As a healthcare vendor seeking to land hospital clients, your main objective has to be addressing what the hospital c-suite wants from you. Here’s how you do that.
“What’s in it for me?”
The very first thing any marketing strategy needs to address is what’s in it for the customer. It’s not enough to create content that shows off your technology or even that features the problems you solve. Instead, you need to show exactly why that problem is important to the c-suite and what you are going to do about it.
The thing is, there can be a big difference between what a company thinks is important to their customer and what that customer believes is important. If you are not already absolutely crystal clear on this, then invest the time to do some voice-of-customer research before you create your campaign. Because if you build a campaign around a report that is focused on the wrong issue, you have wasted a lot of time and money.
I remember once seeing a report that a company had already commissioned from a marketing agency. It was slick and glossy; the photography and design were impeccable. The problem was, it gave about as much information on what they did as their elevator speech. They didn’t dive into real-life situations or showcase the results of their work. In other words, it never answered their customer’s primary question of “what’s in it for me?” In the healthcare world, that’s a lost opportunity.
Social Proof
Hospitals are giant economies so it’s no surprise that their c-suites are loathe to make a mistake. Say, by investing in the wrong vendor. That’s why hospital leaders will always want to know how many other hospitals you have worked with. More than that, they will want to know how similar those hospitals are to their own. Same number of beds? Rural? Critical access? Academic medical center? Did they feel it was worthwhile? What results did they get? If you don’t have an example that’s a match, you might be out of luck.
One of the most common struggles I help clients deal with is how to convey social proof when the prominent, well-respected hospitals they work with won’t give them permission to use their names in a marketing piece. In these cases, your best bet is to describe the hospital without using their name. For example, “1000-bed academic medical center in a major metropolitan area.”
Convenience
Hospital leaders may like your solution and they may feel confident in your social proof – but if they feel you are too difficult to work with, you are still going to miss out. That’s why your content needs to do a great job of highlighting how easy your process was for the hospital.
Sometimes, of course, your process is not especially easy. If you’re in this situation, one approach is to break down your process into smaller chunks and talk about those. You can also focus on how little work is needed of one particular team (like, for instance, the IT team). Or cut to the chase and share a customer quote saying how, in the end, you were well worth the inconvenience.
Your job is to help the hospital c-suite understand.
Once you get the hospital c-suite to understand “what’s in it for me?”, who else is on board, and how easy it is to implement, you will be much closer to landing the account.
Photo by Samuel Scalzo on Unsplash.