How to operationalize your medtech marketing strategy

After months of planning, your medtech marketing strategy is ready to launch.

You've researched your market, established customer personas, and identified which channels you're targeting. You have some hard goals and KPIs defined, as well as a firm understanding of your product's positioning and pricing. Ideally, key opinion leaders or other experts are teed up in your contacts list, if not already in partnership with your organization.

In medtech marketing, even the best-laid plans can go awry when it's time to operationalize. While unexpected circumstances can only be accounted for to a certain point, there are plenty of avoidable workflow inefficiencies and other mistakes that can have a major impact on the success of a product at launch and beyond.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution to bring a marketing strategy to life, but there are a few tools and tactics nearly any organization can leverage for better results. When it's time to operationalize your program, consider the following guidance through the lens of your unique resources, goals, and timeline.

1. Use automation to scale efforts

Marketing automation platforms are invaluable tools for operationalizing marketing strategies. Whenever possible, you should automate repetitive tasks to free your team to focus on higher-level strategy and creative work that requires more hands-on attention.

Tools like MailChimp, HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud can streamline routine marketing processes like email marketing campaigns, lead nurturing workflows, and social media scheduling.

While ChatGPT and other large language models probably aren't ready to replace your human writer (at the very least, they should be overseen by a human editor), they're useful for generating outlines or drafts of emails, social posts, and other marketing copy. They can also help you quickly iterate templated copy or present ideas in a different voice or context.

Automating your workflows doesn't mean working on autopilot. Be sure to continuously update and revise your automated processes as you get new market insights as well as performance data on conversion rates, costs per lead, customer acquisition costs, and other key metrics. You can use analytics tools to understand this data faster and make more informed decisions.

2. Streamline collaboration with the right tools and processes

Marketing teams shouldn't operate in a silo. Operationalizing your strategy will involve sales, product teams, and customer success departments. You can help build alignment through regular cross-functional meetings, shared KPIs, and collaborative tools that keep everyone on the same page.

Digital project management and productivity tracking platforms are widely available at many price points and are invaluable for aligning efforts within your team or across departments. If your budget is miniscule at best, even a Gantt chart on a whiteboard is a lot better than nothing.

Consider creating service-level agreements between marketing and sales (or other relevant functions) to define handoff points and response times. Documenting everyone's roles and responsibilities will minimize confusion and streamline collaboration as teams evolve and members come and go.

Analytical tools and intelligence platforms-like Definitive Healthcare's, for instance-can also aid in collaboration by providing an up-to-date source of insights to shape ongoing targeting and messaging efforts across teams. More on those soon.

3. Know when to outsource

If you have limited internal resources, working with freelancers or an agency can help you operationalize your medtech marketing strategy despite shortcomings in expertise or availability.

When internal teams are spread thin or focused on high-priority projects, repetitive tasks like social media management, template-oriented graphic design, and email campaign execution can be outsourced to free up internal resources. Outsourcing can also bring in fresh perspectives and access to advanced tools or systems.

Hour to hour, outsourcing is generally more expensive than paying for work in house, but it can still be more cost-effective in certain situations. Small-to-medium medtech organizations, for instance, may not need full-time specialists all year long, but could benefit from the extra help during product launches. Plus, external partners can often ramp up a project without the delays involved in hiring and onboarding full-time employees.

Keep your intelligence up to date

A data-driven strategy is a must in the fast-paced world of modern healthcare. For medtech marketing, that means maintaining a steady stream of insights into patient populations, healthcare professionals and organizations, and other factors shaping your sales territories.

Unless you have a full-time team of data scientists at your disposal, intelligence gathering and management is a process that's typically best left to an external partner. Getting comprehensive, up-to-date, and accurate information is a full-time job, and it's well worth partnering with experts to do it right.

The right intelligence should provide current perspectives on the patients, providers, facilities, and technologies within your market. This should include analytical visualization and reporting tools to ease collaboration and help your medtech sales teams showcase the impact of your product.

The Definitive Healthcare platform gives medtech sales and marketing teams the intelligence they need to target and engage the most relevant providers, as well as the tools necessary to create sales collateral and communicate key insights easily. Want to put your medical device marketing plan into play faster? Sign up for a free trial today and see how we can help.

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