Our Solutions:

Marketing for HealthTech Companies

We believe that marketing is a powerful tool that can amplify any message and bring a product in front of large audiences. That is why we channel our effort into working with impactful concepts and industries that improve our lives. We choose HealthTech as one of our biggest focus industries. However, from a marketing perspective, it is not an easy one. Over the past years, we’ve collaborated with several truly inspirational HealthTech companies. The companies had different products and services, were located in various regions, and had different target audiences. However, a number of challenges united them all.

At EDGEncy we like to come up with creative and effective solutions to challenges. Since healthcare is one of the heaviest-regulated industries, marketing HealthTech startups poses a unique set of challenges. This includes restrictions on advertising networks, varying customer journeys, complex content, data sensitivity issues, complicated decision processes and internal company regulations.

Let us give some examples of the companies we worked with:

Medical equipment retailer
Infusion therapy provider
AI skincare diagnostics tool
Longevity research fund

Collaborating with these projects taught us several valuable lessons on marketing for healthcare businesses.

We can divide the projects into B2C - offering HealthTech solutions directly to the end-users; and B2B - supplying medical solutions to hospitals, private practices, and medical professionals.

We had experience working with both. So we gathered the main challenges and learnings from our experience.

Challenge: Creatives in B2C HealthTech

It is often said that when marketing a B2C product it is best to relate to potential users by outlining common pains, adding humor, or applying attention-grabbing tactics. Adding visuals and texts that are relatable, and, sometimes, provoking can indeed have significant effects on conversion rates. B2C products and services can usually be approached with a greater level of creativity and edginess than those of B2B.

When talking about Healthcare, catchy taglines and bright visuals can be perceived as inappropriate. Health/MedTech B2C products require a much higher level of sensitivity. Our target audience consisted of a more fragile population: recovering from traumas and injuries, and struggling with (potentially dangerous) skin diseases. So there was no space for careless experimentation in visuals and copy.

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Our Solutions:

Defining the tone of voice was crucial. We used a firm, solution-oriented tone of voice, assuring but with no exaggerations. We have developed a methodology for creating Google Ads headlines and descriptions to make sure we clearly state who the product is for, how it can help, and what level of accuracy it can provide.

Challenge: Visuals

When developing the branding of HealthTech solutions, visual identity was one of the most challenging parts. Using real-life images of diseases on the website could cause anxiety and aversion. However, using images of healthy-smiling people recovered from diseases could send the wrong message too.

Our Solutions:

For the company that offers App-Diagnostics solutions, we have decided to use illustrations as the main part of visual identity. Illustrations were used on the website, in the app, and across infographics and presentations.

For a company that develops rehabilitation medical equipment, we have created 360-degree images of the equipment that helped the patients understand the devices visually.

Challenge: Sample Bias

When working with AI HealthTech companies, we had to take into account that the algorithms have been mainly trained on samples that exclude minorities and people of different ethnicities. 90% accurate results could be only guaranteed to people of Caucasian ethnicity.

Our Solutions:

We have launched ads targeting underrepresented areas and offered them the opportunity to use the product for free. This way we could both gather the needed data and provide the solution to the areas with less advanced healthcare. We also suggested to branch out a part of the company as a non-profit, which allowed us to make use of the Google Ads Grant for Non-Profits. This way we could scale to those regions faster and more efficiently.

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Challenge: Long and Complicated Customer Journeys

Decision-making in the Health Tech B2B industry is usually a long and complex process. Healthcare is a highly regulated and traditional industry. In order to make a decision, usually several decision-makers have to agree on a specific solution. Therefore, the challenge is how to communicate clearly with a variety of stakeholders with different interests.

Our Solutions:

In order to communicate effectively with various stakeholders, we first needed to establish a high-quality content strategy that would account for the needs of various groups of people. We employed an omnichannel strategy but much less limited than we would with other industries. We have heard an assumption that “medical decision-makers still spend their time scrolling Facebook and Instagram feeds in their free time”, however, we did not validate it. We decided to stick to 3 main channels:

Website blog, optimized for SEO, containing industry-related articles.
Google Ads using only the keywords that our target audience would use in their work
LinkedIn where business professionals from medical fields spend time networking and catching up on the latest trends. We believe that in an industry of this kind having less content and utilizing fewer channels is better. Using specific terminology vs generic descriptions has also proven to be the case.

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Challenge: Advertising Restrictions

As we have defined above, Google Advertisement was one of the key channels when it came to B2B HealthTech promotions. However, in order to avoid any speculations, misuse of sensitive patients data, medical and healthcare industries have a number of regulations when it comes to online advertisement. In Google Ads, specifically, those limitations are:

Generic and unclear copy in medical devices' landing pages can result in ads being disapproved. It is essential that ad copy clearly states that it targets healthcare professionals, not patients.
The type of imagery used in ads comes with a number of conditions, especially when it comes to photographs. Ex.: photos of a clinician administering a COVID-19 nasal swab flagged as “adult content”.
The healthcare-related advertiser certification will not help overcoming any of the personalized advertising restrictions, so remarketing lists, affinity and other audiences, demographic, and location targeting are still off the table.
In the health tech industry, a high-quality keyword strategy is paramount. It's essential to attract a very specific target audience who would both a) have the specific issue b) be interested in the specific solution.

Our Solutions:

As we continued experimenting with different creatives and copy, we have developed a working and efficient formula for Google Advertisement. We used illustrations instead of photographs in Display Ads, and Animated Videos for YouTube Ads. The copy was always clear, straight to the point with no room for interpretations. We always came up with a list of highly specific keywords and continuously exclude irrelevant ones. In the health industry, it's easy for the keywords to become too broad, therefore it's important to constantly track them and exclude irrelevant ones. We made sure that the ad copy, the keywords and the copy on the landing pages are consistent and deliver the same message.

Despite the complexities of HealthTech marketing, with a quality strategy and execution it has the potential to bring significant growth to the business. In our work, we discovered that in the case of the health tech concept, it's particularly important to spend sufficient time to understand the target audience, its needs and pain points and how your product can address them. Furthermore, it's important to be creative within the limits - to create content which attracts attention but remains professional and respectful.

Did you encounter any of the challenges we described above? Our team would be happy to help! Contact us and let's talk about how we could help your business.

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