It’s no secret that the medical device industry is a competitive world. With so many companies constantly innovating new devices, it can be tough to differentiate and educate providers and patients about your newest life-changing innovations.
How do you create the right awareness among target patient populations (especially if it’s sold in a DTC environment)? How do you reach providers to educate them appropriately and become the new standard of care? When you consider potential patient populations that would benefit from your therapy but have no idea it exists and it isn’t top of mind for their provider, reaching them where they are with educational messaging becomes paramount to market success.
What is Geotargeting?
Often overlooked in the toolbox of marketing quickly and efficiently to build product awareness is using geotargeting to enhance your digital campaigns. Geotargeting is a marketing technique that involves targeting individuals based on their geographic location and other targeting criteria such as intent, demographics or behaviors. This can be enhanced through the use of geofencing, which is a process of creating a virtual boundary around a specific area (sometimes VERY specific), and using it strategically to surgically target the right audience. For example, when someone enters a geofenced area, they can be targeted with information about a product or service and then be further remarketed to later when they’re no longer in the geofenced area.
Why does Geotargeting matter to Medical Device companies?
Successful geotargeting allows you to deliver your message to target providers and potential patients with increased efficiency over less targeted methods. That means you can focus your marketing efforts on the locations and audience groups that matter most, making your budget go further. Think of this in contrast to broader-based awareness campaigns in which you’re paying to put your message in front of a wide swath of the population, including many people who will never be part of your target audience. Not to suggest those broader campaigns don’t play a role (they do), but due to their innate inefficiency, they should never be the only part of the mix.
Incorporating geotargeting into your campaigns means utilizing location and demographic specificity that enhances awareness, drives meaningful patient/provider conversations, and–when applicable–boosts DTC lead generation. There’s really nothing like reaching the right audience with the right message when the need for your solution is top of mind. So if you’re looking for an edge over your competitors, the effective use of geotargeting is a must-have for any medical device company.
How can you put Geotargeting into practice?
The short answer is a lot of different ways. Geofencing is a technique that is highly customized to any company’s specific situation, but here are a few foundational starting points we find are important to many campaigns:
Demographic Targeting and Lookalike Audiences – As with any campaign, you need to do your homework first to understand your audiences demographics, buying behaviors, intent, psychographic triggers, etc. Without that knowledge, you’re taking a shot in the dark and wasting valuable advertising budget. But then in a sophisticated campaign, you can use that knowledge to hypothesize which characteristics might apply to other, similar audiences who might also become potential patients or champion providers. We call these lookalike audiences and they can be a powerful tool in expanding patient awareness.
Geofencing – As mentioned above, this is allows you to set specific geographic boundaries around where your campaigns will be seen. Assuming you have already done the work to understand your audience well and developed sound hypotheses about potential lookalike audiences, you should have a sense of where they spend some of their time (maybe a type of provider’s office or a specific type of medical conference, for example). You can focus specific messaging campaigns around those areas to reach audiences with messaging that establishes first contact.
Remarketing – Remember that time Tide spent millions on a really well-produced Superbowl ad but didn’t bother to invest in a follow-up campaign to capture the value of it? Yeah, I think their CFO does too. Let’s not do that here after you have invested in expanding your audience. Remarketing in this kind of situation is the follow-up that really explodes the value of a campaign. You have already made contact with a newly-expanded (but still highly-targeted) audience and now have the ability to keep reaching them to reinforce your message and move them down the funnel to become a patient or a champion of your therapy. Don’t waste the opportunity.
Ready to start your Geotargeting campaign?
The effectiveness of geotargeting as a marketing tool for medical device companies cannot be understated. When used correctly, it can help you reach your target audience with greater efficiency and at a lower cost than other methods. If you’re looking to get an edge on your competition, geotargeting is a must-have for any medical device company.
If you’re looking to improve awareness and action in your next medical device marketing campaign, consider using geotargeting to gain an edge in campaign efficiency. Contact Zozimus today to learn more about how we can help you to use geotargeting for your next campaign.
Nick Lowe
Senior Partner
Nick is focused on building an elite team of experts that can do extraordinary work for our clients. Since founding Zozimus, the agency has grown steadily to a full-service offerings supported by industry veterans and rising stars alike. Nick has spent a lot of time building an organization and structure that can scale, but it’s his involvement in key client projects that makes him most excited. Nick’s focus is on our medical device and healthcare clients, and is a thought leader in marketing this industry. When he’s not making his client’s dreams come true, you can find Nick sipping on a fine California wine, or cooking up something yummy in the kitchen with his kids.
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