Let’s face it! The “spray and pray” B2B marketing approach for landing clients within a niche industry like healthcare is a waste of time. It mostly lets you market your offerings to a generic set of low-value one-time customers. Instead, what’s worth a healthcare business’s time is leveraging an approach that allows them to sell directly to the best-fit high-value customers or accounts.

This philosophy forms the backbone of account-based marketing (ABM) and lets you weed out loose-fit, low-value accounts or clients early on. ABM also aligns your sales and marketing teams as they collaborate to share information on warm leads and pitch them hyper-personalized buying experiences.

So, What is Account-Based Marketing?

In a nutshell, it is a marketing strategy that finely sets its gaze on specific target accounts and then leverages personalized tactics to engage and convert them. It takes a more holistic view of marketing and is not limited to lead generation alone.

For example, LiveRamp, a data connectivity platform, deployed effective ABM strategies to reel in customers on the list of Fortune 500 companies. Doing this drove their revenue to over $50 million annually from just 15 targeted accounts.

More on the Account-Based Marketing Example of LiveRamp:

What Can Healthcare Companies Learn from LiveRamp?

For starters, they used a predictive insights platform to gather intel on businesses through firmographic data and by studying their online presence and growth trends. Doing this narrowed down their search from a sea of potential clients to a crisp list of 15 best-fit accounts and their locations.

After scouting these 15 target customers and where they are, they figured out the commonalities between them. These included:

• All of the identified companies had an employee headcount of over 5000.
• All of them earned over $50 million dollars in annual revenue.
• All of them operated within the insurance, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), and automotive sectors.

Using this information, they devised and implemented their ABM campaign purely for these 15 companies. Their strategists learned the best way to reach these companies was through an omnichannel sequence, which included:

• Display ads
• Email marketing
• SDR calling
• Direct mailing

The first two mediums, or touchpoints, were leveraged to simply introduce LiveRamp to the target audience and to generate awareness of what they do. Once the potential clients gained context around the brand, LiveRamp followed up with SDR calling and direct mailing.

While this is not a healthcare company, several healthcare organizations can leverage its multi-touchpoint ABM methodology.

Additional Read: What Makes Mail Prospects Best Healthcare Email List Providers in the USA?

Steps to Follow to Implement Account-Based Marketing Strategy in Healthcare:

Here is a snapshot to craft and implement the ABM methodology in healthcare-

• Invest in digital tools and databases to identify businesses you ideally want to sell to. These would mainly include healthcare companies with high annual turnovers.

• Use the study to identify accounts to craft buyer personas that help create a buyer collective. Creating a buyer collective means figuring out the names or designations of individuals within an organization contributing to the purchase decision process. 

• Strategize on the types of account-based marketing that will likely prove effective. The answers will come from observing and researching your target audience’s online behavior, previous purchase history, and firmographic data.

• Now is the time to implement said marketing strategy, especially tweaking content offerings for each account.

• Track the impact of your marketing methods and tactics and make major or minor alterations to them based on the response. This will help you determine what works best and what should not be repeated.

• Encourage smooth communication between your sales and marketing teams to ensure all information on leads in passed effectively.

• Scale your strategy to other accounts that seem similar or emulate the ones you are targeting.

Know that this account-based marketing healthcare strategy is not set in stone. You can make changes and add or drop things you don’t need. However, these steps act as an excellent starter toolkit to launch your very own account-based marketing strategy.

The Top 4 Mediums Used by B2B Account-Based Marketers

• Content marketing (blogs, whitepapers, case studies, e-books, industry reports, etc.)
• LinkedIn (publishing articles, sending DMs to potential customers, sponsoring posts and ads)
• YouTube (publishing free tutorials and how-to videos for products)
• Personalized emails (sharing newsletters, deals, and discounts, information on the latest product features)

You can publish educational health-related blogs, create YouTube videos, hop on trending healthcare topics, etc. If you have a small budget, you can also outsource account-based marketing services.

The Bottom Line

Account-based marketing strategies in healthcare may sound overwhelming. But, leveraging it in this industry is not much different than implementing it in other sectors. All you need to throw in the mix is some data intel, research, the right tools, and analytics. But, most of all, you need to switch to a mindset where you want to move away from brut marketing, which, anyway, pulls down your marketing ROI.

You can also buy a healthcare user email list from Mail Prospects to reach the right prospects. Our database is 100% verified and accurate and sourced from legal and reliable sources. So, wait no more. Get a free sample before devising and implementing your account-based marketing strategy!

References:

• https://www.himssmedia.com/news/account-based-marketing-healthcare
• https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/account-based-marketing-guide
• https://cxl.com/blog/account-based-marketing-examples/