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Healthcare software marketing is evolving quickly — what worked in the past may not be enough to attract prospects’ attention and drive high-quality traffic to your website, where you can capture leads and use content to accelerate the sales cycle.
From establishing your branding strategy and building an effective website to reaching the right decision-makers and building thought leadership — you must nail all the moving parts.
This guide shows you how to navigate this fast-shifting market landscape with our tried-and-true strategy so you can stand out in the crowded marketplace, establish credibility, reach the right people with the right message at the right time, and accelerate the sales cycle.
The healthcare industry experienced tremendous growth during and after the pandemic. The rapid digital transformation led to the proliferation of healthcare software and SaaS providers, making the healthcare tech industry crowded and competitive. It’s now much harder to stand out.
How can you make your SaaS or software business more memorable than another?
Your strategy and value proposition are the secret to successful healthcare tech branding. Here’s what to consider when building your digital presence for your healthcare software brand:
A branding strategy outlines how your company should build rapport and favorability with your target audience and show up in the market. It translates your company's vision and core values into how it presents itself through written content, visual elements, and more.
Your brand strategy should include a brand story, brand voice, brand design, brand value, and brand vibe to support your digital healthcare marketing in the following ways:
A value proposition is a concise statement that tells prospects why they should choose your products. It conveys why your solution is unique, what value it delivers, and how it benefits your customers.
It helps you improve your prospects’ and customers’ understanding of your product and communicate why it’s the best option for them. A succinct value proposition also makes it easy for your contacts to advocate for your brand by giving them a unique and memorable message they can share with other decision-makers.
To create a powerful value proposition, you must understand your customers’ needs and map your products’ features to their pain points and desired outcomes. Then, leverage your value proposition to demonstrate why your brand is relevant to your target market.
Working with a reputable healthcare digital marketing agency can help you take the guesswork out of sharing your unique value proposition. Here’s how to get the most out of this process.
First, you must be clear about how your brand and products differ from others in the market. What sets you apart, and what’s your unique story? Next, research your target audience, create buyer personas, and see what resonates with them.
Then, map your brand identity to the buyer personas to help you highlight how your offerings align with your audience’s challenges. Also, leverage market insights to create a concise and memorable brand message.
Finally, apply the brand message to your digital marketing strategy to convey your unique value proposition via digital channels (e.g., website, social media, email, etc.) to reinforce your digital presence across all customer touchpoints.
Inbound and content marketing is essential for digital healthcare marketing. Here’s how to align your content with your brand strategy to augment your brand message:
B2B SaaS marketing has many moving parts, and missteps aren't uncommon. Avoid these common mistakes if you want to attract your ideal customer:
B2B marketers must contend with long sales cycles and navigate buying committees consisting of multiple stakeholders, often as many as six to twelve decision-makers. Large buying committees, plus the complexity of heavily regulated industries like healthcare, means a transaction can take months to complete.
Avoid this mistake by understanding the typical purchase timeline and planning your marketing activities accordingly. Eat the elephant one bite at a time: Set smaller sub-goals within the longer sales cycle, such as signing up for a demo or scheduling an on-site presentation.
You can also time your B2B SaaS marketing and sales communications to align with your prospect's milestones along the purchasing journey, such as the company’s internal budgeting cycle.
A longer sales cycle doesn’t mean you can sit back and wait for a prospect to convert into a client on its own. You should set up a nurture funnel or sequence to support your B2B SaaS marketing effort by building relationships with your prospects and staying top of mind, so they’ll buy from you when the time is right.
Avoid this mistake by mapping out the buying journey from the perspective of your healthcare software prospects. Find out what resources, information, and demonstrations your prospects may seek at each stage and deliver them via the appropriate channels (e.g., email and social media.)
Identifying your best leads with the highest purchase intent can help you focus your resources on pursuing the most promising prospects ready to convert. But how do you know who they are?
Adobe defines lead scoring as “a shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads to determine their sales-readiness.” You’d assign values, often as numerical points, to each lead based on multiple attributes, such as their professional information and engagement with your online content.
Avoid this mistake by implementing a lead evaluation or scoring process. First, create an ideal customer profile (ICP) to help you better qualify leads. Establish a system to describe and rate the essential characteristics of your ideal buyer, including company size, industry, geographic location, years in business, etc.
Next, assign each qualified lead a numerical value based on the attributes. Remove spam, such as contact with form fields missing or a non-company email account (e.g., Gmail address.) Once you set up the system, you can automate the process with B2B SaaS marketing tools.
The key to B2B SaaS marketing success is to build a data-backed case to demonstrate why a prospect should invest in your offering and how it will deliver a sufficient return on investment (ROI). Gartner found that over 90% of business buyers need a business case to support their decisions to purchase technology solutions.
Avoid this mistake by incorporating real-world data into your marketing materials whenever possible. These include case studies, client quotes, statistics, and other evidence presented in a conclusive method. For example, you might add a statistic on a landing page that reads: “Company X saved 25% on quarterly marketing costs by using our analytics dashboard.”
Another way to maximize marketing success is to critically examine how well your website is supporting your goals.
An excellent website can help a healthcare software company achieve many marketing goals, such as communicating its brand story, helping customers understand its offerings, and using content to accelerate the sales cycle.
One of the most important ways to use a website is to generate leads for your business. Your healthcare marketing strategies should use your website to create a steady flow of high-quality leads to fill your pipeline.
Your website should be more than a static element in your company’s online presence. Consider what your prospects are looking for — position your content from their points of view and relate it to your products based on the audience’s wants and needs.
Treat your website as a digital salesperson that is there 24/7 to greet and guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at how you can build a website to convert strangers into warm prospects.
First, you should know where your website stands before investing the time and resources to make improvements. Audit your entire site and evaluate everything from the user experience (UX) to conversion rates optimization (CRO) to see what’s working well and what isn’t. Your site should be easy to use and offer clear paths to conversion.
Content marketing should be an essential component of your healthcare marketing strategies. HubSpot found that over four in five B2B marketers use content marketing. The emphasis on educating the audience and building authority makes it particularly effective for healthcare marketing.
Publishing high-quality content can help you build brand trust by showing prospects that you understand their challenges. Optimize your on-page content and include relevant downloadable offers (e.g., eBooks, tip sheets, webinars, and case studies) in your strategy to capture leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
While you should focus on building a site for human users and not search engine crawlers, don’t overlook the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). After all, your website can only convert visitors if the right people can find it.
To get started, consider the search terms your ideal customers would enter into a search engine if they were looking for your offerings. You must identify the right keywords — the more unique and specific they are, the better.
For example, our SEO experts would pull a list of keywords and assign one unique primary keyword to every page on the website. Then, we optimize that keyword throughout the page. This approach can help prevent pages from competing with each other for the same search term.
While creating a landing page may sound simple, optimizing every component to maximize conversions is more complicated. Here’s how to build a converting demo page for your website:
A landing page is a standalone web page created for a specific marketing offer. Visitors will land on it after clicking on a link in an ad, email, or call-to-action (CTA) button on the website. The page has a single objective — to convert visitors into leads by asking them to fill out a form.
If your landing page isn't converting well, make sure you’re not making these common mistakes:
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Lengthy online formAre you asking visitors to fill out too much information? People don’t want to share too many details when requesting a healthcare software demo. Only ask for what you need to give a demo. You can get more information during the demo or on a follow-up call. |
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Lack of social proofSome people may be reluctant to request a demo if you don’t have statistics or testimonials to back up your claim, build instant credibility, and reassure prospects that your software can deliver on its promise. |
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Navigation on the pageLinks in the content or on the header or footer areas could distract visitors from taking the desired action — requesting a demo — or even leaving the page (and never coming back!) without signing up for more information. |
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Missing detailsPeople are less likely to sign up if they don’t know what to expect after they share their information. Your demo page should clearly explain what would happen after prospects enter their details and what they can expect at the demo. |
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Address decision-makersYou must navigate complex buying committee dynamics and address different audiences in your healthcare marketing strategy. Note that those who make purchasing decisions (e.g., administrators) may not be the end users (e.g., doctors) so make sure your content is relatable to the decision-makers. |
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Offer a demo at the right placeMost healthcare information technology websites should offer a demo at the top and bottom of every page except the blog because it tends to attract prospects early in the buying journey. Other pages, which are likely subsequent touchpoints, are fair game. |
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Include essential elementsYour landing pages should have compelling headlines and digestible content. As mentioned above, the copy should tell visitors what they can expect after they have signed up. You should also include an image, social proof, and a user-friendly web form. If a landing page targets first-time visitors (e.g., from an ad), include content to tell them about your company. You may put navigation elements on those pages because these prospects will likely want to learn more about your brand and products before requesting a demo. |
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Improve the signup flowLabel all the form fields and use progressive fields whenever possible. They pre-populate data you already have on the prospect (e.g., email) so you can ask them to fill out additional information to help qualify a lead. You can also streamline the user flow by embedding a calendar link, instead of a web form, so visitors can directly schedule a demo with a salesperson. |
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Pluck these low-hanging fruitsGet some quick wins with these tips and tricks:
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Track the right metricsGauge the effectiveness of a landing page by tracking bounce and exit rates. Analyze heat maps to see what captures visitors’ attention and what elements they mouse over. Also, evaluate your messaging, see if the form is too intimidating, and tweak your content to provide the right level of detail if your exit rates are high. |
Even if your website and landing pages are performing well, you’ll still want to understand how well your ad strategy is supporting your goals.
Digital advertising is a great way to reach a targeted audience, but some critical mistakes can limit the performance of your online ads. Here’s what you need to know about creating, distributing, and measuring your ads.
Digital advertising has grown quickly over the last few years, and for good reasons: it can effectively reach almost any type of business customer or client. It’s especially true in B2B healthcare digital marketing, where many prospects research online.
But with everyone using this channel to attract prospects, you can’t just throw some money on a few online ads and hope for the best. Here are some typical healthcare software advertising errors we see in developing and executing advertising campaigns.
Healthcare software purchases are often approved at the system level and by multiple decision-makers. Many organizations have a well-defined multi-level buying team to steer the process. You may have to navigate multiple stakeholders and numerous touchpoints over many months to close a deal.
To optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns, you must have an in-depth understanding of these buying teams when creating your ads and find out about the specific people involved (e.g., is it the director of a pharmacy or the CFO of a company?) One of the best ways to sharpen this understanding is to create buyer personas and use them to inform your ad campaign strategy.
While software demonstration is an essential tool in healthcare digital marketing, it doesn’t mean you should push a demo as soon as prospects sign up to your email list or fill out a contact form. Many won't be ready to purchase yet and will need to learn more about your solution before setting up a meeting.
Gartner found that the average technology buyer takes over 16 months to complete a business purchase. An effective healthcare digital marketing strategy must address the lengthy sales cycle and deliver value throughout the buyer’s journey to keep prospects engaged.
You need a nurture funnel to keep prospects engaged when they move through the lengthy buyer’s journey. Also known as nurture sequences or lead nurturing, these processes help you build trust with people who’ve recently discovered your brand and want to see how your offering can solve their problems.
The lead nurturing process begins almost immediately after prospects click on one of your ads. You should direct your leads to a customized landing page with content directly related to what they see on the ad and give them a reason to share their information (e.g., download a checklist.) Then, send an email sequence over the next few weeks to help them learn more about your offer.
Digital advertising generates a lot of data. Social media platforms, search engines, and other applications offer a wealth of insights into how your ads perform, who viewed them, and when they are viewed and clicked.
Track the right metrics to gauge whether your ads are successful. For example, if you have a lot of click-throughs but very few signups, your ad isn’t effective in attracting leads. An ad campaign’s conversion rate is the starting point for identifying metrics that matter.
The healthcare sector is complex. The industry is highly regulated, decisions are high-stakes, and buyers can be skeptical about new solutions. It's hard to build credibility, and many stakeholders trust recommendations only from others in the field — making it difficult for new brands to gain traction.
Healthcare marketers also contend with lengthy sales cycles — many healthcare organizations take 12 to 18 months to reach a purchasing decision. As discussed above, nurturing relationships throughout this time is critical for staying top of mind during the buying journey.
People on the buying committee are often at different stages of the non-linear purchasing path, making it even more complicated to deliver the right message at the right time. Also, you must navigate a complex regulatory and data privacy landscape while meeting highly technical customer expectations.
Additionally, more buyers are researching online and defining their solutions before reaching out to vendors. Traditional sales channels (e.g., trade shows, conferences, and in-person visits) have become less popular, and many old healthcare marketing tactics are no longer effective.
These four common mistakes can hinder the success of your healthcare app marketing effort. Here’s what they are and how to avoid them when navigating the complex B2B SaaS inbound marketing landscape.
The biggest mistake in healthcare app marketing is assuming that "if you build it, they'll come." Without a marketing plan, you can't focus your resources on what matters and deliver the right message to the right decision-makers at the right time.
Solution: Research your ideal customers, create buyer personas, and layer the insights onto account-based marketing (ABM) strategies to deliver a relevant and personalized experience. Identify stakeholders in the buying committee and implement a robust SaaS content marketing plan to address their unique concerns at various stages of the customer lifecycle.
HIPAA compliance is a top concern for healthcare tech decision-makers. You could lose prospects' confidence if your marketing messages and sales materials don't proactively address data privacy and security.
Solution: Cover information security and compliance in your SaaS content marketing strategy. Mention the relevant standards you adhere to and the certifications you have achieved (e.g., HIPAA, PCI-DSS, HI-TRUST, SOC 2, NIST-800, etc.) to establish credibility. Also, publish informative articles, videos, social media posts, and whitepapers to position your brand as the expert in the area.
Customer retention is critical to profitability for any subscription-based business model. You could get stuck on the hamster wheel of user acquisition and churn if you don’t ensure end-users engage with your app and get value from it.
Solution: Your marketing effort doesn't end when a customer purchases your app. You must help them get value immediately with a well-designed onboarding process, share timely and relevant content often, and offer comprehensive technical support and consultation to deliver an outstanding user experience.
You may think your app’s bells and whistles are the greatest things since sliced bread, but your prospects only care if it can solve their problems. If your marketing content only talks about the product without speaking to your audience's needs, you won't get your foot in the door.
Solution: Tech buyers seek targeted content to address their concerns and help them navigate a complex organizational and regulatory landscape. Build a solid foundation with well-researched buyer personas and use the insights to deliver a customer-centric buying experience instead of product-forward messaging — especially for audiences in the early customer lifecycle stages.
While these solutions will help, the biggest step you can take to address your prospects’ pain points is to develop useful, targeted content that invites them to engage with your brand.
You’ve heard the saying, “content is king.” This maxim is especially true in B2B digital marketing, where up to 82% of marketers actively invest in the strategy. High-quality content can help you stand out in a crowded field and build credibility with your audience.
Thought leadership content can be very effective and yield high ROI. Yet many companies conflate traditional blogging with becoming a thought leader in the marketplace. Let’s look at the differences between these two approaches and see how you can craft effective thought leadership content to support your SaaS content marketing strategy.
Blogging involves consistently creating, publishing, and distributing relevant and targeted content on a company website. It supports SEO by optimizing specific keywords that your audience uses on search engines to drive high-quality traffic to your website. Your blogging strategy must define essential elements such as blog topics, keywords, and promotion.
On the other hand, thought leadership content doesn’t focus on your company’s products or services and is often distributed on third-party sites. It serves as an educational resource for the industry on topics the industry deems important and, in the process, positions you as an expert.
In healthcare marketing, thought leadership content can come in many forms, such as a speech or presentation at a conference, an article written for an industry publication, or an interview with a media source. It helps build trust with prospects and customers and establishes your expertise with new contacts and media organizations.
Thought leadership content helps you reach audiences not familiar with your brand. Publishing on other platforms can also help you build high-quality backlinks for SEO. It’s an effective way to differentiate your brand from your competitors and help you become part of the conversation. Here are some best practices for building thought leadership and establishing your company as a SaaS content marketing leader:
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Have a strong internal foundation.Since most thought leadership content will send the audience to your website, you should build a solid foundation with a well-designed and user-friendly site. Include plenty of engaging, targeted content and opportunities for SaaS buyers to convert. |
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Ask important questions before beginning.Establishing thought leadership takes time, so nail down your strategy and have sufficient resources ready. Consider these questions:
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Be selective.Even if you’re starting from scratch, don’t pursue every thought leadership opportunity available. Adopt a targeted approach and only go after opportunities that align with your objectives, are important to your audience, and serve to highlight your expertise. |
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Incorporate case studies.Real-life examples of how a similar organization achieved the desired goal help show an audience how to solve or think about a challenge. Discuss the process, the initial pain points, how the customer vetted the alternatives, what worked for them, and the lessons learned. |
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Research, research, researchFind out the topics and content format a publication looks for — does it seek evergreen best practices or commentary on breaking news, trends, new regulations, and the latest issues? Review its editorial calendars and pitch within the themes. You can also build your content upon a recently published article (e.g., a deep dive into one section.) |
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Get the timing rightSome publications expect proposals nine to 12 months in advance, and editorial deadlines for print can run as much as three to six months before the publication date, so you should plan. Also, writing about a timely subject can help increase your chances of getting published. |
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Follow each publication's guidelinesMake it easy for editors to do their jobs — give them what they want, submit clean content, and meet your deadlines. Adhere to the site's style: Does it use long or short paragraphs? Does it favor bullet points and numbered lists? What topics are most popular among its audiences? Review other stories on a website to help craft your content. |
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Submit unique contentDon't send the same article to different publications since most prioritize exclusive content. If you want to write about the same topic, find a unique angle for each site or space out the submissions and only target one publication at a time. Be patient with the submission process and give the editors time to respond. |
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Offer educational content that’s clean and error-freeYour submissions should not be promotional since most publications have guidelines forbidding content that mention specific products and services. Instead, focus on building trust with your audience and getting backlinks for SEO. Hire experienced writers and editors to conduct a thorough internal review process to avoid submitting articles that need a lot of editing. |
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Understand the rulesKnow the copyright and ownership of the content you submit. The publications will own the articles in most cases, and you no longer have the right to use them. If a site interviews you for a story, some will let you review the draft before publication. |
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Build goodwill and spread the wordOnce your article is published, reshare it, revisit it, and put it on your website (don't forget to cite the source.) Post the link on social media and tag the publication. Also, share other content from the site to build goodwill and relationships. |
Once you have developed content that resonates in the marketplace, it’s time to examine how you can maximize your efforts. One strategy is to reach your customers at the events they attend.
Conferences offer great opportunities to reach your ideal audiences, some of whom may be looking for the exact solution your company has to offer. Let’s look at how to leverage these events to promote your brand.
Here are a few things to know and a few common mistakes to avoid when marketing to healthcare professionals at a conference:
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Research the schedule.Make the best use of your time by identifying the subcategories or tracks most relevant to your business to avoid missing events your customers are most likely to attend. Research vendor booths by potential customers and plan to stop by if appropriate. Be strategic about the events you decide to invest in — many health tech businesses find HIMSS to be a no-miss event. |
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Connect on social media.Many healthcare industry conferences encourage attendees to connect on social media, and some may create hashtags so attendees can interact and host meetups before the event. Some organizers also publish a list of attendees and their contact information — but remember to explain who you are and why you’re connecting when you reach out. |
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Prepare and practice your elevator pitch.When your prospects meet dozens of new people at events, it’s easy to forget these interactions. When you talk to people at a conference, be sure to have a strong (but not canned) elevator pitch — a concise, concise statement expressing who you are, what your company does, how you help people, and (sometimes) the kind of connections you’d like to make at the conference. |
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Be present.Don’t sit in a corner, bury your face in your laptop, or walk around staring at your smartphone. Whether you’re marketing to healthcare professionals or advancing your knowledge of the industry, engage with what’s happening around you — often, these spontaneous meetings and interactions yield the most valuable connections. |
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Don’t fail to follow up thoughtfully.Continue building relationships by following up via emails, social media, or phone calls. When you do, reference a thoughtful detail from the conversation to jog people’s memory and establish genuine interest and mutual goodwill. |
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Don’t try to sell immediately.As mentioned above, the B2B healthcare sales cycle is much longer than other industries, and you’ll need a multi-step marketing funnel to nurture prospective clients. Prospects you meet at a conference probably won’t sign a contract after your first conversation. Instead of trying to sell them something right away, ask their permission to add them to your email list. |
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Don’t neglect hybrid and virtual events.Hybrid and virtual events have become as common as in-person ones during and after the pandemic. Don’t dismiss an event because it doesn’t focus on in-person gatherings. In fact, the digital nature of these hybrid and virtual conferences can give you great opportunities to stand out and reach more people. |
Here’s how to get the most out of your investment when getting a vendor booth at an event:
What happens after you connect with prospects after an event can make or break your hard work. Failing to follow up right away, or taking the wrong approach, can turn off leads. Besides losing potential business, you could waste valuable marketing dollars.
Here’s how to nurture your healthcare marketing leads to convert them into clients:
With so many ways to nurture and track leads, it can be helpful to enlist the help of experts.
The right healthcare marketing agency can help you navigate the challenges of today’s competitive landscape and promote your product more effectively.
Here’s how your business can work with an agency to generate lasting results:
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A healthcare marketing agency understands software customers’ pain points.While your team is the expert in your product, they’re often so immersed in building the best solution that they have limited time to see from prospects’ perspectives. Moreover, navigating the complex buying committee dynamic is challenging. A skilled healthcare marketing agency can align your product marketing messaging with your prospects’ challenges and help you guide them through the buyer’s journey. |
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A healthcare digital marketing agency can help build your organic marketing strategy.The ultimate goal for any B2B strategy is a healthy flow of inbound leads. However, building your presence in a dynamic field like B2B healthcare software or SaaS isn’t an overnight process. Working with the right healthcare marketing agency can take the burden off your internal team. It can help you design an organic content strategy and implement all the pieces to generate long-term and sustainable results. |
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A digital healthcare marketing agency can optimize paid ads.Building an organic search presence takes time, and paid ads can help you get some quick wins in the short term while building your long-term strategy. But navigating shifting online advertising technologies is challenging. A healthcare marketing agency can help ensure that everything from audience selection to bidding strategy is working together and aligns with your overall digital strategy to maximize your ROI, such as generating high-quality leads. |
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A healthcare digital marketing agency can fully develop your existing marketing funnel.One of the healthcare marketing benefits of partnering with an agency with extensive experience in healthcare software marketing is that they can improve what you’re already doing to win business. For example, we help our clients dial in their marketing materials to address different buyer personas, speak their customers’ language and create targeted content to nurture leads to reach the right people and optimize their efforts. |
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A SaaS marketing agency acts upon collective knowledge about the industry.Since a SaaS marketing agency works with different clients in the same sector, it has a well-rounded understanding of how the industry’s various parts work together. It can take lessons learned from clients with related audiences and apply them to your marketing strategy to give you a broader perspective. It can also help you craft nuanced messaging to address each buyer’s concerns. |
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A SaaS content marketing agency understands that success starts with strategy.A reputable agency won’t burn through your B2B SaaS marketing budget until it has set the right strategy to ensure its tactics are adding substantial revenue to your business. Our skilled marketing strategists take your audience, your business goals, and your indicators of success and apply them to your unique brand strategy and the value proposition of your offering to help you maximize your ROI. |
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A healthcare SaaS content marketing agency amplifies your internal capabilities.Organizations can achieve the most success when they view their agency partners as an extension of their internal teams. The agency acts not as a replacement but as an accelerator, filling gaps and bringing a depth of expertise. The best agencies understand how to combine their strengths with their clients’ top areas of need to form a seamless partnership that benefits both parties. |
Now that you have a grasp of the elements that go into B2B healthcare marketing, you may be wondering how you tackle all of these steps. Many healthcare software companies find that the advantages of working with an agency help them accelerate their marketing efforts. However, we don’t believe every organization should be working with one. Some companies may not be prepared to offer an agency partner the time it takes to equip them for success, while others may not have a firm direction guiding messaging about their product or service. Other companies find that partnering with the right agency is a complement to the success of their internal marketing teams.
If you’d like to understand more about how to decide if an expert advisory team that can help you unlock the next level of growth, schedule a time to chat with us. We’d love to discuss how we can help your company meet its sales and marketing goals.
