What could be more frustrating than this scenario? You have a product you know can improve patients’ and healthcare providers' lives – but you just can’t seem to connect with the right buyers.
That’s the position many B2B HealthTech marketers find themselves in. Innovative solutions don’t guarantee a seamless flow of leads; often quite the opposite. Yet it is possible to overcome the problem and generate reliable, high-quality healthcare leads – and this guide will help you do exactly that.
Expect to learn:
Lead generation is always a challenge, but HealthTech presents a few extra challenges:
B2B buyers often have a clear mandate based on existing product categories: “find a new PPI vendor” or “replace legacy EHR software.” But HealthTech is filled with innovative new solutions with no pre-existing analog - which makes it harder to attract buyers for multiple reasons:
This doesn’t necessarily prohibit a purchase, but it does make buyers hard to reach and persuade.
Healthcare is among the most heavily regulated industries, with extensive protections that impact everything from handling protected health information (PHI) to the avoidance of kickbacks. Healthcare buyers are, therefore, far more cautious about introducing new technology; nobody wants to be the person who introduced a new vendor that misused patient data or cost the organization millions in fines because they experienced a breach.
Lead generation, therefore, has a tightwire to walk: your product’s compliance measures must be clearly called out but balanced against more obviously appealing messages about the product’s actual benefits.
The actual process of selling B2B HealthTech solutions is extremely complex:
As a result, lead generation content must appeal to multiple personas and create a strong first impression – enabling effective nurture over the coming months (and potentially years!). But this is just table stakes: a series of recent changes have made lead generation even tougher for B2B healthcare companies.
The last few years have seen a few factors put greater strain on healthcare marketers' time and budgets:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cornerstone of B2B healthcare marketing, enabling companies to generate organic website traffic and capture buyers’ attention during the initial research phase. But recent changes to Google’s algorithm have put a spanner in the works for many companies.
A new emphasis on authority and content length forced numerous HealthTech businesses off the first page for essential keywords – and replaced them with legacy companies or government sources. This is good news in many ways, helping to reduce the prevalence of low-quality information and build trust with search users. It does, however, mean healthcare SEO is a tougher channel to win:
Our healthcare clients have shown that this shift is not a catastrophe; the right strategy and investment have proven to regain lost rankings in many cases. However, it requires a larger amount of time and financial investment to both produce new content and optimize existing content to abide by these new expectations.
US HealthTech is projected to grow more than 15% each year until 2027, with a wide range of market niches emerging. While each product category remains small – fighting to assert itself in a noisy marketing ecosystem – the average healthcare buyer’s total available attentional bandwidth is shrinking fast.
Companies are already seeing this impact, and lead generation strategies are achieving results. Generic content and low-value information no longer gain any traction; instead, gated content or blogs must be more:
This clearly raises the bar, though it does also mean those who succeed bear greater fruits.
Healthcare buyers follow the general trend in B2B buying: more channels and less predictable behavior make reaching them a far greater challenge. Some buyers rely solely on LinkedIn, others are only interested in industry publications, and still more move between channels with no clear pattern.
If that sounds overwhelming, it’s because it is. Most HealthTech companies we work with struggle to reach their ideal buyers; that’s often why they seek out our services. But there are several ways we’ve found to cut through that complexity and generate more reliable (and higher quality) healthcare leads.
Most companies require a highly nuanced marketing audit to identify their best growth channels, but there are four channels that we’ve found rarely fail to deliver quality healthcare leads:
Webinars are a sure-fire hit with B2B buyers, giving them direct access to industry experts and the opportunity to ask questions or have their opinions heard. But our experience as a webinar marketing agency shows there are a few factors that must be in place to make such events effective for lead generation:
These steps helped us increase webinar attendance for one HealthTech company by 177%.
Lots of B2B healthcare companies recognize the value of gated content. Buyers are always on the lookout for high-value information, and the internet is awash with whitepapers – but is that really what buyers need?
Our experience finds that eBooks, eGuides, and whitepapers hold limited appeal; you need a very compelling topic or original research to attract most buyers with a 20-page opus. What buyers really want is help navigating a daunting market, which, let’s be honest, can be a little dry.
Checklists are, therefore, the perfect content format to generate leads. We’ve seen downloads double by repurposing the same information from an eBook into a checklist because the checklist is shorter, clearer and can actually be used.
Google’s algorithm shake-up put many B2B healthcare companies on the back foot. Some saw top-ranking content slip from an average position of 1 to 100 overnight, while others discovered their entire strategy was no longer viable. But it is far too early to throw in the towel – and our clients are testament to that fact.
Heavy optimizations are strategic adjustments to blogs and website pages that seek to capitalize on existing content to achieve high rankings with less effort. Producing a new piece of content, based on Google’s now extremely high-quality standards, could take 8-10 hours; a heavy optimization might take 2 hours between a seasoned SEO expert and writer. Look for ways to optimize meta titles, meta descriptions and headings around the keywords the page was ranking for – and update links and statistics with more recent information and resources.
Many HealthTech companies’ best ideas and insights are built into their products – which is fantastic for their eventual buyers. But it also means their “thought leadership” content, therefore, becomes an extended sales-pitch for the product, which immediately turns off early-stage buyers.
Thought leadership isn’t about spouting endless opinions; it’s about earning “mind share” and becoming a trusted guide to buyers. The best strategy to generate and nurture leads is to focus on what your buyers need – not what you want to sell.
Here are a few important tactics we’ve seen work over the years:
Lead generation is never an end in itself; a company with 1 million leads and no customers goes broke quickly.
That’s why we created this guide to HubSpot for Healthcare: it walks you through a comprehensive system to nurture leads and turn them into paying customers – all based on our experience helping countless HealthTech brands do exactly that.