Enter Your Email Address to Receive a
Copy of MedicExhange Member Demograhpics

As healthcare business solutions continue to evolve - almost on a daily basis - so too do the marketing strategies behind them.

This point was brought home even further during a recent gathering of e-mail and digital marketers at Silverpop's annual conference, which offered a variety of sessions in marketing to its B2B and B2C customers. The common theme throughout the event, which catered to folks in a variety of industries, could be summed up in one word: evolution. 

As Bill Nussey, president and CEO of Silverpop - a provider of digital marketing platforms - said in his keynote, "Everything we know about marketing will change." He also made the point that "old-school marketing has gone as far as it can," explaining that customer experience is now eclipsing products when it comes to purchase decisions. He cited Apple as a brand that has taken this concept and successfully embraced it, creating an experience around its product that consumers have identified with and now want to be a part of. 

It seems those in the healthcare B2B field have certainly taken this idea and run with it - Epic being a great example. It is a company that has eschewed traditional forms of media marketing, and instead seems to rely heavily on the good word of its customers to attract new clients - creating a secret club-like atmosphere among them all.This field, perhaps more than any other in the business world right now, is seeing a tremendous amount of change in a tremendously short period of time. Product marketers are trying to keep up with product developers, as demand for healthcare IT services increases as a result of healthcare reform. 

Most, like Epic, have already come to realize that word-of-mouth marketing - no matter how slickly packaged - is the key to retaining current clients and attracting new ones. Even in healthcare B2B, friends and colleagues are discussing products - and ultimately making purchase decisions - in the social networking space. 

How will marketers in this industry take this knowledge, keep up and move forward? 

"I think [marketers] will need to respond to the vacuum of authenticity and the now-habitual draw toward immediacy," says Tricia Wilkerson, Senior Marketing Specialist at Conifer Health Solutions. "The tools B2B healthcare marketers use to answer the audience's responses to today's marketplace of noise could be: the wider-spread adoption of "trend" tools such as apps and QR codes, [which are two-dimensional codes that can be scanned by smartphone cameras to automatically pull up text, photos, videos, music and URLs*]; the intimacy of peer-to-peer forums; or the return to deeper audience segmentation and messaging practices, to name a few. No matter what trend B2B marketers embrace, the medium is never the message - only the method. 

"Chasing or predicting trends can become a budget and time trap for B2B healthcare marketers," she adds. "However, I do think it's vitally important we continue to introduce and embrace new trends in our industry ... and assign budget dollars to such efforts. Healthcare is notoriously behind other industries when responding to technological advances and audience expectations, so it remains important that marketers push the industry with smart trend adoption."

Source: Billians HealthDATA