B2B Healthcare Marketing on Linkedin: How-To Guide

1. Paid LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn offers advertising to generate leads, drive traffic to your website or landing page, and build brand awareness through a number of different ad formats, including sponsored content and sponsored messaging.

Simply put, Linkedin advertising allows you to guarantee getting a message in front of the healthcare decision makers you’re targeting, unlike organic (non-paid) Linkedin strategies.

2. Organic LinkedIn Outreach and Content.

LinkedIn offers multiple powerful organic opportunities including posting content, connecting with potential customers, sending InMails/Messages to prospects, and participating in groups. Organic (inbound) LinkedIn tactics can help your brand get discovered by prospects that are already “pre-sold” on your product or service.

This sounds like a smorgasbord of opportunity, right?

Well, you’re not wrong but it is important to note that LinkedIn is one of the more expensive social channels for paid advertising. It can be easy to burn through your advertising budget quickly, with little to show for it. Furthermore, the sales cycle for a B2B healthcare company tends to belong. Remember that while both paid and organic strategies on LinkedIn can generate qualified leads but should be considered a “long-term play” for B2B healthcare businesses.

Even with the above considerations, the return on investment for B2B healthcare companies can be very high, and it is well worth the effort to create a well-thought-out LinkedIn strategy.

(Or you can hire us to do it for you!).

These 3 tactics will help your B2B healthcare company win on LinkedIn.

Healthcare Marketing on Linkedin Starts with a Well-Defined Audience

When starting to think about LinkedIn healthcare advertising, the first conversation you have should be creating a clearly defined target audience. 

Who do you want to see in your ads? (Hint: the answer is not “everyone”). Like Facebook, LinkedIn collects data that creates significant opportunities to target your ads. You can check out the vast targeting options for LinkedIn advertising here.

When it comes to healthcare marketing on LinkedIn, there are a few demographic targeting areas that you can focus on to make the most of your budget.

Company Industry

LinkedIn ad targeting by industry can get more specific than just medical and healthcare. In fact, you can target many sub-verticals inside of healthcare.

Here are a few examples:

• Biotechnology
• Hospital & Healthcare
• Medical Practice
• Health, Wellness, and Fitness
• Mental Health Care
• Pharmaceuticals

Job Title Targeting

Let’s say your medical device company makes ventilators for hospital systems. You can target your ads to show up only for hospital administrators. Make sure you include all the potential job title variations that are important, and that the title reflects your true ideal target. Job title targeting often needs to be combined with another form of targeting, such as company, to make sure it hits the right target.

We recommend doing initial testing in the Linkedin Ads platform to understand what title options are available.

Seniority

Take a look at your existing customers and determine what seniority level most or all decision-makers are. Who is able to actually sign on that dotted line? If 80% of the decision-makers in your customer base are directions, senior directors, and vice presidents, target your LinkedIn ads so to specifically serve your ads to users who fit this seniority level. Options include:

• Owner
• Partner
• Director
• Manager
• Entry-Level

Company Targeting

You can run account-based marketing campaigns on LinkedIn by targeting only those people currently employed at a target list of companies.

You will need to add some job title or seniority targeting here to get specific with the department you’re trying to reach inside the company. You could, for example, only target Revenue Cycle Management and IT decision-makers in a list of target companies.

Custom Audiences

More important than LinkedIn’s built-in targeting, however, is creating a custom audience. A custom audience is a list of contacts you upload to LinkedIn that is then “matched” so you only show ads to these individuals.

For example, if you wanted to reactivate a list of old prospects that had “gone cold,” you could import them into LinkedIn and show ads to only those folks. Or maybe you attended a trade show and received a list with only names and emails, but you only want to engage with decision-makers.

You could upload your trade show contact list to your LinkedIn Campaign Manager, then apply job title targeting to specifically show your ad to trade show attendees who are directors or higher within their organization. Custom audiences are a hallmark of “ABM” or Account-Based Marketing.

This simply means that rather than fishing for prospects, you’re targeting specific companies or “accounts” as well as specific prospects you’ve pre-qualified. This type of campaign has been wildly successful for many B2B companies.

Remarketing

LinkedIn also offers website retargeting through their matched audiences feature. This enables your B2B healthcare organization to target those who have already engaged with your brand. The most useful scenarios would be:

• Targeting site visitors who saw your whitepaper download but didn’t submit
• Target those who’ve downloaded a whitepaper to promote a webinar

All of these targeting options are part of what makes LinkedIn successful for healthcare marketers.

Keep in mind that it take a while to build up the size of your Linkedin remarketing audiences. When you’re going after a smaller audience, like most B2B Healthcare marketers do, it can take a few months to build an audience large enough to start a remarketing campaign.

Marketing to Doctors

Yes, you’re able to target doctors on Linkedin as well. There are a few key areas that will allow you to advertise or seek out the kinds of physician specialties you might be interested in.

Company Industry

You’ll want to narrow it down to “Medical Practice” here, especially if you’re targeting independent physicians that are not a part of a larger hospital health system.

Job Title Targeting

This is where it gets a bit tricky. Linkedin has set job titles, which don’t always include the physician specialty you might be looking to target. For example – there’s no “spine surgeon” job title. Rather, there are “neurosurgeons” and “orthopedic surgeons.” In this case, where a physician specialty isn’t reflected in the job title you’re going after, you’ll need to use a different strategy.

Group Membership

One effective way to target specialties that might not be reflected in job titles is to target membership in Linkedin groups. In the example above, you may not be able to target “spine surgeon” as a job title, but you can identify who’s in the North American Spine Society Linkedin Group.

One note to keep in mind for all Linkedin targeting, especially if you’re running ads, is that your audience must be large enough to start a campaign. The minimum audience size to run a Linkedin campaign is 300 members.

Define a Lead Scoring System

Whether you have generated a swath of leads with a well-defined audience and expertly written ads or you have leveraged the robust organic opportunities of LinkedIn, you need to get ready for the leads to start coming in. Lead scoring has many benefits, and it’s a really important indicator of which contacts in your target accounts are ready to be contacted. This is important because even if you start with a list of prospects or accounts you know are qualified, lead scoring helps focus your sales team’s attention on the ones giving signals that they’re actively looking.

According to Marketing Sherpa, 73% are not sales-ready when they enter your system. You wouldn’t sell a car to someone without a driver’s license and have never searched for a car online, in fact, you wouldn’t even let them take a test drive. The same applies to B2B healthcare.

Let’s say you sell a HealthTech platform that works best for large, for-profit healthcare companies. You can score your prospects’ readiness based on behavior and data you capture to alert you when they are considered “sales-ready” based on hitting a minimum score. Here’s an example that shows you both high-value and low-value signals.