As every healthcare marketing pro knows, promoting products and services in this industry is challenging for many reasons. Regulatory requirements, compliance issues (like HIPAA), data security, and privacy concerns all increase the degree of difficulty when it comes to reaching decision-makers and growing brand awareness.
That’s especially true with healthcare event marketing. To maximize the return on their tradeshow investment, companies have to adhere to the many regulations while also finding creative ways to engage with attendees effectively in the limited number of hours available and when competing with other exhibits in environments with many distractions.
Consequently, it’s essential to work with a healthcare marketing agency that specializes in events. An experiential marketing firm’s expertise helps clients achieve their show objectives while reducing their risk of breaking the rules or attracting scrutiny from the FDA or other regulatory agencies.
Medical Tradeshows and the Power of Strategic Planning and Customization
The pharmaceutical, medical device, and life sciences markets are extremely competitive. That’s why it’s critical to understand what surgeons, physicians, nurses, and other stakeholders are looking for and to know how to create event experiences that interest and educate them.
Companies that find fun and meaningful ways to engage with attendees enjoy the best results from medical tradeshows and other events. Those that don’t lose ground to their competitors. Leveraging the skills of a healthcare marketing agency can make all the difference.
A healthcare-focused firm understands how attendees think, the pressure to find companies that can meet pressing operational needs, and what will attract people to an exhibit space and keep them there and engaged.
Vital Access to Industry Insights
A healthcare-focused event marketing firm has the latest data on what’s working and not working for a given offering, market, or industry. Just as importantly, they have a real-world understanding of what stakeholders are looking for and what competitors are doing from attending healthcare tradeshows.
Their ongoing, in-the-trenches industry immersion gives companies the type of “intel” they need to exhibit in eye-catching, engaging, business-building ways. What’s more, an experienced healthcare marketing agency knows to step back and look at the big picture. That helps them ensure event efforts and goals align with the company’s broader marketing and brand objectives.
Beyond Healthcare Exhibit Design for Conferences: Measuring the Success of Medical Tradeshows
Companies or marketing teams that have never worked with a healthcare event agency can be forgiven for thinking that experiential marketing firms simply design tradeshow exhibits and come up with clever gimmicks to increase booth traffic.
Some of the most valuable services a healthcare event marketing agency can provide are helping tradeshow teams gather data, assess various metrics, determine what interests an audience to enable more targeted efforts, and understand the ROI of healthcare events.
Essential medical tradeshow metrics include:
Attendee engagement. This figure represents how actively attendees interact with a company’s booth and representatives. It typically takes into account things like the number of booth visits, dwell time (how long visitors stay at the booth), conversations and demos, interactive activities (completing surveys, playing games, etc.), and social media mentions of the company or uses of its tradeshow-specific hashtag.
Lead generation. This figure denotes how many attendees provided contact information and agreed to get future communications from the tradeshow team or other company representatives. Importantly, it also considers lead quality as determined by lead-scoring criteria developed for the show. Needless to say, one highly interested booth visitor carries much more weight than several people who popped in for a quick look and then moved on.
Feedback scores. These measure attendee satisfaction with and opinions about a company and its offerings. Teams get input by conducting short surveys (on-site or post-show) on booth design, product presentations, and staff interactions. Informal feedback obtained by the tradeshow team in conversations with booth visitors is also valuable.
Follow-up actions. These are post-show activities related to starting or continuing conversations with attendees. It’s crucial to record figures like outreach attempts, the number of attendees who agreed to have follow-up interactions, and the number of leads that converted into purchases.
Brand awareness. While brand awareness is not as easy to measure as other metrics, growing it is a critical objective at medical tradeshows. Data such as increased website traffic or social media engagement during and immediately after a show can support conclusions about the event’s value.
Gathering this essential information requires companies to be proactive and persistent, with steps that include:
1. Deciding on a tracking system. A healthcare event marketing agency can recommend a CRM or other system if one isn’t already in place.
2. Setting clear show objectives. A healthcare event agency’s input based on past experiences can be especially helpful here. Setting goals that are too low or too high is counterproductive. The best targets are attainable but only with sustained focus and significant effort from the tradeshow team.
3. Analyzing the data. A common mistake is to go to great lengths to capture data but then fail to leverage it. A healthcare event marketing agency works with clients to help them understand the information and use it to get the most from the recent show and position the company for greater success at the next one.
The Importance of Collaborating With Experienced and Attentive Healthcare Event Experts
A healthcare event marketing agency’s expertise is only valuable to a company if they can access it. Attentive client service is a characteristic that should be high on the list of any business looking to engage with an agency.
Struggling to connect with the firm spearheading your tradeshow efforts is not only frustrating but can potentially be detrimental to your results. The opposite of that scenario is one where you can reach your account executive quickly and, consequently, information flows freely between your team and the agency, reducing everyone’s stress and enabling better outcomes.
Slate360’s team of seasoned healthcare industry pros has unrivaled experience in all aspects of healthcare event marketing, from concepting, booth development, and show strategy, to execution (including beyond-the-booth activities that create powerful synergy) and post-show follow-up. We collaborate with clients to develop immersive exhibit experiences that attract and engage attendees, maximizing the impact of budgets of any size. And because we function as an extension of your team, you can get a hold of us just about as easily as you do your coworkers.
Does our expertise and accessibility make a difference to clients? Absolutely! We collaborate with some of the most notable names in healthcare, and they’re thrilled with the results we help them achieve.
If you have questions about how our team can help you and yours maximize the benefits of your tradeshows and other events, let’s talk!