How GE Healthcare Humanized Their B2B Marketing Strategy
One of the main issues when it comes to marketing medical devices is that it can be difficult to know who your promotional efforts should be aimed at. On the one hand, it’s the healthcare institutions which are ultimately the purchasers and, on the other, it’s the general public who will ultimately be the ones who receive the benefit of the technology.
More often than not, medical device marketing ends up being targeted at the healthcare organisations using traditional B2B strategies. However, GE Healthcare is trying to shift this paradigm and add a more human element to its medtech marketing.
Humanising B2B
Key to GE Healthcare’s philosophy is the idea that companies should move away from B2B or B2C marketing as concepts and instead focus on the common factor which exists in both arenas – people.
One thing GE became aware of is that buyers had often already made their minds up before they even met with a sales person. This led to a situation where content designed to greet the prospect at the top of the sales funnel was already largely irrelevant. The position which would have once been described as “top of the funnel” could now be more appropriately described as closer to the middle.
Therefore, opportunities now exist to deliver content further upstream which would have previously been thought appropriate and start nurturing those leads earlier.
Automation and other digital tools are also helping GE Healthcare make their marketing more human focused. That may seem like a contradiction in terms, but these tools can help GE track customer behaviour and create personalised prescriptive content strategies which can use existing channels to deliver bespoke messaging based on factors such as the specific role within the healthcare industry (oncologist for example).
Personalised marketing targeted to healthcare providers is one consideration but, as we’ve already touched on, the recipients of care should also be front of mind when it comes to humanising a medical device company’s marketing strategy.
“What Matters”
It’s this human-centric aspect of medical device deployment which GE wanted to highlight when designing its new campaign. Named “What Matters,” the campaign wanted to focus on the real-world impact of GE’s products.
Medical Device Salespeople can talk about advances in medical device hardware and software until they’re blue in the face, but GE Healthcare’s What Matters campaign demonstrates how you can make far more meaningful connections by highlighting the human stories behind them. Stories such as the baby which can go home for the first time, the grandparent who can attend their grandchild’s school play, or the child who can continue with their studies.
“More important than the things GE does are the reasons they do them, and that’s to create personal outcomes that are important to us,” said Executive Creative Director at BBDO New York, the agency behind the campaign, Michael Aimette. “She doesn’t care that we developed an algorithm to help stabilise babies’ temperatures, or that we designed an advanced incubator with minimal noise. What matters to her is that her daughter was born five weeks early, but she’ll be coming home tomorrow.”
These stories help remind us that these devices are more than silicone and plastic. They have the potential to change lives. The difference between having to miss a family occasion or being able to attend it may not seem huge to healthcare practitioners at the coalface of the industry, but to those it directly affects, it’s huge.
Creating emotional connections is a core tenant of humanised marketing and the What Matters campaign has that in spades.
“The creative team found a great tension in pointing out that people, all of us, probably aren’t all that interested in how GE does the amazing things that they do,” added Aimette. “What we do care about is how all that stuff makes a difference in our lives. So, we set out to tell very simple stories that everyone can relate to and illustrate how GE stands for something greater than the sum of its innovations.”
Final Thoughts
The modern landscape of digital marketing opens many opportunities for traditionally pure B2B industries to connect with wider and more diverse audiences than ever before. Whether through shifting the goalposts of personalised content marketing, or emotional campaigns such as What Matters, medical device brands have so many tools to help them promote their critical products.
Digital multichannel and social media marketing is set to be a hot topic at MedForce 2019, taking place in June at the nHow Hotel Berlin. Please download the agenda today for more information and insights.