salesy) content can be a real barrier to entry for people unfamiliar with your products or services. The more you can explain exactly who you are and what you do in a way that’s relevant to your target audience, the more likely you’ll be to get the CTR and CVR rates you crave.
SEO and PPC marketing
SEO and PPC marketing are two of the most helpful workhorses of a healthcare B2B marketing strategy.
SEO helps your website organically grow in relevancy on Google, makes it more accessible to navigate, and guides your content marketing strategy by narrowing down on relevant topics to cover.
Similarly, while PPC marketing can be expensive, it’s a powerful short-term solution to boost your page and content. By paying for highly visible digital advertising locations, you can quickly get more eyes on your site. Because of the price, consider PPC a stopgap during slow periods, such as when your SEO is building.
Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing is practically tailor-made for B2B healthcare marketing. The objective of account-based marketing is straightforward: to boost revenue and foster robust client connections.
Its benefits include increasing loyalty across your customer base, boosting efficiency, and helping you close more high-value deals. By refocusing your energy on creating more personal business relationships with your targets and speaking more directly to their exact needs, you’ll actually be more likely to differentiate yourself from competitors and encourage longer-lasting relationships with more valuable customers.
Referral marketing for healthcare providers
Building a strong referral network is a great way to build trust and create a more reliable stream of potential customers. Because of the many rules and regulations that can make marketing in the healthcare industry difficult and the lower level of trust the average consumer has in healthcare marketing efforts, a referral network can act as a solution to both issues.
Instead of relying solely on your ability to communicate your offerings yourself, the positive words of satisfied customers can be an even stronger incentive. In addition to customer referral networks, you can also leverage the trust of other respectable institutions by getting on their referral networks.
Looking to elevate your B2B healthcare marketing? Ranq can support you
Ranq is here to help you conquer SEO and content marketing in a way that leads to true long-term growth. We have plenty of experience in the healthcare industry and know exactly the strategies to get you in front of your target audience. Take the weight off your team and let Ranq’s team of expert writers and editors get to work crafting original, insightful content tailored directly to you.
We’ll do everything from SEO analysis and competitor research to writing long-form content for your website that speaks directly to your core audience’s concerns. We can help you get to where you want to be, whether you’re getting your business off the ground or helping you take it to the next level. Reach out to Ranq today and get started.