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4 B2B Healthcare Marketing Trends to Watch for in 2020

As a healthcare marketer you understand how important it is to stay on top of ongoing trends from both the marketing and healthcare worlds. It’s not easy! The healthcare landscape is constantly changing, new competitors are always entering the industry, and a whole new generation of buyers that use different channels, makes it difficult to keep up.  

To help you navigate these challenging waters, I’ve put together four B2B healthcare marketing trends that I believe need to be top-of-mind as we hit our stride in 2020.

1. Create Engaging Content
As the old saying goes: content is king. This will continue to be a key trend in 2020, but with a slight twist. It will be crucial for healthcare marketers to create content that converts not just content for content’s sake. 

Start by determining what your buyers are looking for. Interact with them and closely analyze their purchasing behaviors to help create content that converts, is intentional, and engages. 

While blogs, articles, and thought-leadership content still deserve a spot in your playbook, I see more and more organizations turning to interactive video content to better engage their target audience. A recent study from Demand Gen Report found that 91% of B2B buyers prefer interactive and visual content as opposed to static content. And with 68% of B2B healthcare buyers using video to compare products, you will certainly want to include video as part of your mix for 2020.

2. Provide Personalized Communications
The notion that healthcare buyers want personalized communications is not new.  But in 2020, B2B healthcare marketers should know that buyers will continue to expect a high level of personalization that is on par with what they receive from brands such as Amazon, Uber, and Netflix. Let’s look at the business buyer facts:

Remember your competitors are fierce and will pounce at the slightest indication that your client is open to looking at an alternative. So as you head into 2020, think about ways you can hone in on your buyer’s wants, needs, and triggers to provide the building blocks for unique, relevant, and tailored communications that they have come to expect. 

3. Reinvigorate Your Email Marketing
Many industry professionals are claiming that email is dead. And with inboxes being inundated with email after email, it’s easy to see why such claims are being made. However, according to Validity’s State of Email Marketing report, email marketing is holding steady for B2B organizations and still delivering results for most companies.

Although many are jumping on the bandwagon to abandon email marketing completely, a good mix of email marketing along with other outbound marketing techniques will round out your 2020 marketing strategy. This year, try reinvigorating your email marketing efforts by testing multiple subject lines, building new content, and strategically segmenting your email lists to create personalized communications that resonates with each segment of your target audience.

4. Strategically Invest in Social Media Strategy
It is no longer a question whether B2B companies should be on social media. All health IT companies or healthcare organizations should be active in some way on social media. But as we look into 2020, the key question will be how to strategically invest in your social media strategy to ensure you are captivating the right audience. Here are a few easy steps to get you started: 

  1. Start off by clearly defining your objectives for your social media presence
  2. Identify your targeted audience 
  3. Create content that will resonate with your audience
  4. Choose the right social media platform to reach that audience
  5. Monitor and analyze activity

Step 4 is where you want to spend some energy. Ensure you are using the social channels where the majority of your target audience is active. For B2B healthcare companies, the lion’s share is Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter has a whopping 145 million daily active users with 67% of all B2B businesses using Twitter as a digital marketing tool. As for LinkedIn, it is where 80% of all business leads originate and why 94% of marketers use it to publish content. If you’re not currently active on these channels, spend some time rethinking about your 2020 social media strategy to begin incorporating them into your plan. 

Good luck in 2020!

About the author

Brittany Quemby

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