Marketing Metrics for the Medical Device World

The return on investment in marketing and advertising activities has always been tricky. It doesn’t help that sales can be quantified in a number of different ways – dollars, units, share. And then when you add the extra complexity of selling on consignment, slob rates, inventory turnover, contracted pricing, NGOs, it’s no wonder that clearly demonstrating the impact that your marketing dollars are having can be tough!

In the world of pharma, you can track scripts and refills. That data is fairly easy to buy. Not so with medical devices. So what do you?

Here are some different ways to think about marketing metrics for the medical device world

1. Determine your marketing objectives:

Your marketing metrics should be directly tied to your objectives. Hopefully you have already determined your marketing objectives, but if not, take a look at our template for building S.M.A.R.T goals and objectives.

More info on creating S.M.A.R.T Goals

Let’s create a hypothetical situation as an example to use. Say you’re expanding the use of a device you currently market into a new adjacent space – for a new procedure. 

  1. So, one of your objectives could be to educate your current customers that ARE performing this type of procedure but not using your device or technique because they have no idea that it can be used this way. And for these customers, you want to get them to switch from what they’re currently using to your product.
  2. A second objective could be to educate your current customers that ARE not performing this type of procedure on the procedure and encourage trial and adoption.
  3. And maybe a third objective is to target surgeons that are currently performing this procedure but not using your device or technique. And for these customers, you want to get them to switch from what they’re currently using to your product.

Which of these would be considered ‘low hanging fruit’? Number 1, right? And which would be considered your second most achievable objective? It could be 2 because the sales force is already at that call point and has already established a relationship with that physician. BUT unless your reps are really good at procedure-based selling, they may not be equipped to actually teach a new technique or procedure to a physician. So depending on the resources you have available and the competancies of your organization, it actually may be easier to get in front of a new physician and try to steal competitive share.

2. Identify what is important to measure and how to measure it:

So often we work with clients who outline their marketing objectives and then maybe define a couple of strategies for meeting said objectives, but there are three additional steps that you can take when building out your marketing plans that will really help you more clearly track the impact of those strategies.

The first is to decide what is important to measure and how exactly you’re going to measure it

  • Are you going to look at awareness of the overall procedure? 
  • Awareness of your product?
  • Awareness of your product in the procedure?
  • Number of participants registering for a training?
  • Number of accounts trialing the device?
  • Usage?

And then depending on the metrics you choose, how can you measure those? Can you track awareness via a formal market research study? Could you do a sampling of attendees at upcoming conventions? What about tracking online search volumes, or traffic to specific landing pages on your website. How about rep reported metrics or establishing an early experience trial or usage contest?

3. Define your baseline:

Okay so once you understand what is important to measure, then you have to define your baseline. How many times have we heard that old adage that you can’t get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? So for our hypothetical, say we choose to measure actual usage. In this case, our baselines could look like this:

  • Current customer set: Articulate the number of total CURRENT customers you have and segment that by the number that are currently performing the procedure versus those that aren’t. If you have 1000 current customers and 300 are currently performing this type of procedure then your baseline is:
    • 0% usage by 30% of the current customer base
    • 0% usage by 70% of the current customer base
  • Potential customer set: Articulate the number of total POTENTIAL customers you have and segment that by the number that are currently performing the procedure versus those that aren’t. If you have 2000 potential customers and 800 are currently performing this type of procedure then your baseline is:
    • 0% usage by 40% of the potential customer base

Note: in this example we don’t care about the potential customer base that isn’t performing the procedure because that’s a lot of work!

4. Quantify the results you’re looking for:

Finally, once you have an idea of what your baseline looks like, then you can forecast the potential impact that specific brand strategies will have on those different metrics. Make sure that those results are reasonable and take the selling cycle into account. If it generally takes 6 months to close a new customer, don’t expect to convert 15% of your potential customer base by month 3. But maybe that is a reasonable expectation for the 30% of your current customers that are using your device and performing the procedure.

5. Track and adjust:

Once you’ve drawn the line in the sand, have identified your objectives, your metrics, understand your baseline and set your goals, put your strategies in motion! And then track the impact that you’re having whether that’s through formal quarterly reviews, monthly reportings, weekly calls, whatever it is, just don’t let the good work go to waste. Because by tracking what you’re doing and the results that you’re able to achieve you can make adjustments throughout the year that will better ensure that you hit every one of the milestones you’ve set for the year.

So there you have it. 5 steps for creating meaningful marketing metrics for med device marketeers!

  1. Determine your objectives
  2. Identify what is important and how to measure it
  3. Define your baseline
  4. Quantify the results you’re looking for
  5. Track and adjust

And if you are still hungry for more – click below for a deeper dive into Step #2. A little cheat sheet 6 Metrics that Matter Most (to your boss that is).

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A little thanks to our followers

WHY DO WE THANK THEE? LET US COUNT THE WAYS…

In all seriousness, thank you. Thank you for being our clients, our customers, our followers, our friends. We don’t offer heartfelt thanks or praise enough but saying ‘Thank you’ is one of the most powerful phrases in the human language. As our thanks to you, here’s Laura Trice’s TED Talk on the importance of Thanks.

Enjoy!

Defining your brand’s SQ

What in the world do we mean by your brand’s SQ? No doubt you’ve heard of I.Q (Intelligence Quotient) and perhaps even E.Q (Emotional Quotient / Intelligence).  Now a high IQ doesn’t necessarily translate into anything meaningful in life – fortunately or unfortunately depending. But a high EQ? Then you also likely have better job performance, enhanced leadership leadership skills and even increased overall mental health. So developing your EQ can actually make you a better employee, a better manager, a better parent and give you a better overall perspective on life. 

Excellent. But what about the SQ at hand?

At The Matchstick Group, we believe that just as it is important to develop your personal EQ, the same could be said of your brand’s Strategic Quotient or SQ.

FOUR THINGS MARKETERS SHOULD CONSIDER AS PART OF THEIR BRAND’S STRATEGIC QUOTIENT 

The here and now of where you are

You know that saying, you won’t get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? That’s so important when it comes to the marketing of med device and med-tech. The clockspeed of innovation is usually such that you could be launching a ‘next generation’ product in the next six months to a year. So clearly defining where you are right this minute is critical. 

Brand vision

And equally as important is a clear picture of where your brand is going. The strategy at launch is often reflective of what’s going on in the market at that moment. However, in order to optimize a product or portfolio launch, teams really need to understand not just where the market is now, but where it’s going in the next 2-3 years. Only by understanding potential future states can companies proactively develop and shape the landscape to optimize their products success. 

Brand vector & velocity

Once you’ve identified  understand your brand’s vision, how are you going to get from where you are to where you want to be? What direction will you take and how quickly do you need to move? If you’re launching a new product for instance, are you launching it into an existing category or creating a new category? How much market development needs to be done and by when?

By working through the brand’s Vision and then mapping out the Vector and Velocity, you can really set the stage to increase your overall Strategic Quotient and make the biggest impact on the market as efficiently as possible – and as we all know – time is money!

At The Matchstick Group, one of the ways we help companies do this is by conducting what we call our 3-V Planning Workshop: Vision, Vector & Velocity. We help our clients uncover the primary drivers in the market from a macro (social, economic, political) and from a more micro (competition, hospital/rep relationship, procedural rate increase / decrease, reimbursement). And then as a function of those micro and macro factors, we can help them identify the vision and positioning for their brand that sets them up for success. From there we look at where we (and the market) are currently in order to understand the Vector (direction) and Velocity (speed) that we need to shape the market we’re competing in.

Hosting Private Content on Your Website

I just got off the phone with a client who asked if we could post a recent Webinar up to their website. No problem – we have tons of medical device animations and physician case videos on their site already. But this was a little different. This file needed to be available for a short period of time, only for a pre-specified audience AND they wanted for it to be password protected. Okay, that’s a little bit different… We could spend a ton of time and money creating a portal, registering users, building profiles and firewalls, but our clients needed this up yesterday and they didn’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time or money.

Here’s how we did it…


Now first of all, I have to give a shout-out to WebEx because if you’re looking to record video on the cheap, it’s a great way to go. We have been using their service for years and we’ve used it in a number of ways

1. Market Research: We’ve used WebEx in the past to conduct one on one physician interviews.We  also tried UStream and a specialty Panasonic HD video recorder with built-in wif to no avail. WebEx was fantastic. The record function allows you to capture and save both audio and video files. The webcam functionality also enabled us to conduct interviews at a physician conference in the UK and stream them live to the US, Japan and EMEA markets. We recorded the videos and were able to store them directly onto the Webex server. Webex even has an option to schedule the sessions in advance so our clients were able to check-in to see what interviews were coming up next.

2. Physician Case Presentations: Physician case presentations and actual interventions that demonstrate how thought leaders use a given product – that’s the content that they (physicians) find most valuable. It’s some of the most shared content too. 

3. Internal Videos: We have developed internal videos for multiple clients. But with internal videos, budgets contraints can be quite high, especially when R&D is in a different location than marketing, etc… For one client, we used WebEx to help us facilitate and monitor a video shoot in Israel from NY, NJ and CA.

4. Webinars: And then of course there are webinars – the very thing that our client above was looking for!

So once we had the video, how did we post the content and make it private in about 15 minutes?

Vimeo Pro. We use private channels on YouTube to host a lot of video because we like the ability to set up ‘play lists’, but YouTube doesn’t offer the ability to password protect specific videos the way that we (and our clients) needed to in this case.

With Vimeo you can:

  • Upload files up to 100M
  • Make your videos available everyone
  • Make your videos available only to people who have a link or who have been ‘approved’
  • Password protect your videos


So there you have it.

Video can be a great online tool for attracting and educating new and potential customers. Our med device clients have found it invaluable both online and offline in this day of Show & Sell. And physicians are much more likely to stop and watch a case presentation than read a dense printed how to guide. For real examples

Check out our case studies

If you have a video that you need hosted, password protected and shared our recommendation would be VimeoPro. If you need an easy way to capture specific moments consider WebEx. And if you have some great content, but no where to house it – consider reaching out to us to build your new site ; )

Until next time!

These Medical Device United States

For those of us in the med device industry, we know that there are geographic pockets that seem to incubate new device technology. The fact that California is the top of the list comes as no surprise. We’ve been jetting out to Orange County and San Francisco to meet with clients for years. But the fact that more and more innovation is coming from the mid West and some of the Southern states – North Carolina and Georgia – is both intriguing and refreshing.

And we can tell you first hand that organizations like the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where we are now located is on the cutting edge of innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.

Let’s see where it goes from here.