Here’s What Most Entrepreneurs Get Wrong About Marketing Strategy, Experts Say

The Business Plan Essentials series: How to Build a Financial Roadmap for Your Business Plan How to Use Milestone Mapping to Chart a Path for Startup Growth How to Use Competitive Intel to Boost Your Business Plan How to Build a C-Suite That Scales

Healthcare and life science marketing is intricate, complex, and crucial to a startup’s success. Yet, it is often the most misunderstood element of a business plan. In fact, many people mistakenly equate marketing with communications and sales. Instead, it’s a strategic blueprint that connects your product or service with the right audience at the right time, through the right channels. 

A well-developed marketing section not only defines how you’ll acquire and retain customers but also demonstrates to investors that you understand your market, your competition, and your unique value proposition. Without an effective marketing plan, even the best science runs the risk of fading into irrelevance.

“Marketing is the growth engine of your business,” explained Monica Cepak, the multilingual CEO of Wisp and a former chief marketing officer for the organization.  “It’s also one of the most important things to test into and get right early on.”

For this article, Cure spoke with several marketing experts to discuss the key elements of a marketing strategy, how it fits into a business plan, and how it can impact the success and direction of your company.

RELATED: 5 Proven B2C Revenue Models for Healthcare Startups

What Is Marketing and Why Is It Important?

When done well, marketing allows you to identify your customers, their pain points, and their usage or buying patterns. It also provides insight into important details about your startup and the trajectory of the company, including whether or not you need to tweak your product or your approach.

“Marketing is a jigsaw puzzle and you have to put all the pieces together,” says Roberta N. Clarke, PhD, an Adjunct Professor for the Heller School for Social Policy and Management for Brandeis University, an Associate Professor Emerita for Boston University, and a recipient of the American Marketing Association's Philip Kotler Award for Excellence in Healthcare Marketing. “If you only have a few pieces of the puzzle, you’re not going to make it.”

At the heart of marketing is market research—which often starts with asking the right questions and talking to the right people including the potential customer, clinicians, insurers, and other important stakeholders, said Clarke. You also have to ask financial questions and operational questions as well as examine the market size and understand the customer.

“You’re looking at what the competitive landscape is in the market. Are you entering one with lots of strong competitors and do they have bigger pocketbooks than we do? Because obviously if you have a very small pocketbook and your competitors have very big ones, that might be a market to stay away from. Heroic actions are admirable but not necessarily smart from a business perspective,” she explained.

According to Clarke, the most important marketing decisions are made very early on and they do not have anything to do with communications and promotion. Instead, they involve determining market size, examining customer acquisition needs, and evaluating the competitive landscape.

Marketing starts with an early understanding of what the patient journey is, what the market size may be, and what your competitors are doing, she said. “It is systematic, objective, and analytical. You’re systematically gathering information on everything. It’s analytical because it’s heavily data based, and it’s objective because sometimes you have to say no.” 

Benefits of Marketing for Life Sciences Startups

Creating a marketing strategy within your business plan is not just an option for healthcare and life sciences startups, it’s a necessity. Without it, you may struggle to identify your core customer base, lack the market research and data that investors expect, and face challenges when trying to make complex business decisions.

Conversely, having a full picture of what you’re up against can help you fine tune what you’re offering, how you’re going to introduce it to the market, and how you’re going to get customers and keep them.

With marketing, you are gauging market fit early on and making sure you are addressing a core pain point, explained Cepak. You also use it to discover how you can deliver a real value proposition to address those needs; and that comes through testing and conversations, she said. 

“You might think you have a genius idea, but if you don’t validate it or there’s not a market for it, you don’t have a business and no one’s going to invest in it,” she said. 

Marketing helps you find the answers to questions like who is the customer, what are their pain points, what are their purchasing or use patterns, does this fit within their expectations or needs, why is this needed now, and so on. Then, you utilize that information to fine tune or position your startup in the marketplace and determine how you are going to acquire customers. In some cases, the answers may even send you back to the drawing board.

One research study found that effective marketing strategies can benefit healthcare companies by improving competitive advantage, creating trust, and building a solid reputation not only with customers but also with potential investors. It also can:

• Help attract and acquire customers

• Improve patient engagement

• Drive revenue

• Improve health literacy

• Promote positive health outcomes

• Build brand credibility

Related: 8 Early-Stage Hurdles Your Healthcare Startup Could Face—and How To Overcome Them

Key Elements to Include in Your Marketing Section

Because every healthcare or life science startup is different, no two marketing strategies will be exactly the same nor will they contain the same elements, said Cepak. Consequently, the marketing plan for a therapeutic is going to be vastly different from the marketing plan for a telehealth company. 

Your mentors, advisors, and even those in your professional network can help you determine the specifics of what to include. In some cases, it may even make sense to hire a marketing consultant. Here are some core marketing components identified by the University of Pennsylvania that apply to most healthcare and life science business plans.

• Target market overview: This is a detailed summary of your core customer including their pain points, decision-making patterns, and other relevant information. This information is gathered through market research and is used to guide messaging, resource allocation, and marketing strategies. 

• Value proposition and differentiation: This section, which illustrates to investors your value, contains clinical data, customer experiences, and other research used to define the core problem and your unique solution.

• Metrics and analytics: This section identifies the potential return on investment and will include metrics and data like the customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and engagement. 

• Competitive landscape: This section should provide an overview of the current market, who your competitors are, what they do well, where they may fall short, and how your product or service fills a current gap in the market. You should also include metrics on your competitors as well as gaps in the marketplace.

• Marketing strategies: Depending on the stage of your company, your marketing strategies might include your go-to-market strategy, key opinion leader engagement, partnerships with clinicians, and strategic storytelling. These strategies should be unique to your startup and are guided by your market research, your customer acquisition goals, and how you might differentiate yourself from your competitors.

“Market fit, conversion rate, and other key metrics help you extrapolate a cost of acquisition, then that is the key metric that you build into your financial plan,” explained Cepak. “This is one of the core metrics an investor is going to ask you about. They want to see not only that you can acquire a customer efficiently, but what is that payback period.”

Best Practices and Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Because marketing is often misunderstood or not incorporated from the beginning, there is a tendency for healthcare and life science organizations to miss key opportunities for engagement, differentiation, and growth. Here are some best practices as well as common pitfalls to avoid when developing the marketing component of your business plan. 

• Learn everything you can about your customer, the market, and your competition, suggested Clarke. One common pitfall is assuming marketing is simply about sales and communication.

• Keep doing your analysis until you discover what looks like it could be a success, said Clarke. Because most new projects fail, you want to mitigate that risk. Use marketing to help answer critical questions upfront.

• Align your value proposition with the needs of your customer and highlight what need or gap your product fills. One common pitfall is not differentiating your offering from others out there, said Cepak.

• Use your marketing strategy to help remove friction points that hinder customer acquisition or product adoptions. This involves knowing what the customer wants, how they make their decisions, and what it costs to acquire them, said Cepak.

• Refrain from investing too much money upfront on marketing materials, website development, or creating the perfect brand, said Cepak. She said if you are delivering value and addressing a need, you will still see those customers come through without a large expense upfront.

“People think they have to have everything perfect right out of the gate—like their website or marketing materials—but that’s not true,” said Cepak. “When Wisp started, we didn’t have a perfect website and it didn’t matter because we were delivering real value to patients.”

A successful marketing component in a business plan shows investors that you can deliver something your customer wants and needs as well as explains how you are going to communicate your value proposition effectively to your customer in order to acquire that customer in an effective and efficient manner, said Cepak.