The No-Nonsense Guide to Demand Generation & Integrated Marketing
Are you “over” demand generation because, at this point, it just sounds like sales speak from agencies trying to get you to hire them as your marketing department?
We don’t blame you.
So many marketers have watered down and distorted this term, leaving HealthTech companies like yours without a clear direction for bringing awareness to your product and converting leads.
But this is the truth: you need competitive strategies to generate demand and gain traction in the market. Those strategies must work together and they must be integrated for your time, money, and energy to have any effect.
You need content marketing, paid media, SEO, lead nurturing, and performance analytics to get your customers’ attention, influence them to research you more, and ultimately buy your product or service.
How you orchestrate all of these demand generation strategies is up to you; we’re not here to say that Golden Spiral is the only way to get this done. We just know these are the essential components of successful marketing in the HealthTech space.
Clarified Definitions
Over the last decade, the concepts of “demand generation” and “integrated marketing” have lost much of their meaning and have been reduced to buzzwords and jargon in many circles.
For the sake of clarity, let’s define what Golden Spiral means by these terms.
Demand Generation
Demand generation is the process of consistently serving your prospects with the answer to their market problem at the right intervals. Buyers don’t necessarily care about your product but about solving their problems.
When they realize they have a problem, they begin the search for solutions. Your job is to make sure they find your product and recognize it as the solution to their problem. Demand generation is not a new term, but we still see fairly sophisticated marketers struggle to understand exactly what it means, and more importantly, how the various strategies within the demand generation process work together to drive growth.
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Integrated Marketing
Integrated marketing is the process of aligning your marketing channels to promote your products or services in tandem, typically through a strategic campaign. Integrated marketing also works to align the primary brand message that’s delivered through your marketing channels and assets.
5 Key Strategies for Demand Generation & Integrated Marketing in HealthTech
What ultimately matters is growth — you need to position your product as the solution to your prospects’ problems and then nurture those prospects to a closed deal. So, is there any real value to the phrases “integrated marketing” or “demand generation” for your HealthTech company? We think so.
We believe that all HealthTech companies need demand generation and integrated marketing – both are vital to your success. Demand generation strategies must be integrated and built upon one another.
Here are the top five to start with.
But remember, none of this helps if you don’t have your brand foundation in place. You may need to start there, fix your market positioning, then come back here.
1. Produce Meaningful Content
The way you present your product as the solution to your buyers’ problem(s) is through content – the definitive cornerstone of demand generation.
How much about your customers’ needs have you published? How much material about your solution is searchable online?
To drive conversions and build brand awareness, your content must be served and targeted to audiences via the right channels and optimized over time to drive the best results. The type of content you choose to create can exist in many formats:
Blog Posts
Periodic and consistent blog posts help drive traffic to your website, establish your authority, and increase conversions. Not only that, they can be shared via organic social posts, paid social campaigns, and email campaigns to provide key audiences with timely content about leading trends. At Golden Spiral, our team crafts blog posts that incorporate high-value keywords and relevant industry topics, which gives you the most mileage for your blog.
Social Media
You want to expand the reach of your content through social media, but building your social media presence requires a steady stream of valuable content. You want to create social posts that align with your editorial calendar and deliver on-brand messaging that drives traffic to your website. We recommend focusing social content development specifically on LinkedIn and Twitter to reach target audiences in the HealthTech space, and tailoring content to each platform’s style and audience.
Email Campaigns
An efficient, cost-effective method for delivering content marketing pieces to your target audience is email. Be sure to develop attention-grabbing subject lines and engaging copy to generate opens, clicks, and downloads. The result is more leads in your marketing funnel. Email campaigns also provide data about how users engage with your content. This information can be used to segment audiences and create even more tailored messaging in the future.
Rich Content
Rich content is an opportunity to deep dive into your brand and its offerings, sharing valuable insights with your target audience. Golden Spiral creates rich content including infographics, case studies, white papers, and more. Our content and design teams work hand in hand to deliver highly engaging content that captures attention.
You can expend as much creative energy as you want to craft the perfect piece of content. But it’s all for naught unless people can actually experience it. That’s where paid media and SEO come in.
2. Invest in Targeted Ads on Social or Search
Advertising works, and the entire industry has morphed. You don’t need a Super Bowl ad to make a splash. But you need to be doing something.
Sometimes your content might need a little boost to get in front of the right audience. Quickly serve it to highly targeted prospects and create lead capture opportunities via paid media efforts. These can include sponsored social media posts, display ads, paid search results, video ads, pop-ups, and more.
The Golden Spiral team utilizes paid and sponsored advertising options for our clients across various platforms, including:
- Google Ads
- Sponsored LinkedIn Updated
- Promoted Tweets
- And more!
3. Tailor Your Website with SEO-Rich Keywords
Everyone knows that appearing on the front page of a Google search result has an immediate effect on whether your content will be viewed or not. Continuously optimize your website and content so search engines serve your content to prospects via organic search results.
SEO is a constant uphill battle of applying short and long-term strategies to make sure content ranks highly on search engines, but once you’ve built a foundation, it becomes second nature in your content marketing process.
Our team focuses on the two primary areas of SEO:
Onsite SEO
Optimize your onsite SEO by implementing high-value keywords in your content. Research to find out what content is ranking well, and then weave it into your strategy.
Golden Spiral offers several strategic onsite SEO approaches that help your content rank higher, including
- Meta Data & Descriptions
- Image & Content Optimizations
- Monitoring & Addressing Errors
- 404/Redirects
- Algorithm Updates
Offsite SEO
Secure backlinks from third-party publications and digital citations – this will direct users back to your site. Backlinks will increase your overall site traffic and position you as a subject matter expert in your industry — two crucial factors that improve search visibility.
4. Nurture the Leads You Get
The modern customer is more digitally savvy than you think. You can’t ask for the sale in the first interaction. Your B2B customer conducts 12 searches before they make a decision. Are you with them through the entire journey?
Intentionally serve specific content to prospects, moving them through different stages of the sales funnel via email campaigns and remarketing.
For every single potential client you attract, you need to cultivate and sustain a relationship that will lead to a sale or conversion.
Creating nurture campaigns using email, organic content, paid content, rich content, and webinars will drive leads closer to the decision phase of the sales funnel. Golden Spiral helps clients create lead nurturing plans that build upon each other and align touch points throughout the lead generation cycle for maximum engagement.
5. Know What’s Going On and Measure It
Monitor, test, and optimize content throughout the demand generation process via consistent reporting and analysis.
At the end of the day, you need to show measurable results from your marketing efforts. It’s critical to establish and implement insightful measurements at the beginning of your demand generation launch, like project goals and KPIs. This will ensure accurate and holistic results.
We create analytics reports regularly and update the entire project team throughout the life cycle of your program(s). This data remains helpful as you hone and refine the process for future campaigns.
What’s Next?
At Golden Spiral, we offer two distinct paths within the Demand Generation practice:
Core Demand Generation Programs
We begin by leading a brand foundation workshop that establishes and identifies your company’s essence – your marketing position, your core values, your brand identity, and more. Once we’ve determined your Buyer Matrix℠, we launch into the various activities that will grow your market presence and differentiate your brand. These may include:
- Content Marketing & Strategy
- Lead Nurturing
- Paid Media
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Performance Measurement
- Graphic Design
- Website Support
- Custom Demand Generation Plans & Programs
If your needs don’t perfectly match our core demand generation program, we offer nuanced and bespoke plans and programs that include our Buyer Matrix℠ but can address specific needs, like a product launch campaign or team augmentation.
Interested in partnering with Golden Spiral? Contact us here to start a conversation. We can’t wait to speak with you!
