Traditionally, medical conferences, trade shows, and advertising in medical publications have been popular for healthcare lead generation… but nowadays, my inbox sees plenty of emails like this one:
I guess someone bought a list of emails with mine included, and now they won’t leave me alone.
This is a common place to begin generating healthcare leads if you’re selling software or other goods to clinics or similar healthcare businesses.
Today, the hippo and I are diving into two of the most used funnels. We’ve seen strong results with the second funnel, especially, but the first one is worth mentioning because of how popular it is.
Table of Contents
If you prefer this mini-guide in video format:
1. Are email lists the best way to generate healthcare leads?
It’s common for businesses doing healthcare lead generation to buy email lists and spam them with their offers, like you saw in my example.
The hippo points out that it’s against the law, but you’d be surprised how rarely businesses get in trouble for it (not that it’s a recommendation!)
The idea of getting access to thousands of “relevant” leads instantly, for virtually no money, sounds sexy as hell.
“We just need 1% to work out and we’re golden,” scream the team to each other in excitement…
But one percent of people who have no clue or interest in who you are, and aren’t looking to buy your product, is a HIGH success rate with email campaigns.
For starters, how many of those email addresses are vetted and actually active when you contact them? How many can you really reach without hitting the spam folder?
That’s a good chunk of the leads gone already.
But there are sometimes a couple of leads that respond, meaning it feels like it works, so we keep doing it… But we get increasingly more desperate since the results are… slim pickings, and KPIs have to be met.
Sometimes marketers take it to the next level and automatically opt everyone into an email sequence without permission. Meaning, you have to actively unsubscribe if you don’t want ongoing spam from them.
Charming.
As the hippo says, we marketers are a… friendly bunch.
All of this means that the important work isn’t getting the leads, but qualifying them and building the relationship that leads to the sale. You have to get lucky to hit the right timing where you send the email, and the lead is looking for your exact type of service.
While there’s no magic formula for how many emails to include in your sequence or what to say to land the sales meetings, the longer time you have to build the relationship and show your value, the better your chances are.
Meaning, all other things being equal, the more emails you can get them to open, the higher your chances of landing the deal.
It’s difficult to suppress the urge to talk about what your brand can help them do, but as the hippo points out, when you’re out with friends, do you enjoy when someone ONLY talks about themselves the entire time?
Whether it’s in real life or via email, it gets rather boring after a while.
Instead, offering free value and helping solve their problems goes a long way.
I bet you can see where this is going… It looks like a quick win, but isn’t really one when you get down to brass tacks. Building that relationship takes forever.
Fortunately, it isn’t the only approach out there. Let’s move on to the second digital funnel we’ll examine today.
2. The most popular healthcare lead generation funnel
Building a relationship to make the sale can take forever with the typically long buying cycle we see in healthcare.
Someone a lot smarter than I came up with a good way to look at this: the five stages of awareness as described in Breakthrough Advertising. Looking at your leads this way makes it easier to decide how to pitch them depending on which stage they’re at.
- Unaware: you don’t realize you have a problem (you don’t know you need that new ERP system)
- Problem aware: you realize you have a problem, but don’t know how to solve it (you know your current systems are breaking at the seams, but you’re not sure of the best way to solve it)
- Solution aware: you realize you have a problem and know of some ways to solve it (you know your current ERP is screwed and you probably need a new one)
- Product aware: you know the problem, the solutions, and certain brands or products that can solve it (you know you need a new ERP system, and you’re aware of a few options)
- Most aware: you’re aware of all of the above, along with most ways and brands to solve the problem (you need that new ERP system, and you have a shortlist of a few good-sounding options)
In the first healthcare lead generation funnel, we examined buying email lists. Here you bet that you get lucky enough to reach someone at one of the later stages of awareness at the time you’re pitching.
A lot of things have to go right for that to work.
In this next funnel, you’re betting that some of these buyers are searching for information and that you can get in front of them when they do.
The search keywords they use will clue you in on which stage of awareness they’re in. For example, you can target leads searching for competitors, reviews, or pricing of a particular product. That suggests that they are close to a buying decision, and it’s time for you to jump in with pricing and benefits.
You can get in front of them with organic SEO content or search ads. The hippo recommends ads at first, since you’ll get results quicker so that’s what I’ll use in this example.
If you can get them to click on your ad and leave their email address, you can automatically send them to the same email sequence as in the first funnel we looked at. You’re basically at the same stage as when we purchased the email lists.
It costs more money, time, and resources to get here… So why even bother?
It’s well worth it because you’re now talking to qualified leads as opposed to random leads.. and more importantly, you have clues on where they are in the buying process.
That means you can tailor the content specifically to them, which makes it easier for your sales rep to close the deal, and I bet they’ll land a whole lot more deals throughout the year.
It sounds sexy as hell.
Because it is… and that’s the problem!
Everyone feels the same way, so the competition is stiff for some search keywords.
There are several ways you can work around this problem, though.
One way to solve it is to catch the leads earlier in their decision making using different keywords to reach them when they’re, say, warm instead of red hot, and guide them the rest of the way. You’re able to influence them almost on autopilot before your competitors.
It’s a lot more work for your marketing team, but the results are well worth it!
How do you beat the competition?
The problem with healthcare lead generation campaigns that work well is that they attract competition, which drives up the cost per lead across the entire funnel.
At first, the leads didn’t get many pitches, so it didn’t take as much to land the deal. The email sequences didn’t have to be as tight; they could be more hard-selling and direct to the point, and life for the sales rep was easier, too.
With more competition, the ads get more expensive, the leads don’t qualify as easily, and they aren’t as impressed by the content you’re sending them either.
The sales cycle gets longer, the closing rate drops, and the cost to acquire a deal goes up quite a bit.
Things look kinda bleak when you’ve seen the performance in the good old days.. So what the hell do you do?
The hippo says there are several growth levers to work with. For example:
- Find new lead sources that aren’t as competitive
- Optimize the ad and landing page for a better conversion rate
- Optimize the current email sequence to talk less about your brand and more about solving their problems and helping them
- Build funnels targeting leads during earlier awareness stages and warm them up for longer
- Build funnels targeting multiple stakeholders (e.g. the CTO, CMO, CFO, etc.)
- Install granular tracking so you can understand the exact bottlenecks in your funnels
- Improve the sales reps’ performance
- Charge more for the product so you can spend more on the leads
Each of these levers can help close more deals. If you plan to spend any meaningful budget driving healthcare leads through digital channels, it’s worth putting good tracking in place. It’s the first thing to do to figure out which of the other growth levers are worth your time.
That way, you can get clear data on which lead sources and email sequences work best for each type of stakeholder (CTO, CFO, HR director, etc.) you need to persuade, along with insights you haven’t even thought about.
These insights exist whether you install tracking or not, but if you don’t do it in advance, you can’t go back and get them later.
That means you’ll pay more for the leads than your competitors who have installed it and are optimizing their campaigns to fit. Especially if you have to engage multiple departments to close deals.
With the long sales cycles, if your company or team has any pressure to sell and needs good leads, it’s an expensive choice in terms of time to rely on feeling when the data is available anyway.
FAQ
Lead generation in healthcare technology means generating interest in your products or services from those who may buy them. It’s often defined by someone expressing interest by signing up for your newsletter or filling in other forms with name, email, or phone number.
One of the most affordable ways to generate leads in B2B healthcare is through digital advertising. Ads on search engines and LinkedIn tend to be popular but often aren’t cheap due to their popularity.
In order to get medical leads, it’s common to run ads on search engines for keywords that lead tend to target. That allows you to reach leads when they are looking for help. On the other hand, it tends to be expensive because it’s a popular approach.
An example of lead generation is when someone expresses interest in LASIK (eye) surgery by entering their name, email, or phone number on your website expecting you to contact them.
