HubSpot for Healthcare Marketing: Best Practices for Higher ROI

The market for healthcare software has exploded in recent years: from cybersecurity support to AI-driven tools to optimize care, B2B healthcare SaaS is expected to be worth over $50 billion by 2028. 

But with competition increasing and many niches being disrupted, a growing number of marketers are struggling to ensure their company generates the level of business it deserves. 

This article explores how B2B healthtech companies can leverage HubSpot to stand out from competitors and generate higher ROI from their marketing.  

Expect to learn: 

• Three common challenges B2B healthtech marketers face 
• Five powerful HubSpot features that help healthcare marketers overcome those challenges 
• Three ways B2B healthcare executives benefit from HubSpot 

3 Challenges for B2B Healthcare Tech Marketers 

The best way to understand the value HubSpot offers B2B healthcare technology companies is to consider the most persistent challenges they face: 

1. Navigating Emerging Markets 

Most B2B products and services have a clear precedent: there is an established audience, and marketers and sales teams take their cues from what’s worked in the past. But many B2B healthcare technology products are innovative and therefore lack a clear precedent. Buyers have never been faced with AI software to streamline cancer registry processes – so how do you go about selling it to them? 

B2B healthcare companies therefore need access to rapid testing to make data-driven decisions. They need ways to: 

• Determine if their content marketing and messaging are converting their audiences 
• Assess whether they are reaching the right buyers and influencers on the right channels, at the right time 
  

 2. Long, Complex Buyer Journeys 

There are a range of hurdles to selling B2B healthcare software, including: 

• Cybersecurity and compliance fears: Buyers need to be confident that the software will not compromise patient safety or lead to data breaches. This makes buyers highly risk-averse and means deals involve more due-diligence than the average software sale. 

• Implementation concerns: Downtime, delays and IT issues are not just inconvenient for healthcare companies – they are a threat to patient safety. Buyers therefore need to know exactly how the software will integrate with their existing system. 

• Technical specialism: Healthcare buying teams typically include buyers from multiple areas of the organization, some of whom are deep specialists. Agreement between these teams is often more difficult because their interests may be in conflict, and they don’t always share a common language.  

As a result, B2B healthcare buying teams take a long time to make a purchase decision. This creates extra complexity when tracking and progressing deals – as well as managing marketing and sales resources.  

3. Compliance and Data Integration 

From HIPAA to the Truth in Healthcare Marketing Act, B2B healthcare companies face a range of compliance challenges. They must be able to access and use a large volume of data to target communications without violating regulations – but this can be a serious problem due to: 

• Platform compatibility: Companies often have multiple sources of customer data, but these are often siloed and cannot be accessed by all departments. 

• Platform compliance: From manually managing data access to ensuring the platform itself is compliant, many customer relationship management (CRM) platforms make it difficult to safely handle healthcare data.  

Why HubSpot is Ideal 

The above challenges can be solved with: 

• Safe, organization-wide access to reliable data 
• Automation to manage marketing and sales resources more efficiently 
• Segmentation and analytics to test and refine marketing and sales messages 
• Increased visibility to manage and optimize long nurture cycles 

All of which is achievable within HubSpot.  

The platform features specialized “hubs” for Marketing, Sales, Services and Operations – and they are all interoperable and built on the same centralized source of customer data. This empowers B2B marketing and sales teams with a range of powerful features: 

5 Key Features of HubSpot for HealthTech Marketing 

1. CRM and Contact Management 

B2B healthcare buyer teams routinely include up to 20 different people.  This creates a challenge for marketers: how do you keep track of nurture cycles with so many different personas – without creating a heavy lift for your team? 

The HubSpot CRM makes this simple and intuitive. Companies can create a single centralized database for all contacts and ensure that data is easy to access and utilize. A few important features include: 

• Lists: Segment prospects, leads and customers based on a range of factors, such as demographic, psychographic, buying role or historic behavior. This makes it easier to deliver targeted campaigns and content. 

• Target Accounts: Select individual companies to track and analyze in-depth. This is crucial when pursuing an account-based marketing approach, which can be highly effective in B2B healthcare where deals are long, complex – and often highly lucrative. 
   

2. Content Management System (CMS) & Content Hub

This makes content marketing an essential part of any B2B healthcare marketing cycle. But these buyer groups are not just large – they have different needs and levels of technical knowledge. You cannot expect a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) to consume the same content as the Head of Oncology – and that means marketers need to tailor their content to multiple audiences simultaneously.  

The HubSpot Content Management System (CMS) and Content Hub offer a range of features to do just that. From lead capture tools to A/B testing, it provides everything you need to launch and scale effective digital content campaigns. But some of the most powerful tools for B2B healthcare include: 

• Content Remix: Get more out of individual blog posts, webinars or whitepapers by repurposing it for multiple other channels. This can also be used to adjust content to appeal to different personas. A piece aimed at HR could easily be made to appeal to an Operations manager by switching a stat about employee retention to one about resource efficiency. 

• Smart Content: Configure your website pages, landing pages and other content to adjust based on the specific visitor. An ad campaign that appeals to multiple personas can lead to the same basic landing page, but dynamically change its messaging to speak directly to the specific audience's pain points. 
   

3. Marketing Automation

HubSpot workflows enable you to automate a range of marketing tasks – saving time, closing gaps in your funnel and delivering better results. Some of the most important features include: 

• Automated Communication: Use custom workflow triggers based on behaviors and segmented lists to deliver tailored nurture campaigns at scale without excessive effort. This can include marketing emails, SMS or even in-product marketing. 

• Non-Marketing Contacts: 55% of healthcare executives receive 11 or more calls and emails every week from vendors. Avoid being marked as spam and keep subscription costs under control by turning leads you don’t want to communicate with into Non-Marketing Contacts. 

• Lead scoring: Automate lead scoring to seamlessly track the progress of contacts through the funnel and hand leads over to sales at exactly the right moment. 

How Our Platinum Partner HubSpot Agency Helped Intraprise Health Increase Inbound Revenue by 466% 

Learn how ProperExpression helped one healthcare cybersecurity innovator leverage automated emails, sales sequences and RevOps reporting within HubSpot to transform their inbound marketing in just 12 months. 

Read the Story 

4. Sales Automation

HubSpot offers multiple tools to help sales teams align with marketing and deliver a seamless experience for B2B healthcare buyers: 

• Sequences: Send personalized, one-on-one emails directly from salespeople. B2B healthcare companies can develop multiple sequences to automatically send at different points in the sales cycle, ensuring consistent communication and encouraging more engagement from buyers. 

• Tasks: Monitor sales goals and forecasting and stay accountable to SLAs. You can configure automatic reminders to ensure the right salesperson follows up with a lead and create a more connected nurture process.  

5. Analytics and Reporting 

The market for healthcare software is often difficult to predict. With large buyer teams and complicated internal politics, the messages and benefits that resonate most are not always apparent – and that means an iterative, data-driven process is necessary to maximize results over time.  

HubSpot provides granular reporting to help you assess and optimize your sales and marketing efforts. This includes: 

• Channel Analytics: Monitor the impact of individual marketing and sales channels to understand how your buyers interact with your business and what produces the best results. 

• Content Analytics: A/B test different messages for individual audiences to determine what resonates with each persona and drives the most conversions. This can be used to refine advertising and content, as well as equip sales with more persuasive scripts and prompts. 

5 Ways HubSpot Helps Healthcare Tech Executives Drive Higher ROI 

The cumulative effect of the five features discussed above is to empower B2B healthcare marketing executives with: 

1. Pipeline Visibility 

Data silos are always a problem for sales and marketing teams. But when lead nurture cycles last 6 months or more, it becomes impossible to effectively monitor, manage and progress deals without a clear view of how leads are actually interacting with your content and engaging with your business. 

HubSpot unlocks end-to-end visibility of the sales and marketing funnels. This not only empowers your teams to collaborate more effectively and plug gaps in the nurture cycle,but it also enables executives to quickly view their pipeline health and make informed decisions about budget management and strategic pivots. With robust reporting within HubSpot, executives can start allocating more budget and resources to the activities they know are best contributing to net new pipeline and revenue. 

2. Data-Driven Strategies 

Many B2B healthcare marketing teams operate based on gut intuition – which can be very wide of the mark. Consider the recent finding that B2B healthcare decision-makers are 3x more likely to click a CTA that uses simple words: this goes directly against many marketers’ assumptions and could lead to a big increase in conversions if leveraged correctly. 

Such insights are far easier to produce with HubSpot. Marketers can quickly A/B test messages, designs and a range of other factors to evaluate whether their hypotheses are valid – and adjust their approach based on what produces measurable results.  

3. Revenue Attribution

A recent LinkedIn survey found that 40% of CMOs feel under greater pressure to prove ROI in less time. But this presents a challenge for B2B healthcare: with long, complicated buyer journeys, it is difficult to directly tie specific campaigns or channels to revenue.  

HubSpot provides a wide range of metrics to understand how individual channels and campaigns have influenced deals, as well as identifying the source of your leads. This enables CMOs to attribute revenue to specific marketing efforts and quantify their marketing investment returns. They can then compare those returns with their initial spend - and produce a reliable view of marketing ROI. 

How Difficult is HubSpot to Use? 

At the surface level, HubSpot is a simple and intuitive tool. The interface is clear and easy to navigate, and the company provides extensive training and education materials to help companies leverage its wide range of features and tools. But this overlooks a few important factors that routinely trip B2B healthcare marketers up: 

1. Onboarding Complexity

From migrating your contacts to HubSpot CRM to setting up effective automation strategies, the HubSpot onboarding process can be confusing, time-consuming and ultimately futile for many companies. This may result in weeks of delays and wasted resources – all of which produces a system that is not even customized or optimized for your specific team.  

2. Missed Opportunities 

There are a range of features within HubSpot that require a seasoned specialist who is familiar with HubSpot. These can include things such as custom objects, custom properties that require complex workflows, and more. 

3. Budgeting Problems 

HubSpot charges based on a tier system: if the number of marketing contacts in your database exceeds a certain threshold, your subscription price will increase automatically. This is a common mistake for teams that lack HubSpot expertise – and can come as a nasty surprise when you start looking at your monthly outgoings. 

As a result, many B2B healthcare companies opt to work with a HubSpot agency to ensure they gain the platform’s full benefits and keep their CRM data clean. 

Maximize Marketing ROI with a HubSpot Platinum Partner 

The right HubSpot strategy and implementation can transform how you engage with B2B healthcare buyers. But does your team have access to the time, skills and experience required to make the transition smooth and effective? 

ProperExpression has helped numerous B2B healthcare companies drive higher marketing ROI with HubSpot. As a platinum HubSpot partner, we combine platform expertise with decades of marketing experience and deep knowledge of healthcare – making us the perfect partner to help you make the most of HubSpot. 

Want to learn three ways we could immediately improve your marketing?