An effective SaaS healthcare marketing plan involves many moving parts. How do you make sense of them and ensure the components work together seamlessly to achieve your business goals?
The key is to stay focused, consistently making sure you expend efforts only on activities that directly align with your goals. The first step toward alignment for health tech companies is healthcare marketing strategic planning. It begins with asking yourself the right questions to lay the groundwork for success and identify the right goals.
Here are the top questions to consider when developing a marketing strategy for reaching your healthcare tech product buyers.
Healthcare marketing strategic planning takes time. But the process will pay dividends in the long run. With all the subsequent effort that goes into supporting a strategic plan, it's critical that you get the foundation right.
Your first step is to clearly understand your internal goals — and define what they should be. It may sound obvious, but we find that uncovering the most important goals takes more effort than just articulating what you’d like to achieve. These goals will help to inform strategy, so it’s important to get them right.
Madison Rivera, Spot On’s Account Manager, shares tips for how she helps clients dig deeper to enrich their goals and objectives. Here are some initial questions to ask before launching your healthcare SaaS marketing strategy:
You can use benchmarks to help set goals and then again later to measure performance. “We perform quarterly reporting for clients to make sure that we are hitting the metrics, which were defined at the beginning of our relationship or as we continue to work together. It allows us to be proactive.” Rivera says.
This kind of rigorous inquiry and competitive research can help ensure the SaaS healthcare marketing plan you develop is guided by a solid strategy from the outset.
Rivera offers a word of caution: SaaS marketing is a fast-paced discipline, and you may often feel you must do everything immediately. But it's important to weigh the cost of doing many one-off activities that aren't part of a plan that supports your goals. Chasing bright shiny objects could divert your resources and prevent you from achieving your long-term strategic vision.
To better understand how a strategy-first approach looks in action, let’s see how it works when building or refining a website.
Once you have decided on your overall digital marketing strategy and start drilling down to each marketing channel, there's more to unpack.
Let's use website design as an example to see what questions you should consider. Erica Pierce, Partner and Creative Director for Spot On, works closely with clients to uncover important information that will guide their website strategy.
Here are a few of the most common questions she recommends asking each company stakeholder before launching a new site:
And this is just a partial list. “There are several different pieces in the website strategy. It starts out with a questionnaire, and multiple questions that we usually ask in a kickoff call,” Pierce says.
It’s important to consider various factors: website design, user experience, and content. Pierce says, “When someone lands on your homepage, can they figure out what you do and offer within the first five seconds? If not, they'll likely leave your site.”
Then, analyze how your current website performs to determine the next steps. If it doesn't have a lot of traffic, start from the foundational pieces. If the site already attracts many visitors and has a clean, modern design, we recommend focusing your SaaS healthcare marketing strategic planning on increasing conversions.
Also, consider search marketing best practices, such as mobile optimization and on-page SEO, to ensure the site ranks high in organic searches.
Keep in mind that you must create content that resonates. “We start with an empathy map that asks questions about how the client's customers feel, what they want, and what they fear — the emotional drivers of decision-making,” Pierce says. This exercise helps us take the messaging beyond just listing a product's features and benefits to speaking directly to the audience's pain points and desires.
Since healthcare SaaS companies must navigate complex buying group dynamics, you must ask the empathy question for each type of prospect (e.g., job title) to craft targeted messages that will appeal to different audience segments. "For example, a visitor who is a CIO is likely to be interested in the security and integration capabilities of your software, while a CFO is likely to be looking for information about ROI and building a business case for investment,” Pierce says. Consider how your audience feels now and how you want them to feel after using your product.
All of these inquiries are part of a discovery process, which, notably, can be applied to many marketing activities, not just website design. The key is to uncover as much information as possible before developing your digital marketing plan.
Asking the questions listed here will help you uncover many insights about your business. But more importantly, you can apply them to your healthcare SaaS marketing strategy and turn them into action — for example, by translating a website strategy into a site map and content for individual pages to move visitors through and drive conversions.
Our team at Spot On is experienced in helping healthcare software companies define marketing plans, diagnose and correct issues, and get quantifiable results. Schedule a time to chat with us to discuss how we can help you formulate a strategy to meet your marketing goals.
