Marketing to doctors and physicians is an uphill task. These professionals are ultra-busy individuals with little time to spare for their families, let alone flip through marketing materials. However, this crunch may often lead to missed marketing opportunities that could add true value to their profession.

Sure, this is an unideal scenario for marketers, but not an impossible one. You can deploy special marketing strategies to effectively reach out to doctors. But, you must be succinct, among other things.

If you are a healthcare marketer who intends to market a new product or service to doctors or physicians, you must follow the strategies listed in this article.

5 Killer Strategies to Market to Doctors

Nail your marketing brief with the help of the following strategies.

1. Understand their Professional Culture and Respect their Time

First things first, you simply cannot approach doctors the way you would reach out to other B2B leads who work, say, in the manufacturing or IT sector. This is primarily because doctors are inherently skeptical of sales and marketing.

This is due to their deep commitment to ethics and patient safety, which is why you must never come approach with marketing content that glorifies your business offering. You must showcase it as it is without being pushy or salesy. Also, stay miles away from marketing any offering which is not fully formed yet, or is a work in progress.

To make your marketing to doctors effective without glorifying your offering mandates, you target the right doctor base. This brings us to our next point.

2. Segment your Doctor Audience 

Segmentation is at the heart of approaching qualified prospects. It helps you identify profitable leads who are looking for a solution your offering can provide.

Segmentation requires accessing physicians’ email databases or doctors’ mailing lists. This is where the magic of data comes into play. Once you invest in a doctor or physician database, you can start creating ideal customer profiles by filtering data into categories.

You can classify data based on parameters like specialty, gender, income, experience, setting, size of practice, geography, referral patterns, prescription data, and more. Data segmentation will weed out doctors and physicians who stand to benefit the least from your offering.

This way, you can hyper-personalize your marketing efforts to your Total Addressable Market instead of adopting the “spray and pray” methodology.

3. Share Latest Educational Content

Once you have pinned down your target audience, it’s time to prime them for your offering. Simply speaking, before introducing your product, you must create some context and pinpoint the challenges they go through professionally.

Publishing educational content on top medical blog sites or sharing them via email is a great start. Know that doctors are research-oriented readers. Any blog or article you post or newsletter you share must be deeply researched and vetted before sharing.

Here are a few other content marketing tactics you can employ to market to doctors and physicians.

• Post blog posts on relevant health conditions. 
• Publish statistical reports on the consumption of specific drugs.
• Post health assessments and quizzes.
• Don’t stick to textual content alone. Post medical interviews with subject-matter experts.
• Invite doctors and physicians to write opinion pieces that co-relate with your offering.

At the end of each piece of content you share, be sure to provide CTAs that lead to your website. We’re not saying that every blog or video you share must carry brand plugins, but most content should somehow link to your product category.

4. Network Through Conferences and Conventions

Doctors find conferences and conventions useful as they help them stay updated on the latest treatments. Safe to say, many attend them. This is why several pharma giants arrange conferences and conventions, which can act as an excellent way to network with doctors and physicians and talk about your product.

So, research relevant conferences and conventions to attend. Send your best marketers who can crisply talk about your product. Also, these conventions are an excellent platform to garner feedback on a product that’s already floating in the market.

If you find physicians who like and refer your product, request them to review it, either online or provide a testimonial.

5. Offer Samples or Free Trials

Free samples are a great way for doctors and physicians to vet your product. Be it a physical or a digital product, let doctors or their patients sample it through them. Yes, this is a traditional offline marketing method in use for decades, but it works.

In fact, you can draw a parallel to this method, where several marketers offer free trials of their online offerings across sectors.

Offering free samples also grants you a face-to-face audience with doctors and physicians, which is critical for converting them, even to date.

Approach with Caution

While converting doctors and physicians into customers may sound overwhelming, it’s really not! Unless you don’t respect the strategies listed above. Treat them as a starter toolkit to reach out to doctors and physicians.

So, understand their work culture, respect their time, create a database to finely target the right clientele, and share educational content via different mediums. Do this in addition to leveraging offline marketing tactics like offerings free samples and networking during conventions and conferences.