In this article, we discuss how to create a marketing strategy in 2024 for medtech companies, both B2B and B2C (sometimes called Healthtech). We’ve divided the process into six steps:
- Establish your marketing goals for your medtech company
- Identify the right target audiences to achieve those goals
- Develop your core messaging and value proposition for each audience
- Choose the right marketing channels for your goals and audiences
- Create thought leadership content based on your core messaging, audience, and channel
- Measure KPIs and adjust your strategy accordingly
Establishing Medtech Marketing Goals
Clearly establishing your goals is a foundational step in creating an effective medtech marketing strategy. Most medtech marketing goals fall into one of three categories:
- Educational. Goals that prioritize increasing popular awareness and familiarity with the company and its products.
- Sales-Oriented. Goals that prioritize generating warm leads that result in closed sales and additional revenue for the company.
- Market-Oriented. Goals that prioritize increasing the company’s size, reputation, and/or market share within the industry.
The specifics of these goals will depend on whether your product targets consumers or healthcare businesses, and will also greatly impact how you run your campaign. The table below displays the most common examples for each, and shares a recommendation for how that goal can be accomplished.
| B2B Medtech Marketing Goals | |
| Goal | Recommendation |
| Increase brand awareness | Consider an omnichannel approach to spread your message as far as possible |
| Generate MQLs and SQLs | Employ targeted advertising and ABM techniques to define your target audience |
| Establish industry authority | Leverage high level content to win the trust of healthcare companies and professionals |
| Educate prospects on product usage & benefits | Produce webinars, thought leadership content, and video marketing for helpful how-to material |
| Expand into new markets | Nurture partnerships with other medtech and healthcare experts to leverage their credibility |
| B2C Medtech Marketing Goals | |
| Goal | Recommendation |
| Increase engagement | Leverage social media campaigns to encourage organic growth through audience sharing |
| Educate patients | Include accessible informational content in layman’s terms |
| Drive sales | Include targeted CTAs within your material to streamline the sales process |
| Build brand trust & loyalty | Utilize influencer partnerships within the health and wellness industry |
Once you’ve defined the goal for your medtech marketing strategy, the next step is to clearly identify the needs and objectives of your target audience.
Identifying Your Target Audiences
Any marketing strategy inherently relies on a thorough understanding of your target audience – you’ll need to know:
- What problems or challenges do they face that your product can help with?
- How are their lives impacted by those challenges?
- Which marketing channels can they be reached on?
- What kind of tone will they respond most positively to?
Similar to determining your strategy’s goals, the nature of and approach for your target audience varies somewhat in B2B vs. B2C strategies. We recommend developing audience personas to help answer these questions, such as the ones below:
| B2B Persona – Anita | B2C Persona – Dan |
 Anita is an administrator at a hospital in a mid-size to large city. Her day-to-day consists of several meetings with upper management to address larger concerns facing the hospital, which she then takes down to the appropriate departments to seek solutions. Her biggest challenge is finding a consistent record-keeping solution that can keep up with the high patient intake the hospital experiences daily. |  Dan manages a small advertising company with his wife. He works long days in various client-facing meetings and thus doesn’t have much time to take care of himself, resulting in bad habits causing high blood pressure noted by his doctor just a month ago. Since then, Dan has been seeking a solution to monitor his blood pressure without taking too much time from his day. |
In the case of B2B strategies, the questions answered should center moreso around the target’s occupation. For example:
- What is their job title?
- Who do they answer to?
- How is their performance measured?
- What obstacles do they face in the workplace?
- Are they the key decision-maker in terms of getting your product/service?
B2C campaigns, by contrast, focus more on their home life and personal relationships, since these are the things that B2C consumers are most likely to prioritize. Developing a thorough audience persona requires a considerable amount of research into your target audience. Assuming you aren’t trying to break into a new market, one of the best things your team can do is closely examine your existing customers to identify existing patterns within your customer base.
Develop Your Core Messaging and Value Proposition
Your core messaging details what distinguishes your product from your competitors and influences key decision-makers within your target market. Creating a core message requires answering a few key questions:
Medtech marketing teams looking at a considerably wider audience will need to consider how to adjust this messaging depending on the different segments within it. For example, a more elderly demographic may place more emphasis on independence and autonomy than a middle-aged audience, who might be more concerned with time and energy saved. A B2C medtech company targeting both will need to consider how and when their core messaging shifts to reflect these priorities.
Because your core messaging is the foundation of your marketing strategy, it needs to be thoroughly tested before it’s ever made public. This is traditionally done through focus groups, but other options include limited trial runs, pilot tests, and even early marketing campaigns that target a narrower audience (and are therefore cheaper to execute than a full campaign).
Look at the feedback data from these exercises closely and be prepared to iterate your core messaging as necessary until it gets the desired results. Once you feel confident in your core messaging, it’s time to bring your medtech marketing strategy to life by selecting marketing channels and creating content.
Choose the Right Medtech Marketing Channels
A central challenge of creating your audience persona, as described in the section above, is determining what marketing channel is best to reach them. This is not always a uniform answer; for example, a B2C medtech marketing strategy is more likely to heavily favor social media marketing than one targeting a B2B audience. Conversely, webinars are excellent for nurturing B2B leads, but are wholly ineffective for reaching consumers.
The following table breaks down the most effective medtech marketing channels, including information on ROI, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and which of the goals discussed earlier each channel is best suited for.
| Channel | CAC | ROI | Best For – Goals |
| SEO | $647 | 748% | Establish Thought Leadership |
| Build brand trust and loyalty | |||
| Generate MQLs and SQLs | |||
| PPC | $802 | 36% | Expand into new markets |
| Drive sales | |||
| Social Media | $658 | 430% | Educate patients |
| Increase engagement | |||
| Webinars | $603 | 430% | Increase engagement |
| Educate patients | |||
| Improve patient outcomes | |||
| Video | $743 | 496% | Build brand trust & loyalty |
| Educate patients | |||
| Traditional Advertising | $721 | 386% | Expand into new markets |
| Drive sales |
Teams considering a medtech marketing strategy that prioritizes increasing reach (e.g., expanding into new markets, raising brand awareness) will likely need to consider a combination of two or more of these channels. It’s also important to consider support channels like email marketing to nurture existing leads towards an eventual conversion.
Create Thought Leadership Content
The nature of your content is going to vary somewhat depending on the goal, target audience, and marketing channel, all good medtech content shares a few key characteristics:
- Establish value quickly. Your content should always begin by answering the reader’s or viewer’s questions quickly, thereby establishing trust with them
- Skimmability. Content should always be kept as lightweight as possible and keep the reader’s eye moving down the page. In the case of written content such as blog articles or white papers, make use of bullet points, tables, charts, and graphs where possible and relevant.
- Include CTAs. Effective content provides your audience with clear next steps. This can take the form of “hard” CTAs (e.g., “reach out to our sales team”) or “soft” CTAs (“read more about here”)
How you structure your content depends also on where it falls in your marketing funnel. This refers to the manner in which your content leads your audience toward an eventual conversion. Your marketing funnel breaks down like this:
| Top-of-funnel | Lead generation content designed to attract the attention of your target audience and raise awareness. |  |
| Mid-funnel | Lead nurturing content designed to warm up leads over time to the prospect of an eventual sale. | |
| Lower funnel | Conversion-oriented content meant to give readers the final push before a sale. |
As the diagram above suggests, mid and end-stage content is less designed with the purpose of attracting new leads, but rather nurturing and persuading them towards an eventual sale. Members of your target audience are likely interested at this point in evaluating whether or not your product does what it needs or how it compares to other products/services currently on the market. In these cases consider making content along the following lines:
| Stage | Content Type |
| Top of Funnel | Comparison blogs |
| Ads targeting specific problems | |
| Mid-Funnel | Case studies |
| White Papers | |
| 3rd party reviews | |
| Lower Funnel | “Contact Us” web page |
| Service/Product landing page | |
| Hotline number |
Measure KPIs and adjust accordingly
Ensuring the ongoing success of your medtech marketing strategy requires careful observation and adjustment to ensure that your campaign is aligned with the goals and objectives outlined in the early weeks of your strategy. This means paying close attention to KPIs that reflect how well your campaign is doing.
The KPIs included in the table below reflect general marketing KPIs used with any goal, target audience, and marketing channel, but we should note that your choices in these areas often mean using more specific KPIs to effectively measure your performance.
Medtech Marketing Strategy KPIs & Benchmarks
| KPI | Description | Benchmark |
| ROI | A summary measure of your marketing strategies return on investment, calculated by subtracting expenses from profits. | SEO: 748%SEM/PPC: 36%Paid Social: 192%Webinars: 430% |
| CAC | The cost associated with gaining a new lead in the campaign. Calculated by dividing expenses by # of leads. | Organic: $942Paid: $1907 |
| LTV | The total average amount a company stands to make from a single customer. Calculated by multiplying annual profits per customer by average tenure with the company. | Organic: $3680Paid: $7962 |
| LTV:CAC Ratio | A ratio comparing how much a company gains per customer vs how much they spend. Calculated by seeing how many times the lower number multiplies into the larger. | 4:1 |
| Total MQLs | The total number of leads coming in through your marketing strategy that are leaving their information with the company for future contact. | +40% YoY |
| Pipeline Velocity | The speed at which leads move through your marketing pipeline towards an eventual conversion. | $500/day to $5000/day – varies highly based on company type |
| Lead to Win Rate | The percentage of total leads that end up as closed conversions. | 3.7% |
Measuring and improving performance is an iterative process which often takes a great deal of time. Patience is the key to ensuring a slow but steady improvement—observe, change, wait, repeat—to enact a gradual movement towards your objectives.
Implementing a Medtech Marketing Strategy
This article may unintentionally telegraph how difficult it is to develop a medtech marketing strategy, but bringing one to life in the real world requires a high level of skill. Assuming you have an in-house team available, it’s critical to have team members who are already familiar with this process to spot and avoid pitfalls early on.
If you don’t—or if your in-house team is limited in scope—consider with a medtech marketing specialist. Outsourcing this work to a marketing agency like First Page Sage provides you with access to a team of specialists in digital marketing that not only develop your medtech marketing strategy for you, but also implement it on your behalf. If you’d like to discuss a partnership or learn more about our services, you can reach out to our team here.
