How to Build a Winning B2B Medtech Demand Generation Strategy

In the ever-evolving landscape of medical technology, staying ahead requires more than just innovation; it necessitates a robust demand generation strategy. This tactic is crucial for companies looking to build awareness, engage prospects, and ultimately convert leads into loyal customers. A unique approach to demand generation is what will get you the most leads, and this involves building specific buyer personas and creating targeted campaigns to uncover gaps that most businesses miss. But what does this look like in action?

Learn the basic steps involved in smart demand generation and how to leverage it effectively to drive ROI in the B2B medtech sector.

What Is Demand Generation?

Demand generation is a holistic marketing strategy aimed at creating awareness and interest in a company’s products or services. Unlike traditional marketing, which typically focuses on immediate sales, demand gen emphasizes building long-term relationships and educating prospects, helping them understand the challenges they face and how the company’s offerings can solve those challenges.

In the B2B medical technology sector, this goes beyond mere promotion; it’s about informing your audiences, highlighting unmet needs, and positioning your medtech solutions as the ideal answer for prospects. By leveraging targeted campaigns, companies can attract high-quality leads and guide them through the buyer’s journey, from awareness to decision-making.

Demand generation can also help companies align with medtech industry trends in telemedicine, AI, and sustainability to better reach relevant audiences. In a competitive and rapidly changing space, this tactic is not only valuable for navigating market shifts but also for improving brand awareness, complying with stringent regulatory updates, and overcoming supply chain complexities.

Demand generation can be tailored to various stakeholders in the medtech field:

Manufacturers: Manufacturers can build interest in new products and foster relationships with healthcare providers and distributors.
Distributors & Retailers: Distributors and retailers can boost market presence and position medtech products more effectively to consumers.
Healthcare Providers: Practitioners, clinics, and hospitals can keep up with new medtech innovations for the benefit of their patients.
Regulatory Authorities: Regulators can understand industry trends and educate the community on medtech compliance requirements.
Procurement Professionals: Procurement teams can identify and evaluate potential suppliers to improve their medtech supply chain.
R&D Firms: Researchers and developers can align projects with market demand and drive investment in new technologies.

Planning a Demand Gen Campaign

A successful B2B demand generation campaign in the medtech industry starts with a nuanced understanding of the target market. You’ll need to gather information on your audience, which includes putting together an ideal customer profile and scoping out the competitive businesses they are familiar with, so you know what you’re up against.

Understand Your Target Audience

Define the healthcare providers, institutions, and other stakeholders who would benefit from your product. This can involve creating an Ideal Customer Profile or buyer persona for each audience type. Whatever path you choose, make sure to consider demographic and psychographic information, including occupation, responsibilities, location, pain points, buying behaviors, and even common objections—reasons they might present as an argument for why they wouldn’t need your product. It’s important to get a grasp on all angles and traits of your target market to ensure your demand generation efforts resonate with the right people at the right time.

Position Your Medtech Product

Building awareness is the next step. You’ll need to position your medtech products as solutions to challenges that your target audience faces but may not be aware of. Awareness efforts can take on many different forms. You can start with persona-specific messaging and going after your ideal customers on LinkedIn by focusing on company sizes, job titles, and locations that match your buyer personas. Sharing evergreen content like eBooks, whitepapers, and handy checklists and deploying ads across platforms will help educate prospects during this phase, but note that you want to avoid gated landing pages. Any content you promote here should not feature a contact form. For now, it’s all about creating awareness without capturing information.

Start Generating New Leads

Leverage insights from the awareness stage of your campaign to create targeted contact lists. You can build highly targeted lists by tracking and analyzing this data through tools like LeadLander, Lead Forensics, and ZoomInfo. These platforms function by monitoring the online activities of visitors, such as identifying the industries and companies visiting your site, the pages they viewed, the duration of their visit, and even their job title and contact details. They effectively pull back the curtain on anonymous site users who haven’t filled out a contact form. Incorporating these tools into your demand gen strategy facilitates a smooth shift from raising awareness to engaging with specific individuals who are most likely to show interest in your medical technology.

Nurture & Convert Your Leads

Transform initial awareness into genuine interest and action. Now’s the time to employ tactics like account-based marketing (ABM), paid search engine marketing (SEM), LinkedIn Sponsored Content, and automated email marketing to engage and nurture leads through the sales funnel. Segment your contact lists and use them to precisely target key decision-makers within specific organizations and capture leads through form fills. At this stage, you’ll need to keep your messaging consistent with the messaging used during the initial awareness phase. This ensures a cohesive narrative that resonates with the audience. Highlight how your products or services address real-world healthcare challenges to demonstrate value and relevance. Now is perfect for sharing helpful resources, case studies, and special offers with leads to keep engagement consistent.

Optimize Your Campaign

Align your marketing efforts with the sales team. Develop collateral like brochures and sell sheets to equip your sales team with practical tools that seal the deal with warm leads. Staying closely connected with sales will help marketers refine demand generation strategies based on data and feedback, ensuring that nurtured leads quickly convert into customers. Measuring campaign effectiveness is vital in identifying areas for improvement. Regularly track KPIs such as conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and lead quality, then use these insights to adjust your tactics, whether it’s fine-tuning your messaging, optimizing your targeting criteria, or reallocating your budget to the most effective channels. By continuously iterating your strategy, you can enhance the overall efficiency of your demand generation efforts, ultimately driving better results and maximizing ROI.

Get the Guide & Start Generating Demand

Demand generation in the medical technology industry is a complex but vital process. It requires a deep understanding of the target market, a strategic approach to content and messaging, and the ability to engage potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. From creating awareness and building interest to nurturing leads and converting them into loyal customers, each step plays a critical role in achieving success.

As the medtech landscape continues to evolve with advancements in technology and changes in regulations, staying ahead with a well-executed demand generation strategy is more important than ever. By consistently measuring and optimizing your efforts, you can refine your approach, drive higher engagement, and ultimately achieve a better return on investment.

For a more detailed look at medtech demand generation, check out Sagefrog’s and contact us for support with strategies and execution.