Ultimate guide to smarter physician marketing campaign

The more a marketer knows about a specific healthcare provider, the greater that marketer’s ability to deliver relevant and meaningful content

Like many well-seasoned healthcare marketers, planning and executing outreach campaigns to target physicians may conjures up memories of poring over countless spreadsheets, with a feeling of dread that you'll be faced with a sparsely-filled hotel conference room on the day of the event. The lesson learned is that the success of any given physician marketing campaign relies on your ability to identify, understand and meaningfully engage the right physicians.

Healthcare marketers have a lot working against them to run effective outreach campaigns.

(1) Doctors can be hard to pinpoint. They change locations, re-align hospital affiliations or become employed . Knowing practice affiliations can make the differenc.

​(2) Networks can be hard to crack. Referral relationship are diverse, opaque and always evolving. The potential to tap into those networks often fall flat.
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(3) Behaviors can be hard to understand. It's challenging to find reliable information on whether doctors are involved in the delivery of care that matters to your product.

​Done right, physician marketing will reliably fill your sales pipeline by educating physicians on your product while cultivating relationships across your product's entire value chain. But to pull it off, especially under the constraints of finite resources, you need to approach your marketing campaigns with much more insight and precision.

How to get started creating a smarter physician marketing campaign

Carevoyance recently worked with a MedTech marketing team who was looking to support a hospital-sponsored outreach and education campaign. The hospital had recently installed their surgical equipment and had an eager radiation oncologist who wanted educated the local physician community on the advanced procedures afforded by the investment.
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The MedTech team turned to Carevoyance to find and engage the right set of referring physicians. We  followed a 5 step process for planning and executing a far superior physician marketing campaign.

Target and prioritize more precisely

​Start by defining targeting criteria matter most and work with a marketing partner that support the nuance. ​Consider how the following targeting criteria may inform your exploration:

• Specialty
• Number of procedures delivered, visits completed or prescriptions written
• Distribution of various diagnoses within their patient panel
• Number of patients shared
• Sunshine payments received

The ideal clinician will likely be represented by a combination of the above criteria. So prioritize your targeted list by assigning a score to account for each the inputs, weighting each criteria based on relative importance. 

Keep in mind ... for many physician marketing campaigns you may be targeting a different set of providers than those who normally buy you product or interact with your Sales Reps.

​Perhaps these targeted providers are referring partners or other clinicians in the community involved in the care of the desired patient population. ​

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Assign and fully empower your sales reps

It's likely you are going to need to engage your field-based operations to execute on your marketing campaign.

Technology makes it easier to map each opportunity to any given geography. Line up the new opportunities against existing sales territories to ensure you engage the right field-based team members.

You'll may get pushback from your field based team. Perhaps they are put off by the extra work. Or perhaps they are apprehensive about approaching new doc with which they don't have a relationship.

​Produce useful information for pre-call planning and push out engaging content to be leverage to book meetings and hook audiences.

Even though I had never met with the physician before, and had no pre-existing relationship, I looked 100%  better than the last guy my contact saw by bringing timely, personalized content to them.

The entire practice of physicians love the competitive insights and market intel I was able to share with them. It went a long way to build trust and rapport.
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​- Regional Sales Representative

Measure campaign effectiveness

​It's critical to define the measures that define success before launching the campaign. You should be interested in how active and engaged your Sales team is in the campaign - proxies could include how often team members interact with the data and reports made available to them. You should also be building out an Return on Investment for the campaign. Don't forget to include often overlooked costs such as time spent training the team and hours spent producing content. Monitor these metrics throughout the campaign so you can be quicker to make adjustments as needed.

Want to learn more on how to build a smarter physician outreach campaign?

Request a free case study about a capital equipment manufacturer delivered more value to their hospital partners.

Download a free copy of our Case Study - Build a Physician Marketing Campaign!