Today an increasing number of healthcare professionals, including physicians, are very much active on social media platforms. Be it networking with peers or interacting with patients; doctors are making use of social media extensively. Even statistics report supporting such claims say that about 36% of physicians use social media to interact and network with other healthcare professionals. Going further, the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog reports that social networking sites like LinkedIn have 360,000 members alone from the U.S., which consists of physicians and surgeons.
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn’s users are mostly professionals. Even doctors prefer LinkedIn more as privacy policies are much stricter. And as physicians don’t prefer too much engagement and are very selective and private in their nature, they make use of LinkedIn more than any other social networking site. Hence, if medical marketers want to connect and engage with physicians, then they need to develop an efficient LinkedIn strategy that works in their favor.
Here are the five best strategies that B2B healthcare marketers can use to draw physician’s attention and market their products to them on LinkedIn:
Join Relevant Groups
LinkedIn is an ideal social media platform to make professional connections. Even it allows medical marketers the opportunity to join groups and participate in relevant discussions to draw attention. There are many healthcare industry-specific groups where marketers will find professionals, decision-makers, and executives from various healthcare organizations. By joining these groups, marketers can be a part of the ongoing conversations, answer questions, share insights, and engage with targeted physicians.
By being members of healthcare-related medical groups, B2B healthcare marketers can engage, interact, network, and make their presence felt within its members. Later this connection and engagement can be used to run LinkedIn marketing campaigns promoting your healthcare brand to a broader audience relevant for your products and healthcare services. This will definitely help build a strong relationship with potential customers.
Establish Yourself As Thought Leaders
For reaching decision-makers and professionals from your industry, LinkedIn is the place that every marketer must explore. Even for healthcare marketing, medical organizations must use LinkedIn for connecting with B2B sales leads from their targeted area of specialization within the medical sector. Also, LinkedIn is an excellent platform for companies to build credibility and win customer trust. And for that, marketers would require to establish themselves as thought leaders who have a strong influence within the LinkedIn community.
According to market reports, physicians and doctors mostly interact with pharmaceutical companies through social media, and if anyhow you fail to project your reliable image, you are likely to lose their trust. So, marketers must focus on winning the trust of healthcare practitioners by showing their knowledge and expertise in the field. To avoid missing out on B2B marketing opportunities dues to trust issues, medical marketers must establish a positive presence through sharing and publishing influencer posts on LinkedIn groups. When content comes from an individual with a good number of followers rather than a company profile, physicians start believing. So, the first thing marketers should do is optimize their individual profiles and share content from there as personalized interactions work better here.
Promote Customer Testimonials and Reviews
If you are into the healthcare business for quite some time, then obviously you will have a good customer base comprising physicians, doctors, surgeons, and other practitioners. Why not use the experience of your happy customers and promote it on LinkedIn profile, medical groups in which you are a member? The idea works great as when a doctor sees that his peers are giving good reviews about your healthcare business and are recommending it to others, they are most likely to get influenced and express interest in your healthcare solutions. Client testimonials and reviews prove to be an effective marketing tool when shared and promoted as it helps build credibility and attract new healthcare leads.
Make Use of Sponsored Ads on LinkedIn
Healthcare marketing isn’t an easy job. Especially on a social platform like LinkedIn, where every company is trying to reach their potential customers. The competition gets fierce and to make your way through the crowd and get your healthcare brand noticed is a challenge altogether.
Every day healthcare professionals receive hundreds or more email marketing campaigns, messages, and connect request on LinkedIn. Making your way to the top amidst the many sales campaigns and connecting with your prospect requires an effective social media and content marketing strategy. And these strategies need the support of sponsored ads to cut through the competitive space. Using sponsored ads, marketers can reach a broader customer base and even run targeted campaigns by location, seniority, company, industry, etc. LinkedIn allows marketers to narrow down their audience for sponsored ads so that your messages land into the inbox of the relevant audience only.
Research to Know More
LinkedIn allows medical marketers to know more about their targeted audience. For instance, if your target is a physician, you can research about him and know in detail their specific interests, pain points, technologies they use, medical device and medicine related perceptions, and much more. This information can be used to optimize direct marketing efforts like email marketing.
By researching on LinkedIn about doctor and physicians profiles, healthcare marketers can get access to some valuable information based on which they can segment their physicians email list and develop effective medical email marketing campaigns with relevant content.
