HCP Digital Marketing: 5 Steps to Successfully Market to HCPs (The Short Version)
Marketing to healthcare providers (HCPs) is no easy feat. You have to know how to capture their attention and convince them that your solution is the right one for their patients. These decisions are high-stakes for HCPs – so here’s what you need to know to market to them.
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The 5 Steps of HCP Digital Marketing
1. Define Your Audience
Healthcare providers aren’t a homogenous group—they represent a wide range of jobs. However, the tactics that work well among healthcare providers come down to the details. You need to know who they are and what they care about.
Develop a precise target audience definition based on the following:
- Specialties such as cardiology or oncology
- Job titles for other healthcare professions, like Chief Nursing Officer
- Business types, like whether your solution is for people who work in independent practices or larger hospital systems
- Geography, including state or even local borders
- Prescribing behavior, which is especially helpful for creating high-value lists and profiles
- Job context, like whether they are operating as a healthcare provider or the leading businessperson in their practice
Remember that healthcare providers can include more than just traditional physicians – don’t forget other clinicians, such as dentists and vets, as well as other types of support staff like physician assistants (PAs), nurse practitioners (NPs), etc.
2. Create Great Content
The success of HCP digital marketing campaigns hinges on quality content. Content marketing strategies work best when they provide valuable information to people about a topic that’s relevant to their needs. Quality content is far more effective than a banner or video ad. After all, these prospects aren’t making purchasing decisions based on a single ad they see while perusing the web.
Creating useful content for healthcare providers takes a lot of work, but that’s what makes it so valuable. It sets you apart from businesses pursuing easier tactics. You get to position yourself as a brand that genuinely cares about helping your audience with their needs.
And you have to back it up with data – clinicians value through research, and your content needs to reflect that. Information should be backed by scientific studies as well as well-sourced facts and figures. While many marketers with a consumer background would spend effort creating a snappy tagline, it’s not the main priority here.
And don’t forget to make your content skimmable – think callouts, headers, etc. While showing breadth of knowledge is important, doctors are busy and need to understand the point of your content within 30-60 seconds.
3. Pick the Right Platforms
Crafting great content is crucial, but it’s not enough on its own. You could write the perfect eBook that solves your audience’s most pressing problems—but if it sits on a landing page that no one ever sees, it won’t do you or them any good. You have to pick the right platforms that let you hone your targeting. Consider a mix, such as:
- Search (both SEM and SEO)
- Paid social media
- Trade publications and associations
- Apps
- Direct mail
- Other HCP-specific platforms
Determining the right platforms will depend on the specific audience you’re trying to reach and the type of content you’re promoting.
4. Nurture (and Nurture, and Nurture)
For high-consideration solutions like yours, prospects need to learn about the offer and think about how it can help them, and this typically takes more than reading just one eBook. You have to guide them through the decision-making journey with helpful content. And for this, you need a robust lead nurture strategy.
Some of this HCP digital marketing strategy can be scaled with things like:
- Personalized email based on the content they have interacted with
- Retargeting campaigns
- Direct touches from sales
Figuring out your unique strategy will require collaboration between sales and marketing to determine what your funnel looks like and when it makes sense for sales to take over.
Your #1 goal when nurturing is to ensure that none of your valuable leads are neglected while also protecting the sales team from spending time on leads that are irrelevant or aren’t ready for the direct sale.
5. Measure, Rinse, Repeat
Once you have your HCP digital marketing campaign up and running, you’re not only producing results; you’re producing data such as:
- Blog post conversions
- The success of various ad creatives
- Number of eBook downloads
- Email engagement metrics
From there, you can understand how many people are interacting with your content and, of course, who those people are. Use the data to refine and optimize existing campaigns, and take note of what’s working so you can apply those insights to future campaigns as well.
Content marketing works best when you keep at it. It’s the kind of strategy that builds and generates cumulative results over time. So don’t stop at one campaign— apply what you learned to the next campaign, and the next, and the next.
So, How Do You Get Started? Find the Right HCP Advertising Agency Partner
HCP digital marketing has changed a lot in the past couple of years. The pandemic shifted a lot of the process online (where it is likely to stay), and as a result, HCP behaviors and expectations have changed.
HCP digital marketing tends to have a learning curve – to be successful, it helps to work with someone who has experience with digital marketing channels and strategies but also knows your market specifically. That’s where we come in.
glassCanopy – Your ideal HCP Advertising Agency
We provide start-to-finish lead generation for organizations looking to reach doctors and other healthcare providers, administrative professionals, and support staff. We handle everything:
- Content creation
- Ad buying and strategic planning
- Landing pages and banners (design and dev)
- Integrations with your CRM and marketing automation systems
- Nurture campaigns
- Closed-loop reporting
- Ongoing optimization
If you want to see what we can do for you, schedule a quick 20-minute intro call.
Let’s Talk
Rich founded glassCanopy in 2001.
