Investment in global healthtech is booming, with over $50 billion pumped into startups in 2021 alone. The demand for technologies like telemedicine, at-home testing, smart watches, and other personal healthtech during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a major driver of funding and awareness, bringing new and innovative products to the market.
Some of the most exciting innovations in healthtech include real-time monitors like the FreeStyle Libre 2, which enables those with diabetes to have minute-by-minute data on their blood glucose levels via their phone, accessible VR surgical education tools like @HomeVR, and smart ‘e-skin’ apparel like Xenoma.
Whether it’s motivating healthy behaviors, boosting productivity, or supporting serious conditions, healthtech marketing should always prioritize keeping the public informed and supported. For technology like the FreeStyle Libre 2 and other cutting-edge medical devices, marketing campaigns have to be sensitive to people’s fears and uncertainties. On top of all this, as healthtech brands continue to grow, the need to differentiate and convey unique brand messages grows too.
To help get the right message out to the right people in a way that cuts through industry noise, healthtech providers have to build trust in their tech, using empathy to meaningfully connect their product to its users.
Take a look at three of our favorite healthtech campaigns that have broken boundaries, sparked new conversations, and demonstrated empathy.
Elvie, a London-based healthtech startup, created an innovative device that makes Kegel exercises and pelvic floor training easy. The Elvie trainer connects to an intuitive mobile app that allows users to track their progress in improving their pelvic floor strength.
A recent campaign saw the brand breaking the stigma around female urinary incontinence, an issue that affects 84% of women in the UK and over 60% of women in the US, by installing a billboard that “pees” on passersby. The 20-foot billboard is rigged so that water falls down onto pedestrians below, with the tagline “Leaks happen … but they don’t have to”.
As well as being timely (the campaign itself is an homage to a recently-banned viral TikTok), the imagery is striking, and Elvie’s decision to use outdoor advertising rather than digital-only adds to the statement. The campaign's effort to break the stigma around female urinary incontinence, and call out social media platforms for censoring similar content, establishes Elvie as an open and accepting brand, unafraid to open up taboo conversations that empower women to prioritize their health.
A leader in wearable healthtech, Fitbit produces devices that monitor physical fitness, sleep, heart rate, and more, helping the wearer stay motivated. Fitbit decided to center this 2021 campaign around “shifting the patterns” of daily life to healthier ones as the world emerged from lockdown.
With an overall message of “self-care” and listening to one’s own body, the campaign consisted of various ads that focused on different individuals’ positive self-care patterns. By focusing on an overall health-related message, and representing a variety of different people’s daily stories, Fitbit establishes better emotional connections with their different target audiences.
“Layla” was created by The Public Good Projects (PGP) to address unintended pregnancy among Black and Hispanic teenagers in Syracuse, New York. Teenagers can type in any questions about sex and pregnancy and get an immediate reply from Layla via a website chatbot, which uses AI and natural language processing.
Built in collaboration with local women to ensure that the chatbot ‘speaks’ realistically and that the target audience is represented across Layla’s branding, the “Layla’s Got You” campaign demonstrates the potential of combining digital technology with human-centered design. Using AI to establish trust and familiarity, Layla builds emotional connections and empowers young people to access the healthcare they need.
The common thread among these campaigns is their emphasis on connectivity and empathy. Successful campaigns, no matter the industry, need to appeal to their target audience’s wants, needs, and emotions. For healthtech brands, it’s vital to strike a balance between the technical (important medical information) and the emotional (the mental or physical pains each individual is feeling).
At FMXA, we know how delicate this balance is. By combining our experience in brand development and content creation with our in-depth tech industry knowledge, our campaigns emotionally connect, creatively stand out, and technically resonate, meeting both your technical and emotive requirements.
We’d love to help you devise a unique campaign to market your tech. See more of our campaign experience here and get in touch with the team for more information.
Conducting campaigns is a vital pillar of marketing, and, done right, can be your key to raising awareness, driving growth and launching into new markets. But all too often, once content has been sent out and any leads have been passed over to the sales team, you find that the results of the campaign aren’t quite what you expected. Maybe you went disturbingly over budget, attracted leads that are less than ideal, or found that prospects weren’t willing to engage past the initial stages. It’s a waste of your time and without a doubt a waste of your marketing budget.
Putting disappointing campaigns behind you means setting out your goals, tactics, and strategy early, and making sure that every individual knows their role in the process. In other words, using a bespoke and carefully-mapped campaign blueprint.
A campaign blueprint graphically lays out the elements of a marketing campaign to identify:
However it’s presented, your campaign blueprint should act as a master document throughout campaign planning and execution, reflecting your goals, forecasted results, audience information, timeline, and budget.
Larger and more strategic activities like giveaways, landing pages, and events are called “Fulcrum” elements, and are often the most detailed part of your campaign blueprint. All initiatives designed to drive action towards Fulcrum elements are then labeled as “Levers”, and initiatives that take place after an action, such as thank you emails or retargeted ads, are called “Outcomes.” Using these three elements (illustrated on the diagram below), you can capture the precise workflows you need to plan and execute your campaign successfully.
So, how do we create our campaign blueprints? At FMXA, we believe that for campaigns to be successful, they need to consider the entire path to purchase, truly resonate with the end customer, and stand for something more than the technology, elevating you above your competitors. We know that one size doesn’t fit all, so our campaign blueprints make an effort to understand your customers and create bespoke strategic activities, backed up by research, all integrated into your sales process.
Our blueprints take into account three key considerations:
Connecting with your customers in the right way is the key to a successful campaign. We combine extensive research with our experience in the tech industry to understand not just who the customer is, but how they buy from you, and why they might be reluctant to. Beyond understanding the individuals you’re targeting, we make an effort to map the entire ecosystem of contacts within an account, from the C-Suite to Analysts and channel partners.
Our campaigns evolve as the industry evolves, tapping into the current conversations and pain points that your customers have, whether that’s through giveaways, reports, personalized videos, or intimate events. We never settle for copy-and-paste emails and LinkedIn messages; we personalize your outreach to each persona, ensuring that you evoke the emotions you want to evoke.
By nurturing the customer with personalized content throughout their entire path to purchase, making the buyers’ journey one cohesive and seamless experience. We ensure that your customer, sales team, and channel partners have everything they need to successfully execute the entire campaign, from sales collateral to design templates. This helps your business move away from rushed, short-term campaigns and toward longer-term campaigns that build up and back up your brand.
By pulling together our experience in brand development and content creation, as well as our in-depth tech industry knowledge, our campaign blueprint ensures that what we do creatively stands out and engages with your customer's emotions. And we make sure we do this without deviating from your brand story or diluting important technical messaging.
But don’t take our word for it. We’ve conducted multiple creative campaigns for our innovative tech clients, like this one that shone a light on CISOs’ mental health and this one that likened cybersecurity to the flesh of an avocado. Our ‘66 days back’ campaign for Malwarebytes even won us The Drum’s B2B For Good award in 2021.
Let us chat you through the FMXA campaign blueprint in more detail. Get in touch for a chat about our services and how they fit into your business plans.
As an agency, FMXA has always been mindful of the alignment of sales and marketing, and we understand that executive sponsorship is key to the success of any Account Based Marketing Programme.
With this in mind, I was delighted to attend the 2021 Global ABM Conference to further expand my knowledge of what makes an ABM campaign successful. It was particularly exciting to be able to attend the event in-person this year, after almost two years of remote, online-only events. Spread across two days, one in-person and one virtual, the conference included talks from some of the leading masterminds of the international ABM community, who spoke directly to the pain points of B2B marketing.
Compared to the 2019 conference, it’s clear that many more technology vendors are now embarking on building an ABM strategy program. Over 86% of attendees had budget allocated to Account Based Marketing, with over 24% of the audience allocating 30% of their total marketing budgets on ABM programs.
Andrea Clatworthy, Global Head of ABM at Fujitsu, kicked us off by explaining the three building blocks of ABM success: executive sponsorship, finding the right ABM resources, and realistic budgets.
Andrea went on to explain that there’s no set budget per every account should be looked at with a fresh perspective, and a net-new account may require a bigger budget than an existing customer. I loved Andrea’s talk on the three Rs: Reach, Relationships, and Revenue, which explained the importance of having realistic expectations for ROI.
Tricia Stinton, UK CMO of Cognizant, explained the ways in which the pandemic has shifted our interaction with audiences. With less scope for physical events and trade shows, most of the interactions we make are now digitally-led.
Both Tricia and Andrea talked about a ‘purist’ approach to ABM—having a deep understanding of your client and scaling a one-to-one approach to one-to-few and then one-to-many as you refine your marketing formula.
As an agency, we certainly consider this deep understanding and personalization an important factor when working with clients. Our ’66 Days Back’ CISO engagement campaign for Malwarebytes focused on the human impact of malware, shining a light on stress within cybersecurity and providing personalized wellbeing subscriptions as a way of empathizing with security professionals.
Autodesk’s Judy Wilks and Christian Weiss talked around the five ways (not) to fail at ABM, with Christian sharing his challenge in getting executive sponsorship for ABM (or “another bullshit in marketing”, as it was referred to by his peers). Christian shared his advice on aligning with sales and the role of marketing in taking a longer-term view, always keeping the customer at the center of the process.
We loved his comments around how data is king and content is queen – a view shared by Tejal Patel, Senior Director of Marketing at Cisco.
At FMXA, our focus is always on the person reading the content – their worries, their capabilities, and their goals.
Looking beyond marketing to accounts and striving to reach the people within these accounts is key to successful ABM. And when we drive that engagement further, that’s when the magic happens.
Neil Berry, Global Head of Account and Deal-Based Marketing from ATOS, focused on the human aspect of technology marketing and the complexity of the B2B buyer journey. Marketers have over 9000 marketing tools to choose from, making it easy to get lost in systems when we should be focusing on building campaigns that give reach.
Neil explained how important it was to separate and differentiate deal based marketing from account based marketing, both of which are necessary for key accounts.
Holding and attending events and conferences in this ‘new normal’ can be daunting. The silver lining is that COVID has challenged us to push the boundaries of what we can do, forcing us to be creative and personalize the event experience so that everyone is comfortable, mutually respected, and safe as they network and share knowledge.
This year’s Global ABM Conference emphasized the need to look beyond the data and focus on the personal and professional goals of the individuals we market to, validating FMXA’s philosophy of humanizing technology.
If you’d like to discuss account based marketing, message Alisha Dattani or reach out to the FMXA team.
