Top Tips For Marketing Healthcare Innovations

Healthcare, pharmaceuticals, MedTech and life sciences marketing is a difficult field, as due to the nature of the products for sale, the priorities for marketing teams are in many cases considerably different from marketing other products.

With organisations such as the Advertising Standards Agency having very specific rules about what you can and cannot write in advertising material about a product, as well as different medical innovations having very different audiences, here are some top tips when marketing healthcare products.

Get Approval

If your product is a medical device as defined in the law as any device that is used for:

• diagnosing, preventing, treating, monitoring or lessening the effect of a disease or injury,
• investigating, replacing or modifying part of the anatomy, or a bodily system,
• controlling conception.

You need to follow the MHRA’s guidelines to ensure they are safe and suited for the purpose they were designed for, such as providing adequate clinical data from trials and investigations.

Know Your Audience

Are you planning on selling your product, technology or service to individual patients or doctors?

Much like how selling to a business is different to selling to an end-user, selling your product to doctors will involve a different process than creating a product that patients can pick up at a pharmacy.

Selling to doctors involves personal communication, meetings and pitching your technology, responding effectively to feedback, whilst selling to consumers is about emphasising what your product does and how it can help people in their everyday lives.

Use A Multifaceted Approach

There are a lot of marketing tools out there that can get your product attention, such as social media, print media in relevant publications, video, radio and television advertising, and direct marketing.

Tailor your messaging to the strengths of each media you opt for and consider the reach and demographics your product is aimed for.

For example, given that many social media platforms have younger demographics, if you have a product intended to help people struggling with medical conditions that primarily emerge later in life, it may not be financially prudent to invest heavily in advertising on certain platforms.