Our firm has helped numerous medtech companies develop their go-to-market (GTM) strategy. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the elements of creating one, beginning by defining what a GTM strategy is.
| A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step plan designed to bring a new product to market. It focuses on driving demand from an identified target audience by outlining the new product’s value proposition and product-market-fit, developing a marketing and sales strategy, and outlining a launch plan and viable business model. |
Creating a GTM strategy is a difficult undertaking that requires coordinating across multiple teams. We break it down into four parts:
- Conducting Initial Market Analysis & Building Marketing Strategy
- Creating Pricing & Sales Strategy
- Executing Your Medtech Product Launch
- Adjusting & Iterating on your GTM Strategy
We’ll begin our discussion with market research and strategy development.
Conducting Initial Market Analysis & Building Marketing Strategy
A central part of bringing your product to market is understanding the market itself and how your product provides a unique value proposition. Begin by considering the following questions:
- Product-Market Fit: What problems does your product solve? How does it solve those problems in a way that existing products don’t? (E.g. by solving those problems through a new method, at a better price point, more conveniently, or in some cases, by providing a solution at all.)
- Target Audience: Who is experiencing the problem that your product solves? How much are they willing to pay for a solution? What are their specific pain points and frustrations that you can alleviate?
- Competition and Demand: What other companies already offer a product similar to what you’re launching? Is there unmet demand for the product, or is the market oversaturated? How quickly will your competitors be able to respond to your product launch by creating similar offerings?
- Distribution: How will you sell your product? For physical products, will you sell direct to customers, or through 3rd-party distributors? For software, will you use a SaaS model, or a traditional software sales model?
- Purchasing Power: Is your target audience the person in charge of actually purchasing your product, or will they need to consult with other parties? (This question is most relevant for B2B medtech, but consider the impact that insurance coverage will have on B2C purchasing.)
Answering these questions will help you to determine your ideal target markets—and therefore your target audiences—and create marketing, pricing, and sales strategies to target them. The next step is to create customer personas that describe your target audience in more depth.
Creating Customer Personas
Customer personas detail the life of a fabricated individual who fits into your target audience, and are used to help your marketing team better understand each audience, so they can both choose the appropriate marketing channels to use and conversion optimize on each. In addition to the pain points that your product might address, your personas should also describe where your customers look for information, and, for B2B personas, how they fit into the purchasing process.
The examples below are two potential personas, one created by a B2C medtech company that is developing a blood sugar monitoring device, and the other created by a B2B medtech company that offers EHR software.
| Mark Harris | |
| Mark Harris is a senior account manager at a mid-size accounting firm. He is approximately 38 years old, married, and has two children. He has an extremely tight schedule that leaves him very little free time, but tries to keep up with his friends through Instagram and Facebook. Mark was diagnosed with type II diabetes about a year ago, and has been looking for easy ways to monitor his blood sugar without the hassle of traditional fingersticks. |  |
| Ann Peters | |
| Ann Peters is a cardiologist at a hospital. She is deeply committed to providing compassionate care to her patients, often going above and beyond to ensure their well-being. She finds that in the course of her work, the hospital’s decades-old patient records-keeping systems make it difficult to keep track of test results, and has been pushing management to find easier to use software. She learns about the latest advances in cardiology primarily through CME courses and medical conferences, but also keeps up with other cardiologists on LinkedIn. |  |
With your target audience thoroughly explored, marketing teams can now begin considering how exactly they want to roll out their products or services, beginning with the marketing channel.
Choosing Marketing Channels
The nature of medtech products means that potential customers will need multiple touchpoints to build trust before committing to a purchase, so medtech marketing requires a combination of multiple channels to build that trust over time. This can be especially true for B2C products—a new development on a diabetes fingerstick or inhaler could impact a broad range of demographics that are all best reached by different channels. This consideration should be covered by your customer personas, however, and allow your team to quickly rule out which channels won’t fit into your GTM strategy.
More difficult is understanding which of the potential channels you should choose. In the GTM strategies we’ve helped clients build, we’ve prioritized high ROI organic channels like SEO and speaking engagements, but use faster paid channels like PPC to establish a quick foothold and test messaging. The table below compares multiple channels’ average speed, CAC, and ROI for B2B and B2C medtech:
Marketing Channels for B2B and B2C Medtech
| Channel | Average Time until Results | Average CAC | Average 3-Year ROI |
| B2B Medtech | |||
| SEO | 6-9 Months | $647 | 748% |
| PPC | Near Instant | $802 | 35% |
| 1-3 months | $510 | 312% | |
| Speaking Engagements | 2-4 weeks | $518 | 856% |
| B2C Medtech | |||
| SEO | 9+ Months | $647 | 748% |
| PPC | Instant | $802 | 35% |
| Social Media | 6+ Months | $488 | 298% |
| N/A | $510 | 312% | |
| TV Advertising | 3+ Months | $1037 | 443% |
The next step in is to understand how to create content to share on each channel.
Creating Marketing Content
One of the central pillars of effective medtech marketing strategy is to nail down exactly what you want your message to be and how it should be interpreted by your audience. The marketing content for your medtech product should first communicate your product’s value proposition to your customers, but secondary goals may include establishing your company as a leading authority in the medtech industry, attracting new investors, or increasing brand awareness.
We’ve written a great deal about how to write content for digital marketing, particularly in the realm of SEO, and the following rules apply across channels:
- Provide value upfront. Tell your audience immediately what is valuable about your product. Only after you’ve established the value of your product should you get into the specific details that keep the reader interested.
- Prioritize skimmability. Don’t make your audience work in order to understand the value of your product. No matter the format, make any element you include easily digestible and keeping the audience’s eye moving onward.
- Capture attention with Images, graphics, charts, & tables. Whatever your content is, make it visually appealing. Provide trust elements like existing customer testimonials or performance data in eye-catching forms
- Include clear CTAs. A central tenant of good marketing is content that holds the readers hand and guides them through the steps leading towards an eventual conversion. Provide actionable next steps for the reader.
We also recommend building a modular content strategy into your medtech GTM plan. By creating a few, very high quality and in-depth pieces, your marketing team can then divide this pieces as appropriate across every marketing channel you use. This not only makes content creation more efficient, but also unifies your messaging.
Creating Pricing & Sales Strategy
Your pricing/sales strategy details how you intend to sell your product upon launch. When creating your pricing & sales strategies, you should:
- Analyze competitor pricing
- Understand customer price sensitivity
- Determine pricing models
- Develop and train sales teams
- Set launch goals
Pricing strategies typically take one of several paths, as shown in the table below:
Medtech Pricing Strategies and Considerations
| Strategy | Description | Considerations |
| Value Based Pricing | Pricing based on perceived value to the customer as opposed to the cost of production. | Requires thorough market research to understand perceived value |
| Cost-Plus Pricing | Adding a standard markup to the price of the product | May not capture the full value of the product. |
| Competitive Pricing | Basing your pricing on what your competitors are charging for similar products | Can lead to lower margins as you and your competitors see who can offer the product for the lowest price |
| Tiered Pricing | Offering different prices based on additional product features or usage levels. | Requires clear communication of how customers benefit at each product tier |
Once teams have determined how they want to price the product, they then need to determine how they plan to actually sell it. Your sales strategy determines the overall size of your sales team, what kind of training they will need, and where your GTM budget needs to go in order to generate the warmest leads.
The most common sales strategies include:
Medtech Sales Strategies and Considerations
| Strategy | Description | Considerations |
| Direct Sales | Inbound and outbound sales done through a dedicated sales department to healthcare providers or customers | Requires a highly trained sales force with experience in the medtech industry |
| Channel Partnerships | Leveraging the networks of various distributors, resellers, or healthcare providers to sell your product | Requires research into your distributors to ensure that they market to your target audience |
| Digital Marketing Sales | Utilizing online platforms for lead generation and direct sales | Requires a talented digital marketing team familiar with digital marketing best practices |
| Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) | Working with respected healthcare professionals to endorse the product and drive sales | Requires finding the right KOLs to speak directly to your target audience. |
The pricing and sales plans help you determine what your product will be sold for when it is introduced to the market. The final step before the actual launch is to create your launch plan to coordinate the event with your GTM teams.
Executing Your Medtech Product Launch
Your launch plan refers to the final implementation of your GTM strategy, and while this subject mostly falls outside the scope of this article, we cover the generalities briefly.
Begin by laying out your expectations going into launch and setting goals by which you can judge success or failure. Understanding your goals for your product launch will also provide you with insights into how to adjust your strategy post-launch. You should also understand the general timeline of a product launch, as show below:
Medtech Product Launch Timeline
| Phase | Timeline (Weeks) | Activities |
| Pre-Launch | 1-24 | • Begin product development • Begin preclinical testing • Prepare for clinical testing |
| Clinical Trials & Regulatory Approval | 25-48 | • Submit for regulatory approval • Finalize manufacturing process • Establish distribution chain • Begin developing marketing & sales strategies |
| Launch Prep | 49-72 | • Finalize launch plans • Finalize marketing & sales strategy • Schedule launch events • Begin marketing campaigns |
| Post Launch | 61+ | • Monitor progress against goals • Make adjustments as necessary |
Your timeline should be further broken down into individual weeks or groups of weeks in order to more accurately determine a weekly course of action; the example above is meant to serve only as a broad overview.
Adjusting & Iterating on your Strategy
Medtech is a rapidly evolving field and your medtech go-to-market strategy should remain agile and ready to change in order to meet your performance goals for the campaign. Making adjustments to your GTM strategy is relatively easy, in theory. The process can be customized according to the campaign, but the basic steps are always the same:
- Observe initial results and compare against benchmarks
- Identify potential reasons for underperformance
- Implement solutions
- Repeat as necessary
The solutions you implement will depend on where in your sales funnel the breakdown is. The following table provides suggestions for each.
| Funnel Stage | Why it Breaks Down Here | Potential Solution |
| Top of Funnel | Your strategy is not attracting leads the way you thought it would, driving down conversions down the line. | Offer a free product trial. Re-examine your target audience to identify new inroads. |
| Mid-Funnel | You’re attracting leads, however they are not very warm and are not interested in making a purchase yet. | Use email marketing and provide in-depth materials (e.g, case studies, white papers) to nurture leads |
| End of Funnel | Your leads have demonstrated interest in your product, but aren’t committing to purchases | Examine your product pricing compared to your competitors’ pricing. |
Exercise patience after any change you make. It takes time to accurately measure results, which can often feel like a lot of time wasted while you wait for the newest data to come in but is necessary to accurately identify the cause of potential improvements. From there, the process repeats itself, working bit by bit towards your goals for the campaign.
Getting Help Creating Your GTM Strategy
Creating a full GTM strategy is a huge undertaking that requires the coordination of nearly every branch of your medtech company. Each individual element—marketing, product pricing, sales, and launch planning—is a specialty unto itself, and a well-executed GTM strategy requires each element to be successful in its own right.
For that reason, many companies choose to work with experienced partners while developing their GTM strategy. We’ve helped many medtech clients build and execute strong marketing campaigns as part of their GTM strategy, with a focus on creating sustainable long-term ROI through SEO and thought leadership. If you would like to discuss partnering with us to help build your GTM strategy’s marketing, contact us here.
