A comprehensive guide to digital marketing for medical devices

Medical digital marketing has completely changed how the industry approaches its buyer’s journey, showing that traditional in-person sales tactics, like visiting hospitals or attending trade shows, are no longer the sole methods to engage with your target audience.

While traditional marketing and sales will always be prevalent in medical devices, with 44% of millennials preferring not to talk to a sales professional in their buying process, digital marketing has become more important.

In today’s marketing audiences look for meaningful connections with brands which can be most effectively cultivated through content marketing strategies, specifically targeted towards healthcare professionals and decision-makers.

This is why we’ve put together this complete guide to medical digital marketing, to help you create tailored campaigns for the healthcare industry. We’ll look at the best practices for creating impactful websites, leveraging social media marketing to spread brand awareness, using paid ads to help with your SEO and utilising email marketing.

How will websites help your digital healthcare marketing strategy?

Websites should be the central point of your medical digital marketing. The main touchpoint that all your other marketing channels should be directing your audience into. On this platform, you should be hosting all your content, from product information to articles and blogs, to medical videos and much more.

A website is a great host for the majority of your marketing content because it’s a dynamic platform that can provide your audience with all the necessary resources to help them take the final step in their journey and reach out to you or make a purchase. Its multifunctional content hosting abilities allows you to organise all your content marketing in one place, educating your audience and giving them a cohesive and positive experience.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the practice of improving your website’s rankings on search engines through selective content creation and technical support. While it might seem like a difficult process if you don’t have a background in websites or computers to optimise your website.

The main ways in which you can optimise your website to put you at the very top of search engines is through these three best practices.

• Keyword research: Use a variation of selective and high-ranking keywords on your pages to tell search engines what your content is about. The more keywords that you use will suggest to search engines how relevant your page is to that topic. However, beware that you don’t overdo it as search engines will penalise you for keyword stuffing (putting keywords in places it doesn’t belong).
• Adding multimedia content: Adding different formats of media to your webpage will encourage search engines to share it with more people. Things like images, videos, audio recordings and external and internal links will all benefit your SEO.
• Technical SEO: Technical SEO happens more behind the scenes of your website, and it’s really about making sure that everything is working how it should be. You can do this by making sure that all your links are going where they are supposed to or that you’ve added alt text to all your images.

How can social media boost your medical digital marketing?

Social media marketing is a useful tool to help expand your digital presence and support your overall marketing strategy. It is primarily useful if you want to spread brand awareness, connect with your audience or push people onto your website.

In operating rooms, medical device sales professionals with a personable and relatable demeanor tend to excel. This human touch is also essential in the digital domain. Despite fewer in-person interactions, the authenticity of your brand should shine through. Social media marketing not only offers a window to display your medical devices but, more importantly, it enables you to convey your brand’s values and ethos, explaining why engagement with your healthcare brand is meaningful.

What are the best practices for medical social media marketing?

• Target your audience: Picking and finding your audience on social media is essential, otherwise, you’ll just feel like you’re shouting into a room where no one is listening. There are many ways of finding your audience on social media, which could be through picking the right social media platforms or using hashtags. If you’re looking for answers to questions on how to target your audience, then head to our social media guide.
• Add variety to your content: Varying your content topics or formats will help engage your social media audience more. Videos, animations, and graphics all will contribute to your online persona showcasing to healthcare professionals and patients that you’re a dynamic organisation that creates exciting content.
• Consistency: Keeping your social media consistent is one of the most important rules that you have to maintain when conducting a social media campaign. It’s estimated that your audience needs to come into contact with your brand 15-25 times before they take action. If you keep changing what your brand is then you reset that counter back to 1.

How can paid ads help healthcare providers in their medical marketing?

Paid ads are often praised as the fast-acting element of digital marketing for medical devices, offering immediate visibility and measurable results upon activation.

These advertisements are primarily categorised as search ads on search engines and display ads across social media and various websites.

These ads are triggered by specific keywords associated with digital marketing to physicians or aligning with certain demographic profiles. Companies engage in a bidding process for these keywords or demographics, opting to pay per click or per impression, depending on their strategy. Ad platforms are designed to efficiently utilise budgets to achieve the best possible return on investment.

While paid ads serve as an effective means to broaden your reach and swiftly drive traffic to your website, the key to their success lies in careful optimisation. This ensures that every dollar spent on medical device marketing is an investment towards achieving your brand’s marketing objectives.

Email marketing in the healthcare industry

Email marketing, well-known for delivering one of the highest returns on investment, is particularly potent in digital marketing for medical devices. It involves sending curated content to a list of subscribers—ranging from special offers and newsletters to company news and event invitations. At this point, the potential customer is already aware of your brand, and the goal is to foster this relationship until they are ready to make a purchase.

What makes email marketing exceedingly effective is its ability to reach an audience that has already shown interest in your offerings, providing continual value with minimal associated costs, barring the expense of an email service provider.

However, there are challenges to navigate, such as compliance with GDPR regulations and the uncertainty of email open rates. To manage these effectively, it’s key to constantly assess and refine your email marketing strategies. Our comprehensive guide on digital marketing to physicians includes resources to assist you in executing successful email campaigns, complete with an overview of prominent email service providers and their capabilities.

How does this all fit together into one digital marketing campaign?

Medical digital marketing isn’t just about casting a wide net—it’s about weaving a network of targeted campaigns that guide your audience to exactly where you want them. Imagine it like a GPS system, all roads leading to your contact form, each turn a step closer to a conversion.

The beauty of digital marketing is how different strategies support each other. For example, the content on your website isn’t just there to climb the SEO ladder; it’s a launchpad for your social media and email campaigns. And those tweets and newsletters? They’re not just friendly updates. They’re signposts pointing back to your website—the place where the magic happens, where browsing turns into action.

After visitors land on your site, you’ve got the chance to bring them back for more. Maybe it’s with a free guide they can download in exchange for an email, which adds them to your mailing list. From there, you’re not just another company; you’re the one that keeps showing up with something valuable. That’s how separate platforms sing in harmony, hitting all the right notes in your marketing symphony.

Ensuring that every point in your digital marketing is connected is key to a successful medical campaign. Every stop must have a reason and an action attached to it, every message must do something that pushes your audience on to the next step, because without a CTA (Call-to-Action) your healthcare audience will be lost and not know where to go next.

Where will healthcare marketing take you next?

Hopefully, this has given you a better understanding of the medical industry and what you can be doing to help boost your digital marketing campaigns. So long as you’re specific in your marketing and are always connecting it to the next campaign or message then you have nothing to worry about.

If this has left you with more questions than answers then ask our specialists for help? As a medical device and healthcare digital marketing agency, we understand the industry better than anyone so book a 30-minute call with us to find out more.