There are often misconceptions surrounding the role of strategic product marketing. This is especially true in healthcare IT organizations. Company leaders sometimes confuse it with traditional “downstream” marketing efforts. For example, those associated with advertising, promotions, and lead generation.
While these activities are part of a product marketer’s role, they are pieces of a much larger pie. A very delicious and well-seasoned pie!
Development, Support, Marketing: Product Marketing Trifecta
Strategic product marketing sits at the intersection of all business activities. It is where product development, sales support, and marketing converge. Experts have deep knowledge of healthcare market drivers, buyer personas, and problem statements. As such, product marketing plays a key role in the end-to-end product lifecycle: from early ideation and development to commercialization and beyond.
In this blog, we begin to explore the strategic and tactical role of product marketing in healthcare IT. But, that’s not the end. In future blogs, we will delve deeper into the product marketer’s role at each “slice” of the product commercialization lifecycle.
What Is Strategic Product Marketing?
At the highest-level, strategic product marketing is the process of:
- bringing a product to market
- promoting it
- selling it to a customer
In the healthcare world, this requires a deep understanding of the market and unique buyer personas. Including the:
- business models and buying processes of different healthcare organizations
- nuances of clinical and operational workflows within each care setting
- problem statements faced by a variety of clinical, technical, and operational stakeholders
- associated value of solving them
What’s So Strategic About It?
Product marketers are responsible for performing a thorough market analysis. They need to keep a pulse on any emerging changes or trends. With doing so, product marketers bring a wealth of valuable information to the organization. In turn, it informs the following critical cross-functional business strategies.
1) Business strategy. It’s important to identify and quantify the pervasiveness and value associated with the problems your solutions address. Product marketing plays a key role in shaping the company’s vision, mission, and objectives.
2) Product strategy. Product marketing involves a deep understanding of clinical, technical, and operational stakeholders. This includes their needs, preferences, and workflows. It informs roadmap planning and market validation activities that enhance the marketability and value of resulting products and features.
3) Support strategy. Marketing plays a pivotal role in early pilot programs and customer implementations. This includes working alongside different user personas to assess product efficacy and value. It also involves identifying opportunities to maximize the customer experience.
4) Market strategy. Leveraging their deep understanding of buyer personas, product marketers develop targeted messaging, thought leadership, and promotional content strategies. This helps generate awareness and interest across your target audiences.
Marrying Strategy and Tactics
The strategic product marketer handles everything related to product positioning, messaging, and commercialization. This includes traditional marketing responsibilities, like content development, sales enablement, advertising, and communications. Moreover, it involves mobilizing the organization around product execution and launch activities. Such as:
- Competitive Analysis. A strong competitive analysis can help your product and sales teams better understand your product-market fit. It will also identify the key differentiators that set you apart in the eyes of your target audience.
- Positioning. This involves segmenting and prioritizing target healthcare organizations and buyer personas. Positioning enables product marketers to focus marketing and lead generation activities on the organizations and stakeholders that would benefit most from your company’s products and services.
- Pricing and Packaging. It’s crucial to understand the buying patterns of your target audience and the value in solving their problems. Strategic product marketing is able to define pricing models that will align with your buyers’ procurement processes and budgets, while delivering the greatest value to your company.
- Commercialization. Besides coordinating marketing and sales enablement, product marketers are a “safety net” that helps you think about the things that are often underestimated or forgotten as part of the commercialization strategy. Too often, everyone focuses on product release.
Putting It All Together
Strategic product marketing is a unique and essential role in every healthcare IT organization. Product marketers can bring vast healthcare IT market expertise and a deep understanding of healthcare technologies, workflows, and stakeholders. They also coordinate organizational strategies and mobilize teams towards successful product development, launch, and sales.
Curious to learn more about the role that strategic product marketing could play in your organization? Follow our blog as we explore each slice of the strategic marketing pie. Or, contact us to learn how we can help integrate strategic product marketing into your organization.
