The healthcare industry is fiercely competitive, making impactful marketing an absolute necessity. With the growing contest between heavy-hitting brands, capturing attention in a saturated atmosphere can be challenging for B2B healthcare marketers. Couple this with an ever-changing array of marketing technologies and methodologies, and you have an incredibly complicated, continuously shifting landscape. To keep a firm footing in this competitive and unpredictable industry and to continue to stay top-of-mind to clinical influencers and executive decision-makers, healthcare marketers need to look at recent trends to understand what’s working now and what can work for your brand in the future.
By understanding B2B healthcare marketing trends, you can identify critical opportunities for experimentation and which cornerstone strategies are worth continued investment. You need to know precisely how to best position your products and services in the upcoming year—and now is the time to evaluate your current methods and look ahead to 2024 to stay ahead of the curve.
Defining the B2B Healthcare Marketing Audience
Before thinking about the future, ensure you know who you’re marketing to. Knowing your target audience will help align strategies and allow you to identify trends that are working and those that you should dismiss that may be better suited for the B2C industry. For example, the B2C industry primarily focuses on marketing to patients, offering an incentive to choose a particular healthcare provider.
B2B healthcare marketing focuses on healthcare products or services for other businesses. For example, B2B marketing can incentivize a hospital to choose specific equipment or machinery or a primary care doctor to select a specific medication. By establishing your audience, you can tailor your efforts strictly to B2B marketing in the healthcare industry and ensure you’re hitting the mark with messaging, imagery, platforms, strategies, and more.
What Makes B2B Healthcare Marketing Important?
No matter how good your medication, medical equipment, medical linen service, or doctor-supported software platform is, without targeted B2B medical marketing, the products and services you offer won’t reach your desired buyer. Marketing is an absolute necessity, especially in today’s modern world, where most buyers begin their search for a product like yours online. Not only will a targeted marketing plan give customers reasons to choose your product or service over a competitor, but good B2B healthcare marketing ensures that your product garners consideration from potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. This effectively guides prospects from initial recognition of your product or service to actual purchase.
The question is, which methods, tools, and strategies are succeeding in the healthcare marketing industry now and which will prove successful in 2024?
B2B Healthcare Marketing Trends You Need to Know
The trends dominating the B2B medical marketing world change rapidly, particularly since the healthcare industry, which has been historically slow to embrace digitization, adapted to new norms during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to navigate a more digital landscape than ever before. By taking advantage of these digital trends, you’ll be able to put your product and brand in front of the most viable buyers and keep up with your competitors.
Investing in SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is nothing new. But it is an ever-changing game as Google makes changes to its algorithm. With fewer interactions in person these days and more exchanges online, investing in updated SEO practices is essential to B2B healthcare marketing success. Being lost on the later pages of a Google search can spell disaster for your brand and product. Begin with an in-depth digital audit and then focus on keyword research and comprehensive competitor analysis. This will establish a solid foundation for utilizing other digital tactics like search engine marketing (SEM). Combined, this can increase your website ranking and increase organic traffic to your website.
Creating Engaging Content
Content is king and vital to B2B healthcare marketing. Content can help bolster your SEO efforts and position your business as an industry leader, provide valuable information to appreciative prospects, and then move those prospects farther down the sales funnel. The key is ensuring that your content is interesting, keyword optimized, and leveraged on the right platforms via the proper delivery methods.
Leveraging a Strong Social Media Presence
Building a brand, gaining trust, and maintaining authenticity are vital to healthcare marketing—and social media offers an excellent opportunity to achieve all of this. Your social media profiles are often a significant touchpoint for prospects but a profile that hasn’t been active in years is the equivalent of spiderwebs and broken glass in your storefront to most potential customers. If you’re already taking the time to leverage engaging and relevant content, social medial can be the perfect tool to disseminate this valuable information while continuing to build a trustworthy, industry-leading online brand.
Utilizing Video Marketing
Video marketing is necessary for B2B marketing in the healthcare industry. This versatile and dynamic marketing tool is a great way to create better engagement and educate audiences. Prospects can quickly grasp and visualize parts of your offering that may be complicated or can directly see the team members they may be interacting with, building familiarity and trust. Beyond that, videos can be a significant boon for building a more substantial social media presence, allowing you to utilize more visual storytelling.
Focusing on Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly beneficial tactic for B2B marketing in the healthcare industry. ABM uses more personalized and targeted campaigns to create faster turnaround on more qualified leads. This method builds direct connections and trust with healthcare business leaders and can expedite your sales process. With ABM, you’ll identify high-value opportunities and communicate directly with the decision-makers and business leaders, targeting your marketing efforts toward these individuals and filtering out unqualified prospects.
Choosing Expert Help
B2B marketing can be complicated, especially in the healthcare B2B industry. Keeping up with the latest trends and then capitalizing on them takes in-depth research and a deep understanding of industry best practices. That’s why many in-house B2B healthcare marketers rely on agency support. Agencies often have the capacity and expertise to help you take advantage of these trends by providing strategy, planning, and execution that is in tune with the latest information, methods, and technology.
With 2024 on the horizon, B2B healthcare marketing trends should be a significant focus of your marketing plan. Working with a knowledgeable and experienced agency can save you from scrambling to keep up in the new year. If you’re interested in what an agency with experience in B2B healthcare marketing can do for you, get in touch.
