Marketing to the Healthcare/Healthtech Industry

Twinning Strategy's 20th episode is up, with a focus on "Marketing to Providers and Practitioners: Generating Demand in Healthcare" with guest Scott Alexander of Jairus Marketing. Healthcare is a complex industry: it is highly regulated; the payment systems and stakeholders are a tangle of insurance, medicare, and patients; and the targets of marketing range from payers to patients to provider organizations to government to doctors and medical decision makers; the products are often complex on technical and scientific grounds. With a difficult landscape, Scott advises us to remember that Doctors are people too. People in healthcare make purchasing decisions the same way people do in any industry (i.e. as the saying goes 'one leg at a time'). They have a problem to solve and need the emotional motivation that any potential buyer does. 

Marketing in this space often needs to focus on education--doctors as much as anyone else want to grow and get better at their jobs. But with this education focus comes an additional challenge. It is easy to fall into the trap of getting into the nerdy 'weeds' of your technology or product. Scott reminds us, the marketing must not ultimately be primarily about the technology or science of your product or service (i.e. the solution) so much as the problem your solution addresses. Sounds familiar, it is a basic tenet of marketing! The advice from Scott is to think about the perspectives of the many layers of decision makers, and that there is a time and place for those technical details for some stakeholders at the right time, i.e. once the problem has been qualified and once that problem is determined to be something that your product can address.

Another challenge, how do you even breakthrough with your marketing given the constant busy, overload of the prospective clients. In healthcare as with other spaces, the commercialization process is a slow burn. Absent karaoke as a primary marketing tool (check out the episode), you need to create the awareness and the value of engagement with your brand. The relationship, Scott analogizes, needs to unfold the way it would when you meet someone at a professional conference. You are in the same industry space, then you need to establish a rapport (whether that is through e-mail, through linked in messages) and then you have created a space to discuss the offerings. Again, it is the human connection that matters. 

Take home: doctors (and healthcare industry folks in general) are people too. In other words, the complexity is real, but don't get so caught up in it that you forget the fundamentals of marketing, sales, and branding.