Turns out your marketing “bedside manner” counts. We tend to think of physicians as efficient diagnostic machines — but when you’re marketing to them, think of them as people who value relationships.

How important is your contact with them? Let’s just say “personal” is a plus. This research-led piece covers what marketers should know before they treat physicians as a segment instead of an audience of people.

The ongoing shift to Value-Based Care represents a major transformation in healthcare — emphasizing quality over quantity and rewarding providers for improved patient outcomes. As VBC gains momentum, driven by expanding Accountable Care Organizations and new models like ACO REACH, healthcare marketers face new challenges and opportunities.

This opinion piece highlights key trends, including the shift to primary care capitation and the growing focus on health equity, and offers strategies to align messaging with VBC principles, leverage technology, and collaborate with providers to demonstrate how solutions drive care quality, cost efficiencies and better outcomes. By aligning with VBC principles and emphasizing analytics, marketers can position their brands as key players in the evolving healthcare landscape.

Healthcare marketers, listen up: the people who make the buying decisions — the IT folks who buy solutions, or not — have a couple of reasons why they buy.

Check them out before you structure your account-based marketing. This infographic-led piece lays out what moves healthcare IT decision makers from “bye” to “buy.”

Even though marketing automation is the cornerstone of today’s marketing success, getting a world-conquering automation initiative off the ground is still difficult.

One reason stands out — and knowing how to conquer it can turn the fizzle into sizzle. This infographic-led piece names it and shows the way through.

Far too often, clients’ marketing automation platforms are dramatically underutilized — used as glorified email-sending platforms. Automation should automate your marketing: move you from tactics to revenue, and free your time for the strategy and story your brand has to tell.

Nowhere is underuse more evident than lead nurturing, often misunderstood as a linear string of emails to contacts with something in common. That simplicity is the problem: it demands constant maintenance, new programs, manual list work and manual decisions about where leads go next. An effective nurture program looks more like a spider web — interconnected, always-on paths that run automatically, account for buying-cycle stages, guide people through your story toward a sales conversation, and let them skip ahead when ready. The setup takes front-end time; it returns incredible amounts of it later.

Before asking about nurture best practices, ask a question that sounds obvious and requires serious consideration: what is the nature of the buyer? A client selling multi-million-dollar software to hospital executives needs a significantly different strategy than one selling entertainment systems for gas pumps to small convenience-store owners.

The factors go well beyond industry: time required to close, decision-making group size, complexity of contracting, the buyer’s education level, and the budget and revenue of target companies. A program serving a C-level decision group in a hospital isn’t just longer — a 12–24 month sales cycle versus 6–12 — every affected department must be considered as a champion or influencer of the sale.

And start early: relationships with early-stage buyers, like early friendships, are more enduring, deeper and preferred to those made later.

Could it be prospects making a beeline to your ads? The noise those ads are making? Or the sound of more MQLs ringing in your ears?

To increase all three, snag better prospects and get more of them — and the simple way to do it is to clear a path from click to conversion, so the attention your ads earn has somewhere valuable to go.

Sure, banners are a cheaper way to buy leads. But they’re actually more expensive — the confusion is in the conversion.

This head-to-head comparison lays out the math: judged on cost per converted lead rather than cost per click or impression, eBlasts win. Buy the outcome, not the inventory.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure — and predicting success starts by working backward from the goal rather than forward from the tactics. If the goal is 100 marketing qualified leads, look at each tactic — email, site placements, social — and use typical form-fills per visitor to determine how wide and deep the net must be cast.

No two clients approach this the same way; each screens MQLs by parameters bound to their own sales organization, and each therefore has a unique MQL conversion rate — as should you. Apply your rate to the traffic your mix will drive and see if the math reaches the goal. If it doesn’t, change the mix: add tactics such as eBlasts, increase qualifying criteria to reduce junk leads and raise qualified conversion, or attack the leads already in the funnel with a nurture program. Predictable success is arithmetic, not hope.

It sounds like heresy from a stat guy, but here it is: if marketing initiatives don’t correlate directly to sales, why spend money on them — for clicks? If 100 clicks produce five sales, would you care about having only 10 clicks if they still produced five sales? No — though you’d want to know why you attracted the unqualified clicks, and where to find more of the qualified.

The same theory runs through the process. Converting visitors to MQLs improves less by adding qualified leads than by attracting fewer non-qualified ones: halve the visits, keep the qualified number, and a 20% conversion rate becomes 40%. It’s equally true from MQL to SQL — reduce the bad MQLs to raise conversion. One approach broadens; the other narrows. Narrowing creates a lean, clear system to drive sales. Start with SQLs and work backwards, and you’ll reduce the time and wasted touches you spend today.