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Marketing creates demand while sales harvest that demand. It’s easy to invest a lot of effort and resources into sales because that’s what brings in the profit. But without solid marketing to generate demand in the first place, there will be no sales to harvest. Here are three reasons to market your healthcare IT product.
Healthcare IT Product Marketing is Unique
There are certain triggers to invest in marketing that are common across a variety of non-consumer and technical industries. But healthcare and healthcare IT also have many unique attributes that demand strategic marketing investment. These include numerous ways to access a market, the need for strong proof of product viability, and very long sales cycles.
1. Gain Better Market Understanding
With so many ways for healthcare IT companies to access the market, it is critical to understand the opportunities, limitations and demands of each avenue. Remember, marketing is more than just pushing your message outward through awareness building and benefits statements. Marketing is also a way to gather information inward. As the business owner, this helps you understand:
- the market opportunity
- how the target market buys and uses your product
- how your competition accesses the market
All of these are important to know when determining whether to sell one’s product via a direct sales force, channel partners, dealers or online. Marketing insights can enhance and inform decision-making. Otherwise, it’s easy to focus too much on financial or operational issues. While these are important, they don’t provide a complete picture that enables all opportunities to be considered.
You will find valuable insights to fill that understanding gap as you market your healthcare IT product.
2. Help Customers Bring You Qualified Referrals
Healthcare IT buyers must trust their suppliers. You will have to provide adequate proof that a product is viable and provides the stated benefits. The good news is that attentive marketing can convert somewhat skeptical leads into paying customers who are willing to help you sell.
Healthcare IT companies must test and prove their products in a real world setting that includes addressing data flow and integration issues. The only way to achieve this is by implementing and beta testing their products in a real-world clinical setting. The process of setting up these beta sites provides opportunities to develop meaningful relationships with key stakeholders. If your product provides good results, these stakeholders should then be in a position to share their experience using the new products and articulate how they have helped. Marketing should work closely with these individuals to gather testimonials and develop case studies. You can then leverage these for press releases and other earned content.
If you invest wisely in marketing your healthcare IT business, you can not only earn satisfied customers but also qualified, repeating referrals.
3. Accelerate Existing Lead Generation
Healthcare IT sales cycles are very long so you will need to implement a range of efforts to fill all stages of your sales funnel with prospects. A single lead generation effort such as cold calling is typically inadequate. Closing 10 deals will probably require 100 sales qualified leads.
To get 100 sales qualified leads, you may need thousands of marketing qualified leads. Marketing qualified leads include website visitors, trade show booth visitors, and white paper downloads. Even after marketing qualified leads are generated, you need to qualify those leads and move them through the sales funnel. Marketing can help with this effort by developing appropriate content for each phase of the sales cycle.
Investing in marketing can not only supplement your existing lead generation methods but accelerate them.
Healthcare Service Consultants Can Help
Wondering how best to market your healthcare IT product? Contact us to discuss how marketing can help your healthcare IT business.
