Get personal: Healthcare ABM strategy with Bombora’s Intent data

In the world of B2B account-based marketing (ABM), the healthcare sector presents unique challenges. What was once primarily an in-person sales experience has become increasingly dependent upon digital marketing. Now, the healthcare sales process is almost entirely digital, and requires healthcare marketers to fully understand a prospect or customer’s unique goals. 

The three most common roadblocks facing marketing to healthcare buyers are:

• risk-averse buyers
• long sales processes
• tight regulations 

The buyer committee in the medical community is complex. Purchasing models are complex and you will need to build trust with high-quality buyers. Combine these hurdles with a nuanced decision-making process within hospitals and other large industry organizations, and you have very prolonged sales cycles. 

Despite this, there are sales to be made. According to Deloitte, healthcare spending accounts for $320 million today and will likely reach $1 trillion by 2040. To combat these challenges and offset the long sales cycle, effective measurement of success is crucial in understanding and refining how you attract new accounts and even retain existing customers.

So where do you begin to efficiently and effectively understand who is in market at any time?

Enter Intent data.

Understanding buyer intent

Intent data provides a unique view of an account’s online search behavior during the customer journey. In simple terms, Intent data signals show which accounts are in market and ready to make an investment in products or services. This data is gathered from search terms, content viewed, and other trackable activities across the web.

Intent data is helpful because when buyers look for a specific solution or product, they engage in several related search journeys. Typically, there are about seven buyers (a buying committee) making the final decision when looking to onboard a new Intent data provider, sales prospecting tool, or martech platform. The buying committee will research the features needed, the typical cost of the solution, top vendors, and competing products, before deciding. Statistically, 57-70% of the buying process happens before the buyer will ever speak with your company, 

With this information, you can build targeted campaigns directed toward these buyers to ensure you’re putting your solution front and center and directly addressing the pain points the buyer is looking to solve. Targeted content is critical to the final purchase decision – 9 out of 10 buyers say content has a moderate-to-major effect on the purchase decision. Ensure the content they see is relevant to their needs.

Revolutionizing digital health solutions with Bombora’s Company Surge^®

In the healthcare sector, Intent data can be a game-changer. It provides valuable intelligence about who is in-market for your solution, who is researching the category you operate in, how to solve a problem you can help them with, what their options are, and who they are considering. It can tell you who you need to focus on in your prospecting and marketing, aligning with one of the key principles of ABM — focusing on fewer best-fit targets.

However, not all Intent data is created equal. Bombora’s Company Surge^® — a type of Intent data — isn’t siphoned or scraped. It’s directly collected with consent from our proprietary data source — the only Intent data cooperative comprising 5,000+ of the top B2B sites on the web. Unlike with siphoned or scraped data, you gain the most accurate reflection of the buyers’ digital journey and understand their intensity of purchase intent. This is a critical need when building ABM programs for a privacy-first industry like healthcare and digital health solutions.

There are several sources of Intent data, with Bombora being one of the most well known and trusted providers. Other sources include ABM platforms like 6sense, Terminus, and Demandbase. These platforms integrate ABM Intent data, providing signals on buying intent collected by companies from third-party websites. 

Discovering how Intent-powered ABM works for digital health and patient care providers today

Third-party Intent data provides signals about which accounts are actively interested in specific topics. For instance, a virtual care business might be interested in finding telehealth buyers. They can integrate Intent-powered products like Company Surge® into their marketing automation system to track healthcare providers’ interests across telehealth topics. This data can then be displayed in a sortable report, allowing the business to determine who might be in-market for what they’re selling, as shown in the screenshot below. 

The more topics researched by the buyer, the more insight can be drawn about what they are looking for and what their pain points might be.

Leveraging Company Surge^® in your ABM digital program

• Outreach aligned to your enterprise sales goals: Providing your SDRs access to in-market buyer intent reports in real time in your CRM platform can help them prioritize where to hunt and personalize outreach. They can distill top insights about the accounts that are most active in their buying journey when they’re researching your or your competitors’ solutions.
• Customers with a flight risk: Buyer intent can also be valuable in keeping an eye on existing customers. Seeing that they are actively spiking in interest for a topic related to your product or service may indicate they’re looking around. E.g., if you’re a medical device provider,  and the data shows your medical manufacturing partner is researching patches and security upgrades, this may present an opportunity to work together on product design and development. Alternatively, if they’re researching your competitor names, they may be in the market for a new or additional partner.
• ABM go-to-market motions: ABM programs are most effective when intent-based targeting and nurturing activities are applied to niche audience segments with common needs, traits, or interests. You can then create and launch personalized sequences for each segment that include tailored content and different lead scores for the varied CTAs presented in your sequences. Ultimately, you’ll be able to adapt your marketing-sales funnel towards moving accounts closer to booking a meeting, reaching out to your team, and ultimately converting as new customers.

Driving digital marketing success in your healthcare ABM program with Company Surge^® 

Why talk about it when we can show you? Here’s an example of where buyer Intent data can be pivotal in your ABM marketing sequences and LinkedIn targeting. Let’s pretend you’re an electronic health records (EHR) provider. You can use Bombora in the following ways:

1. Use Bombora’s Company Surge® to create a weekly report identifying healthcare providers showing in-market behavior for EHR systems.
2. Import this narrow, targeted account list seamlessly into LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
3. Now you’re ready to create a tailored LinkedIn marketing campaign designed specifically for accounts showing an active interest in solutions like yours.
4. Focus your campaign on high-impact roles, such as healthcare IT directors or chief information officers (CIOs), in organizations actively seeking EHR solutions.
5. Launch your campaign! Provide content or offers tailored to your audience’s primary interests, such as improving patient data management. 

This is how you can easily use Intent data to strategically align your EHR solutions with the healthcare providers active in the market.

To learn more about how Healthlaunchpad effectively integrated Intent data into its ABM strategy, check out this webinar. We spotlight how it uses Intent data to identify which vertical segment a prospect might fit into, then run vertical campaigns for each.