What are the top challenges your healthcare company faces with digital marketing? I'm betting it's at least one of three things:
1. Increasing website traffic and generating prospects for the sales team
2. Delivering definitive proof your marketing is generating ROI
3. Convincing senior leadership to provide the budget and resources you need
These issues are standard across all industries, but B2B healthcare also has compliance to worry about as well, which complicates things further.
Here are a few mistakes that often exacerbate the challenges above, and ways to find your way out of them.
No Investment into Revenue Attribution Analytics
After interviewing dozens of companies about why they made an investment in marketing when they did, we've found most of them were concerned with a rebranding effort or build a new website. They never considered how that investment would translate into ROI.
Some marketing initiatives are not easy to make money on – I mean, you can’t tie revenue to a logo redesign – but any sustained investment in marketing must have revenue attribution analytics.
Senior executives are skeptical about digital marketing, and for good reason. When they ask the question everyone knows they are going to ask – how many new practitioners did we gain from this? – what they usually get back is data about “engagement” and a whole lot of speculation about the impact on the bottom line.
This is a complete disaster. People lose their jobs over stuff like this.
If your company is not using a reputable marketing automation platform that integrates with your CRM, like HubSpot or Marketo, you will struggle to prove the value of your efforts.
Related Article: What's Missing From Your Marketing Analytics?
Content Does Not Focus on Information Buyers Want
Functional medicine companies have a huge opportunity in front of them today.
The industry is growing rapidly, and practitioners are hungry for good educational content! That’s the good news.
Publishing blog posts, videos, and podcast episodes on a regular basis is one of the most effective ways your brand can build relationships with your ideal buyers and convert them into qualified leads on your website.
Unfortunately, many brands are missing the mark with their content. The two biggest problems I see on a regular basis include:
Using the blog as a PR platform for the company
If you want your posts to generate traffic from the right practitioners and convert them into interested buyers, you have to publish quality educational content they are looking for. Too many companies are still using their blogs as a promotional tool that highlights their products, benefits, and successes.
This approach usually comes from senior executives who still think of marketing as advertising. It’s not.
The reality is only a very small fraction of your most loyal customers truly care about what’s new at your company, unless you are Tesla or Apple maybe. Today, companies that put the interests of their buyers first and help them find the best fit for their needs always win.
Missing or Weak Calls-to-Action
Whenever I check out an interesting article or video about business and find there isn’t a graphic offering me a relevant, compelling “next step," it’s like hitting a dead end.
Blogs and videos are great for attracting the right people to your website, but then you have to earn the privilege of following up with additional information later on.
This is the process of qualifying prospects and gathering insights about them as you watch how they respond to good information. Start adding two good CTAs to your content and you will put that hard earned traffic to good use!
Related Article: Can SMART Calls-to-Action Get You More Customers?
What [senior leaders]...usually get back is data about “engagement” and a whole lot of speculation about the impact on the bottom line...People lose their jobs over stuff like this.
Goals & Strategy Are Based on Guesswork
Businesses love goals. Or, at least, they love setting them and forgetting them.
It took us years to figure out that meeting successful growth objectives depends finding and managing a few critical elements:
- Revenue Gap – How much is the overall increase over last year? Calculate your expected rate of growth from the status quo and subtract it from the revenue objective you’ll get from your new marketing program. This gives you the revenue gap.
- Customers Needed -- Calculate how many customers it will take to fill that gap. Base this number on an average annual spend, and remember these customers will be phased in throughout the year.
- Opportunities and Sales Qualified Leads – How many good-fit opportunities is your sales team closing? How many of your qualified leads actually make it to the proposal phase? Use these percentages to figure out how many opportunities and SQLs it will take to get your target number of customers.
- Website Traffic Needed – Not every lead you convert on your website will be a good-fit. We find about 25 percent of the leads turn out to be sales-qualified, so you need to figure out how many total leads it will take to reach your number. Then, you can assume – once your new inbound marketing campaign is in full swing – your website will convert between one-half and one-percent of your traffic into leads.
Armed with this data, you now have a clear revenue gap and a SMART roadmap to get there. These metrics will give you the right KPIs to measure along the way, allowing you time to adjust your tactics for optimal performance.
Remember, you must have a good marketing automation and CRM platform to optimize this plan (we only use HubSpot, but there are other options of course). Remember our first point about revenue attribution above -- without the right tools, you will never have the data you need to prove the campaign worked.
It's 2020 now, and we have to look at marketing differently. From the moment medical professionals enter the market for the products and services you provide, they are on a journey. Your role is to help them, not influence them.
Buyers have all the reasons in the world to mistrust brands. But when your company exists to serve the community -- even when it means referring a prospect to a competitor who would make a better fit -- you will earn something even more precious than a sale. You will earn their trust.
By following that example, and putting the pieces in place to accurately measure the results of your efforts, remarkable things will start to happen for your bottom line.
Believe it.
Jan 17, 2020 5:53:42 PM
