B2B healthcare marketers have long been familiar with the traditional marketing funnel, in which a net is cast far and wide in the hopes of attracting prospects, the pool of which continually narrows throughout the sales funnel until some ultimately complete a purchase. While marketers may have different names for the sales stages in this funnel, they’re often along the lines of Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Purchase.
Healthcare Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing is a similar process, but there are some key elements that make it unique, providing both challenges and benefits for marketers. For example, traditional marketing funnels tend to focus on acquisition, while SaaS healthcare marketing requires a full-lifecycle approach.
Healthcare SaaS marketing builds on the concept of a traditional funnel, adding stages like Onboarding, Retention, and Expansion. Ideally, expansion occurs when clients are so pleased with your services that they provide a qualified referral, leading to a shorter sales cycle for the new prospect.
Curious to learn more about the similarities and differences between the traditional marketing funnel vs. the healthcare SaaS marketing funnel? Let’s explore these nuances by examining the seven unique stages of healthcare SaaS marketing.
Healthcare SaaS marketing can be challenging because you’re not really marketing a tangible product. The software is constantly evolving with product updates and new features, so your marketing narrative must be able to adapt to these changes and speak to the multiple decision makers on the buying team. Having a niche audience can also be challenging, as your software might only apply to a few healthcare organizations in an oversaturated marketplace, making it difficult to stand out and reach those who could truly benefit from your offering.
Another challenge with healthcare SaaS marketing is a slow sales cycle, especially compared to other types of businesses. HubSpot notes that the typical SaaS sales cycle can last up to three months, but for healthcare SaaS, that time can be greatly extended. Plus, the usually high cost of the SaaS subscription model can translate into businesses spending more time ensuring they've found the right option before purchasing.
There are four unique stages that leads follow before making a purchase and becoming a SaaS customer. These stages can also be applied to healthcare SaaS customers:
In a traditional marketing funnel, awareness of a product or service could be developed through paid advertising or email marketing. With healthcare SaaS marketing, prospects might find your business through a blog post, a free offer, a social media post, webinars or videos on relevant healthcare topics, or other creatively designed content.
At this early stage, they may not be aware of your product or know that they’re looking for it. They may not even realize they have a problem your product can solve. Awareness is your “first date.” It’s your opportunity to make a good first impression and intrigue customers enough so they want to learn more about you and what you have to offer.
This is where highly targeted and personalized content can make a big difference. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools and large language models, like ChatGPT, can help you identify relevant keyword terms, content gaps, and featured snippet opportunities and implement content personalization at scale. This can help you land in AI overviews and surface your content to the right prospects at the right time.
Once aware of your brand, engaged customers will begin the process of getting to know you better. They might subscribe to your blog, download a free white paper, or follow you on social media. They may even turn to your thought leadership content for inspiration, advice, or practical tips and tricks.
This is when they really start connecting with your brand. If they continue to see content that resonates with them, they’ll come back more often, and they’ll begin to associate your name with authority and credibility. Content marketing is of the utmost importance here. It can be the bridge between awareness and continuous engagement and interaction.
Exploration starts when prospects realize your product might help them solve a problem. They’ll begin researching their options and evaluating your offerings. They might look at your pricing page, ask questions via chat, request a quote, or contact your sales team.
At this stage, they’re actively comparing options, browsing pricing, and requesting demos. Prospects are interested in the product you offer and want to ensure their questions and concerns are appropriately addressed. They may even ask to test out your product—and that can be a major inflection point.
Conversion occurs when the prospect who’s been in your sales funnel for a long time finally purchases your software subscription. Cha-ching!
In a traditional marketing funnel, this purchase might be the last stage of engagement, hopefully resulting in a satisfied customer. You met your goal: A prospect became a paying customer. It’s a critical step, but it doesn’t end there for SaaS healthcare marketing.
These first four stages simply set up the sale. Healthcare SaaS marketing strategies demand three additional steps to nurture a continuous sales cycle.
Your healthcare SaaS customers will need substantial time for onboarding to ensure they know how to use the software and how it interfaces with their own operations. They need clear guidance and support to activate quickly and gain early value.
If the users within the organization don’t engage with your software because they find it too cumbersome or confusing, you lose an opportunity to satisfy them, and you may even lose a chance for renewal. To overcome this, focus on developing an intuitive onboarding experience with a user-friendly UI that anyone can engage with, especially those who aren’t technically savvy. This will help convert even the most obstinate of users into believers.
Out of all of the stages, retention may be most crucial. It’s where loyalty is earned. Ongoing support and ease of use drive renewals and build lasting trust.
At the end of the day, if your clients aren’t satisfied, they won’t renew their subscription, and they’ll likely make their dissatisfaction broadly known. With social media and various review platforms, customers have a variety of ways to share their experience with your company, and you want to do everything possible to ensure their comments are purely positive.
You can do this by encouraging feedback and implementing continuous improvements that address customer concerns and bottlenecks. This is part of the advantage of the SaaS model: It can adapt and evolve in kind with customer needs. Take advantage of that at every opportunity, and you’ll cultivate positive experiences that can directly feed into the last stage of the healthcare SaaS marketing funnel: expansion.
In the ’70s, a popular shampoo commercial touted that once you tried their product, not only would you love it, but “If you tell two friends, they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on.”
In the age of social media, that adage has never been more true, even in B2B sales, where customers may first find your brand online. Happy clients become advocates, bringing referrals and credibility you can’t buy.
This stage is often the most neglected. For many businesses, they’ve succeeded at this point—they’ve landed a sale and retained a satisfied customer. But there’s plenty of opportunity for expansion. Whether it’s through cross-selling across departments and accounts, upselling to more premium features or subscription tiers, or bringing in other healthcare facilities in the customer’s network, you can foster sustainable growth ... you just have to be strategic and proactive about it.
To truly drive performance, your SaaS healthcare marketing strategy needs to address all seven stages of the funnel. It must go beyond acquisition, with smart content, SEO, and intentional messaging that should support every stage—proving your value from first click to long-term partnership.
If you’re looking to improve your healthcare SaaS marketing, Spot On has outlined these B2B marketing strategy best practices, which are relevant for healthcare industry marketing, as well.
Our top 10 recommendations vary by customer and are tailored to the individual strategy; however, in general, they include:
This is a lot to think about. We know. Spot On has successfully navigated the world of healthcare SaaS for more than a decade. Our team has seen first-hand how rapidly the market can shift and change, and we know it can feel overwhelming to keep up with—let alone staying ahead of it.
If you have a small marketing team with limited resources and budget or don’t have the know-how to implement these strategies in-house, consider partnering with a healthcare SaaS marketing agency. A healthcare SaaS marketing partner can help you move faster and more effectively and deliver the high-quality, tactical execution you need across the entire SaaS healthcare marketing funnel.
At Spot On, our first step with any client is developing a strategic marketing campaign that will help achieve your sales goals and objectives. If you’d like to discuss how we can help you develop your healthcare SaaS marketing funnel and turn every stage into a growth opportunity, schedule a call with our experts today.