Many times, when we think of a brand that we know and love, we automatically associate that organization with the person who represents it in the public forum. Apple, the Dallas Mavericks, Nike and Microsoft have all had a notable spokesperson associated with their brand. While you may not have Michael Jordan on your bench, it’s as important for your organization to have a trusted frontman or woman to tell your story to the world.
So, Who Should You Choose?
While it may seem like a given to choose the head of your company, a recent article from pr.co cites research that shows the CEO is not always the way to go. Sure, the top boss might know the company and the technology better than anyone else, but does that person have what it takes to relay this knowledge in a relatable way that members of the media and the public can grasp and connect with?
When selecting a spokesperson, credibility is key. Even if your company exec is an expert on your product or service, it’s of the utmost importance that they have experience and knowledge that extends beyond the company talk track. Often, executives who have lived another life as a clinician, health system leader or hands-on data engineer make great spokespeople. They have worked through and grappled with the technology your solution is solving and can speak firsthand to the perils of the problem and the importance of a solution to like yours. Titles such as Chief Medical Officer and Chief Nursing Officer are often great choices. We’ve recently seen great interest in Chief AI Officers, and these executives are often adept to speak not only to the current state of technology, but they can offer insights into how we could see technology change in the near and long term.
Importantly, would you find the person you’re considering to speak for your company interesting to talk to over coffee or at a dinner party? Do they have a unique perspective? Are they passionate about finding a solve to the problem you are addressing? Media are people too, and just like you, they can get bored easily if a spokesperson comes across as static or rehearsed.
Another consideration: In key strategic situations, a company may select someone who is controversial to speak for the organization. Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid someone who runs the risk of alienating your customer base. If you’re considering a controversial or confrontational figure, work closely with your PR agency and internal stakeholders to weigh the pros and cons.
The more, the merrier?
A mistake some companies make lies in thinking they must choose just one person to speak for the company. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While you do want to maintain a consistent brand voice and drive home key talking points that have been determined through a thoughtful process, it is perfectly fine and often even preferable to have more than one spokesperson.
When using multiple spokespeople, differentiate based on each person’s area of expertise. Perhaps your CEO would be the one to give an interview to Axios a funding round, while your CMO would talk about the challenges of clinician burnout in a chat with a provider-focused podcast. Be deliberate when determining how many people will speak for your company. While a couple key leaders focused on disparate topics is great, too many voices can muddy the message and leave your audience confused. Additionally, determine who will speak for the company during a crisis (often your CEO or board chair) and develop a crisis communications plan that is shared with all relevant stakeholders in advance.
How to Build a Thought Leader
Once you have determined who will speak for the company, create a plan to introduce that person to the company. A PR plan should include thought leadership articles from your spokesperson that will be pitched and placed in key trade publications. To build credibility for your spokesperson and to secure earned placement, these pieces should cover a topic relevant to your space and avoid direct mention of your company. If your piece sounds like a sales pitch for your tech, it won’t see the light of day. Further, develop a social media content calendar that details posts for the company and your key spokespeople. Your audience wants to see that your leadership is part of the conversation in their area of expertise, so posting relevant articles from outside your company as well as engaging with outside content are all effective strategies.
A key part of being a spokesperson is, of course, speaking. Well before you schedule your first interview, schedule comprehensive media training for anyone who might be speaking on the company’s behalf. Amendola Director of Media Relations Grace Vinton offers tips for making the most of opportunities.
When it’s time to pitch, again, focus on broader areas of interest and prepare talking points in collaboration with your spokesperson and other stakeholders. You’ll often be given the chance to talk about what makes your company different, but let’s face it – no one likes someone who only talks about themselves all the time.
Additional Pitching Opportunities
While we often focus on health tech and healthcare trade publications and podcasts, Amendola Senior Writer Brandon Glenn reminds us in this recent blog post not to neglect mainstream media. Consumer and local outlets can provide golden opportunities in the right situations. Business publications such as the Wall Street Journal will often publish hiring news, so this can be a great option if your spokesperson has recently joined the company – a great way to get their name in front of a large audience. Axios loves big financial news, so if your spokesperson is willing to talk about a recent funding round or lucrative business deal, don’t overlook this mainstream outlet. Are you hosting a user meeting or participating in a charity even in the city where you’re headquartered or elsewhere? Try for an interview with the local business journal or morning news show.
Remember, too, that media is changing. While landing big publications is often the goal, smaller outlets can offer a precise target audience. Increasingly, bloggers and hosts of smaller podcasts are targeting the very audience you’re trying to reach.
Conclusion
Selecting a spokesperson is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make for your company. But don’t worry – remember these steps that we’ve covered here and you’ll be on your way to putting your company on the right path.
Some health technology entrepreneurs are absolutely convinced their company has a unique, revolutionary solution that will transform healthcare. And they will not hesitate to tell you!
Most, however, are more grounded. They only have to look around to see that the problems their solution is designed to solve – whether it’s clinical data quality, patient identity, billing accuracy, etc. – have attracted the interest of other clever and well-intentioned people. They have competition! Worse, some of these sector rivals are well-funded.
Which doesn’t mean your solution is any less genuinely transformative to healthcare consumers, providers, payers, or researchers. What it does mean is you likely face a formidable challenge in rising above the noise in your sector to attract and capture the attention of potential customers and investors. After all, there are a lot of stories being told out there.
So how can healthcare PR and marketing pros make their company’s story compelling enough to break through and stand out in a crowded market? For starters, health tech companies can gain a market advantage by clearly articulating (and repeating) across multiple channels what problems their solutions solve and how these solutions benefit patients. Why should customers choose your solution and not a competitor’s? You need a great answer to that question.
Hone your marketing language to highlight your company’s competitive differentiators. Once you’ve locked in on a framework for your messaging, you can deploy several specific techniques to help your health tech company rise above the clamoring masses. These include:
The marketing messages that resonate with potential customers such as provider organizations or payers may not resonate with investors. While a hospital or health plan will want to know what your technology costs and how it would help them improve care quality or operational efficiency, they’re not interested in a graphic showing the projected growth of your startup’s market sector. Investors, on the other hand, care deeply about a sector’s growth potential as well as a prospective portfolio company’s strengths and weaknesses (particularly its technology and leadership team) relative to the competition.
It is essential that you learn the needs and pain points of each target audience and then tailor a message that specifically addresses them. Try to get feedback from members of your target audience (or people who understand their concerns and priorities) and then modify as necessary.
Go multimedia
We may be in the technology business, but humanity sells. The human connection is a powerful thing; people like to hear and see other people talk. That’s one of the reasons why podcasts have become so popular. If there is someone in your company who could shine on a podcast, do not hesitate to get that person some training and some bookings.
No matter how nervous your subject matter expert may be, once they see the positive response internally and externally, they’ll be pestering you for more podcast opportunities. Then they’ll ask for help getting an agent.
You also can use multimedia in social media and in press releases. Spice up your messaging with pictures, graphics, and even short videos. You won’t need to hire a crew for a three-camera shoot, either; videos can easily be recorded on a smartphone.
Get customers to tell their story
I know, it’s one of the hardest things in marketing. A health tech company’s customers – whether they’re a hospital, health system, payer, or academic center – may not want to get involved in your marketing efforts because 1) they’re pretty busy doing their own jobs, and 2) they worry about being perceived as shills for a vendor. From their perspective, those aren’t unreasonable concerns.
But you won’t know what your customers say until you ask. Suggest doing a white paper on their experiences with your solution or ask for one of their spokespeople to join you on stage at an industry conference or for a podcast. People like to talk about their successes and impart advice to colleagues. It’s all upside to them.
One great selling point for healthcare marketing and PR pros who are trying to get a customer to share their experiences is to emphasize that the customer’s story (and yours) centers around how they were able to better serve patients using your technology, not the merits of the technology itself (which should be apparent in the telling of the story). Again, it’s an opportunity for the customer to talk about what they’re doing to help patients, research, or efforts to control healthcare costs.
Conclusion
To succeed in highly competitive markets, health tech vendors need a coherent message centered around how their solution benefits both patients and potential customers. By tailoring these messages to targeted audiences, leveraging the power of multimedia to build human connections, and working with customers to communicate powerful success stories, health tech vendors truly can stand out in a crowded market.
The first blog was created in 1994 by a Swarthmore College student who posted his own writing as well as links to websites he liked and thought his readers would enjoy.
Incredibly, that formula still holds up after more than 30 years of the internet. What other aspect of the online world can that be said about? Of course, a lot has changed about blogging (SEO, the addition of video and audio, different platforms, AI), but the objective of expressing your thoughts and sharing interesting things remains fundamental to successful blogging.
That’s true for businesses that blog as well as college students. Blogs have been around so long that they can be viewed as internet relics, like MySpace and Napster, but there is a reason they persist. They’re effective – as long as they’re done right.
There is some interesting research on the tactics of blogging: how to use SEO, how long to write, formats, how frequently to publish, even when to publish. Here’s an earlier Amendola post with some interesting research about blogs. That is helpful for the experienced blogger who wants to become expert, but I find the rules for a successful corporate blog are similar to those for being a good guest at a party:
Have something to say
Corporate blogs that simply recycle company press releases and other internal announcements are dull, like party guests who can’t carry on a conversation. No one, least of all a client or customer, feels obligated to read a dull blog. The content should be either interesting, educational, entertaining or some combination of the above.
It’s not about you
The first rule of successful socializing is expressing an interest in others (even if it’s feigned). The party guest who talks only about himself is a boor. It’s the same for companies that blog only about themselves. No one – not even their employees – is that interested in them. Blogs should take a more expansive view of the universe. I don’t mean medical device companies should be commenting on sports and Oscar nominations necessarily, but dealing with tangential topics add variety, demonstrate a wider world view and make it easier to draw in readers.
While there is no exact formula, a good rule of thumb is roughly a 50/50 mix between company content and other material.
Mingle with others
Blogging alone in your corner of the internet while ignoring all the other content out there is like refusing to interact with other party guests.
Acknowledging and making use of other companies’ relevant content is a great way to gain an audience and show off your insights.
This doesn’t mean promoting the competition, just recognizing that you don’t have a monopoly on interesting things to say. If a media outlet writes a compelling article about your industry, you can link to it and offer your thoughts. You can even invite guest bloggers. It’s a great way to build an audience.
Don’t overstay your welcome
No one likes a guest who shows up early, insists on being the center of attention at all times and lingers after the hosts have started cleaning up. In other words, don’t blog too often. It’s only large B2C brands that might need to be out with new material every day. For B2B brands, once or twice a week is fine. That also makes it less likely that you’ll have to post weak content. Just like at a party, you want to leave them wanting more.
There is nothing sadder than hosting a party which no one attends. It’s the same with writing blogs that no one reads. If you’re going to go to the effort of creating and maintaining a blog, be sure to follow the rules for making it interesting. Otherwise, you’ll be eating the cake all by yourself.
In today’s content-saturated landscape, thought leadership bylines remains a powerful tool for building credibility and influence. For example, 88% of decision-makers believe high-quality thought leadership content improves their perception of an organization, yet 71% say less than half of what they read actually provides valuable insights, according to statistics cited by The New York Times.
This gap underscores the importance of crafting compelling, meaningful bylines that stand out. To increase your chances of publication and audience engagement, consider these three essential tips.
Go easy on the self-promotion: The quickest way to lose credibility in a thought leadership piece is to turn it into a sales pitch. While it’s tempting to highlight your company’s solutions, most publications require bylines to be vendor-neutral. Readers seek valuable industry insights, not an extended advertisement. Instead of pushing products or services, share a fresh perspective, unique data, or a forward-thinking analysis of an industry trend. If your content provides genuine value, readers will naturally associate that expertise with your brand, enhancing its reputation without overt self-promotion.
Focus on an industry problem: Readers engage with content that resonates with their professional challenges. A strong byline should tackle a pressing industry issue and offer actionable insights, not just general observations. Rather than reiterating well-known problems, take a deeper dive: Offer a counterintuitive take, present real-world case studies, or challenge conventional wisdom. For example, instead of writing about how digital transformation is crucial in healthcare, explore why certain digital initiatives fail and what organizations can do differently. Thought leadership isn’t about stating the obvious; it’s about advancing the conversation in a meaningful way.
Respect your readers’ time: In an era where executives and professionals are inundated with content, brevity is key. Editors and readers prefer bylines that get straight to the point, typically around 800 words. If your article stretches beyond that, tighten your argument by removing fluff and redundant points. Strong, concise writing improves engagement and increases the likelihood of publication. Aim for clarity over complexity, and ensure every paragraph serves a purpose.
Final thoughts A well-crafted byline can elevate your thought leadership profile, but only if it aligns with industry standards and reader expectations. By prioritizing valuable insights over self-promotion, addressing real industry challenges, and keeping your content concise, you enhance your chances of making a lasting impact. As the data suggests, high-quality thought leadership matters, so take the time to refine your byline and provide content that truly informs and engages your audience.
Healthcare is complicated and constantly evolving. From navigating strict regulations to addressing diverse stakeholders, healthcare sales teams operate in an increasingly competitive and nuanced environment. Fortunately, marketing teams can play an essential role in amplifying and supporting sales efforts and ensuring sales teams have the tool kit required to deliver success. Working hand-in-glove with sales, marketing can help build cohesive and persuasive messaging, comply with regulatory requirements, and support lead generation with strategically crafted content and campaigns designed to capture the attention of target audiences, nurture their interest, and encourage them to take specific actions.
The Healthcare Sales Landscape
It’s no surprise that healthcare sales teams, in particular, face challenges directly related to the diversity of their target audiences, ranging from hospitals to health plan CEOs to clinicians and patients. Each stakeholder has unique priorities and pain points that must be addressed with a tailored solution or call to action. It’s also true that the U.S. healthcare industry is subject to strict regulations, such as HIPAA, which makes compliance a crucial factor in sales and marketing strategies. Marketing teams can help lay a solid foundation that builds trust, and bolsters thought leadership with clients, prospects, and patients.
Generating High-Quality Leads
In my decades of experience in marketing, lead generation is a crucial focus for sales/marketing collaborations – after all, it’s the core of business growth. Leads drive sales opportunities, boost revenue, and increase brand awareness, and it’s one of the main activities in which marketing can support sales objectives. Without compelling and engaging content, sales can’t drive to the bottom of the funnel. That’s where marketing comes in. A healthcare marketing team can create a white paper on the benefits of a new diagnostic tool or host a webinar on improving patient outcomes through innovative technology.
By providing valuable insights and thought leadership, marketing teams capture leads and position their organization as an industry authority. This establishes credibility and trust, making it easier for sales teams to initiate conversations and close deals.
Equipping Sales Teams with Enablement Tools
Marketing’s role, however, doesn’t stop with lead generation – it can and should move into building an integrated strategy and tactics that provide sales teams with the “enablement” tools and resources to convert leads into clients. These resources may include:
Sales Collateral: Brochures and product guides tailored to the needs of different stakeholders.
Pitch Decks: Customizable presentations highlighting key product or service benefits.
Battle Cards: One-page documents comparing your product or service to competitors that help sales address objections and highlight key differentiators.
Customer Personas: Detailed profiles of target buyers, including pain points, motivations, and preferred communication styles. These guide sales teams in personalizing their outreach.
Whitepapers or eBooks: High-value content pieces that establish thought leadership and can be shared with leads to nurture trust and demonstrate expertise.
By creating resources that align and support the sales team’s objectives, marketing can help ensure that every interaction with potential clients is meaningful and impactful.
Creating a Cohesive Narrative
Building and implementing consistent messaging is crucial for sales and marketing, serving as a strong foundation for engagement and customer loyalty. This is especially true in today’s healthcare environment, where trust and credibility are paramount to growth and sustainability. Here again, marketing teams can play a vital role in creating a cohesive narrative that aligns with the organization’s mission and values. Marketing can also help weave this cohesive narrative through all communications and channels, from website content to social media posts and email campaigns.
A unified message strengthens the organization’s brand and ensures that sales teams deliver a consistent pitch to clients for a seamless customer experience, increasing the likelihood of success.
Driving Sales Through Digital Engagement
We live in a digital-first landscape, which means marketing should also support healthcare sales teams by leveraging digital channels to engage prospects and clients. Targeted advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media campaigns allow marketing teams to reach potential and existing clients where they are most active and open to engaging. Additionally, digital channels can enable personalized and timely communication, nurturing leads throughout the sales funnel.
For example, a targeted LinkedIn campaign might highlight a new study demonstrating the efficacy of a medical device, driving traffic to a dedicated landing page where prospects can learn more or request a demo. This kind of digital engagement generates leads and keeps them engaged until they’re ready to connect with a sales representative.
Measuring Success and Refining Strategies
Accurately measuring success and adjusting strategies requires continuous collaboration between marketing and sales to meet evolving business objectives and revenue goals. So, it’s best to begin any sales/marketing initiative with an agreement on which key performance indicators (KPIs) will provide valuable insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Together, marketing and sales can jointly optimize campaigns and improve through open lines of communication and sharing data and strategic insights. This open approach also ensures that organizations remain agile and responsive to changing market dynamics.
Conclusion
The complexity and rapid evolution of the healthcare industry necessitate collaboration between marketing and sales to help drive business and revenue growth and improve client success. Marketing supports lead generation and empowers sales teams with the resources, insights, and narrative consistency they need to succeed. By working together, marketing and sales can navigate the complexities of the healthcare landscape, driving growth and making a meaningful impact on patients and providers.
