5 Powerful Tactics for Medical Device Promotion & Why You Need Them

Imagine this: You launch a campaign promoting a new medical device and in just 3 months, 25% of your accounts moved down the sales funnel. Similar results are possible, but only if you build your medical device promotional and advertising strategy around tactics that’ll grab the attention of healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Here are some of the best ways to promote medical devices and why you need to introduce them into your campaigns right now.

5 of the Best Medical Device Promotion Tactics to Boost Performance

Digital medical device promotion should never be a one-size-fits-all solution. The industry, HCPs, and the greater healthcare world are too complex for that to be the case. That’s why it’s important to build your strategy based on objectives and the HCPs you’re targeting.

That said, there are a handful of tactics that just about all medical device promotion and advertising strategies should include: video advertising, contextual advertising, point-of-care advertising, native advertising, and mobile and in-app advertising. These tactics are especially relevant to medical device advertising, as they allow you to:

• Compete in a crowded market (there are over 6,500 medical device companies in the U.S.)
• Overcome ad fatigue (many of the 6,500 medical device companies are competing for the same HCPs’ attention, leading to ad fatigue)
• Reach HCPs across multiple channels and devices (HCPs now have access to over 10 connected devices)

Medical Device Promotion Tactic #1: Video Ads

It’s impossible to deny video’s popularity. Case and point: people watch 16 hours of video every week and 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.^1,2 Given video’s hold on the population, video ads are the go-to format for most advertisers — 85% of businesses use them.³ They’re also effective. People are 27.4X more likely to click-through video ads than standard banners while video content is 1,200X more effective than other formats.^4,1

Given its impact, it makes sense that every digital ecosystem supports video ads, giving you plenty of options. For example, you can use telehealth video ads to promote your medical devices when HCPs are using EHRs during the workday.

Similarly, you can use in-stream video ads — on YouTube, for example — to engage HCPs when they’re immersed in video content. Whichever video route you take when deciding how to promote a medical device, take advantage of the power of video to bring your ads — and the medical devices they depict — to life.

Medical Device Promotion Tactic #2: Mobile & In-App Advertising

If video advertising is at the top of your list of medical device promotional tactics, mobile and in-app advertising should be number two. Why? Because 51% of HCPs’ time spent online is on mobile devices and four in five of them use smartphones daily.⁵ The proliferation of mobile will continue as patients and HCPs alike opt for digital interactions over in-office visits.

Beyond helping you get your ads on popular handheld devices, the ubiquity of mobile in everyday life gives you an easy way to engage HCPs in and out of the office. For example, you could combine geofencing and mobile advertising to engage HCPs while they’re in a work mindset, i.e., at a conference, doctor’s office, cardiac center, blood bank, urgent care facility, addiction treatment center — the possibilities are endless. You’ll reach the right people, at exactly the right time.

In-app advertising is a powerful tool because you can identify HCPs and then target them on the top apps that doctors use in practice settings, such as MedPage, Mescape, and UpToDate. In other words, you can engage HCPs at high-intent moments.

Medical Device Promotion Tactic #3: Contextual Advertising

It’s human nature to care more about something relevant. If you’re a marketer that’s concerned about showing your boss better marketing reports, you’re more likely to click on an ad from a marketing analytics company than, say, an ad from a company producing construction equipment.

When applied to medical device promotions, this is called contextual advertising, a tactic that helps you align your ads with contextually relevant content, i.e., promoting automated external defibrillators (AEDs) to HCPs when they’re visiting a webpage about “cardiology,” “cardiology devices,” or “devices for cardiac arrest.”

Just like a marketing analytics provider would see better results when advertising to marketers consuming marketing-related content, you’re more likely to see the same when advertising to HCPs while they’re reading medical content. And it works. Incorporating a super-specific keyword strategy into a contextual advertising campaign can increase brand awareness by up to 93%.⁶

Medical Device Promotion Tactic #4: Point-of-Care Advertising

Point-of-care advertising goes hand-in-hand with contextual advertising because it delivers timely and relevant medical device ads. The difference between the two tactics is that point-of-care advertising uses location-based technology to target ads based on an HCP’s location. This ability is precisely why it’s a tactic worth including in any campaign promoting your medical devices.

By using point-of-care advertising, you can focus your ad dollars on a specific group of HCPs who are in the medical-device mindset, and therefore, more likely to engage with your ads. For example, you could promote a new device for knee replacements to HCPs attending the Annual Meeting – American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Because you’re targeting HCPs who are in the right mindset, you’re reducing media waste. How? You’re not spending to reach HCPs who may not be ready to hear from you.

Medical Device Promotion Tactic #5: Native Advertising

As more medical device companies pour dollars into online advertising, HCPs will see more ads. This is an inevitably given the rise of digital health, but it presents you with a challenge: Some of the HCPs on your target list will grow frustrated with the increased ad load — 84% percent of respondents in a global consumer survey said ad interruptions were too frequent.⁷ While some may view this as a reason to reduce ad spending, it’s actually an opportunity if you approach it in the right way.

Enter native advertising, a promotional tactic that keeps your ads in front of your target HCPs, but in a way that naturally blends into the surrounding web content. Said another way, you’ll still see value from your ads, but not at the expense of HCPs. This is one of the primary reasons native advertising is so powerful. Native ad formats have been shown to reach CTRs of approximately 0.3%, compared to 0.12% for standard IAB ad formats.⁹

Final Thoughts on Medical Device Promotion

Competition in the medical device industry is fierce, which is why so many companies are building promotional strategies around online ads. Understandably, this makes generating HCP engagement difficult. The solution? Promote your devices using tactics that’ll help you stand out and engage HCPs when and where they’re spending their time online. That means video and mobile ads, contextual advertising, point-of-care advertising, and native advertising.