Healthcare is a highly competitive and regulated industry, and successful market penetration is dependent upon the ability to reach and educate your customers with compelling product value propositions.  A robust communications strategy that incorporates three key drivers of success will increase your success -- from launch through all product lifecycle stages.
 
1. Build relationships with medical experts to create consistent messaging and long-term trusted advisory liaisons
 
Communicating a product’s therapeutic benefits must be linked to credible sources, which includes external scientific advisors and industry thought leaders.  Identifying these important voices prior to launch helps on two levels.  First, external medical experts understand the industry and competition, both current and forecasted.  They are well suited to assist in crafting core messages that resonate with professional target audiences as well as patients.  The perspectives of external experts ensure your value proposition is clearly articulated and well received.  Second, long-term trusted advisory relationships are key to the prolonged success of your product.  As market conditions change, competition emerges, and regulations shift, your key advisors will guide you in updating product messaging and positioning.  These trusted experts act as outsourced business and scientific intelligence, and they aid your internal teams throughout the product lifecycle.  Along the way, they build your corporate reputation as experts in the disease state.
 
Five Key Take-Aways from Advisory Boards:
1.  Product messaging and positioning
2.  Competitive analysis
3.  Target market segmentation and specific value propositions
4.  Forecasted industry and therapeutic trends
5.  Professional and patient communication strategies
 
2. conduct a needs assessment for the current market view
 
“What pain does your product solve, and does the target audience know about you?”  Answering this question is a classic go-to-market exercise.  For healthcare products in particular, the starting point for building a communications plan and answering this question is a Needs Assessment.  Needs Assessments reveal currently available therapeutic options, standards of care, clinician’s views on patient management techniques, trends in therapy and associated outcomes, along with a host of other valuable data.  Needs Assessments are the foundation of a strategic communications plan and help to define specific tactics appropriate for reaching and educating each target audience.  These assessments rely on both qualitative and quantitative data to help you manage product launch and lifecycle stages.
 
Five Key Take-Aways from Needs Assessments:
1.  Current standards of care and clinical guidelines and how your product fits in the mix
2.  Forcasted industry and environmental trends and how your product may influence them
3.  Target audience barriers to change and how your product can change behavior
4.  Outcomes and results from previous educational and marketing initiatives to learn effective means of reaching and teaching the target audience
5.  Learning preferences and styles of identified target audiences to guide development of marketing and educational materials
 
3. Prepare the market by raising disease state awareness
 
Prior to launch, a key communications strategy is to raise disease state awareness.  By communicating about the disease state as a whole -- along with currently available treatment options -- you create opportunities to introduce market trends and to establish a voice of expertise, both yours and that of your strategic advisors.  You set the stage for future communications that directly address your product offering.  From white papers to byline articles, case study vignettes to patient panels, a strategic communication plan must include opportunities to establish your company’s expertise through awareness campaigns.
 
Five Key Goals of a Disease State Awareness Campaign:
1.  Raise the level of awareness about a disease and its treatment trends
2.  Establish the company as an expert in the disease state
3.  Educate the public and create call-to-action opportunities
4.  Devolop your brand and create goodwill
5.  Cultivate business and scientific relationships
 
The ultimate success factor in bringing a product to market is ensuring the right messages -- both educational and marketing -- reach the right audiences, every time.  A strategic communications plan that factors in interactions between internal and external experts, tactical programs to reach and educate target audiences, fully researched needs assessments, and nationwide awareness campaigns will yield success, every time.
 
About the Writer
Alicia Sutton is the President of Healthcare Division at Sage Communications. She is a seasoned business leader with two decades’ experience in founding and growing businesses operating in B2B markets. As President of Sage Communications’ Healthcare Division, she leverages 18 years of healthcare marketing, branding, communications, and education gained through working with such clients as Pfizer, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Merck & Co., Sanofi-Aventis, Genentech, Amgen, Johnson & Johnson companies, and a dozen more leading pharmaceutical companies. She has successfully completed four accreditation processes in the continuing medical education (CME) arena; her expertise spans strategy development for pre-launch compound and disease state awareness to post-launch marketing and education campaigns.
 
Prior to joining Sage Communications, she was founder and CEO of Enable Healthcare Communications, where she conceptualized and brought to market a product line that addressed the needs of pharmaceutical companies supporting direct-to-physician communications, including DriveTimeCME™, cmeCinema®, cmeOn-Call™, cmeInsight™, and others. Enable Healthcare was acquired by CME Enterprise in 2004, and Alicia directed the transition of team members, products, clients, and business development. Prior to founding Enable Healthcare, Alicia held executive management positions in numerous private and public entities, including Executive Vice President of Boron LePore’s Digital Communications Division, a publicly traded healthcare communications company (now owned by Cardinal Health), with clients such as BMS, Merck & Co., GSK, Novartis, and more; President of Strategic Implications International (SII), a healthcare marketing and education company that successfully launched the first CME content on AOL through its Digital Cities Network (SII was acquired by Boron LePore); President and co-founder of Cogent Interactive Communications, an interactive media company with clients such as Porter Novelli, Glaxo, American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, American College of Gastroenterology, and Oncology Nursing Society; and CEO of DesignPower, a marketing communications firm with clients such as Perot Systems, Fairchild Industries, EDS, U.S. Naval Command & Control, and Janes Information Group.
 
Alicia is a member of the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education and the Healthcare Business Women’s Association (Mid-Atlantic Division). She holds a BS in Journalism.
 
About Sage Communications
Sage Communications, founded by Israeli–born David Gorodetski, is a full-service marketing communications firm located in the Virginia/Greater Washington, D.C. area with an office in San Francisco, CA. Sage provides strategic marketing services that includes public relations, advertising, marketing and branding campaigns to US and international organizations, including AMOS Spacecom, National Institutes of Health, K2M, CME Enterprise, Juniper Networks, Avant Healthcare Marketing, Dynamics Research Corporation, Apogen Technologies, AT&T.  Sage Communications also supports the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival as well as Goodwill of Greater Washington.
For more information about Sage Communications: www.aboutsage.com
David Gorodetski: davidg@aboutsage.com