IDR Medical Switzerland
Austrasse 95, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland
T:
+41 (0) 61 535 1109
IDR Medical UK
Unit 104 Eagle Tower, Eagle Tower
Montpellier Drive, Cheltenham, GL50 1TA
T:
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Boston, Massachusetts 02110, USA
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While solving healthcare issues and growing businesses around these solutions is rewarding, marketing the medical devices involved remains complex.
Luckily, communication testing can help optimize your communication and get the right message to the right people. This ensures your medical device’s commercial success.
Join us in learning how to conduct successful communications testing in the medical space and how it can benefit your organization:
US healthcare and pharmaceutical digital ad spending grew by 10.1% in 2023, in a context where 5% of all Google searches are health-related. This shows how active the medical marketing audience is and how crucial it is to craft resonant messages.
Consistent marketing is usually more beneficial to brands. However, customer preferences, markets, and competition in the healthcare sector are constantly changing.
This means it's important to continuously analyze the market to help craft messages that capture and retain the attention of your target audience.
Communication testing can help you give the peace of mind that your marketing messages are going to resonate, so let's examine key concepts and actionable steps for improving medical product communication.
Communication testing works best when you start with clear goals. They are great reference points when gauging how well you’ve gotten through to your audience.
Customer segmentation is a good starting point when establishing communication testing goals.
Behavior varies across different segments, and so should your campaigns and expectations. You can segment customers based on numerous criteria, such as:
To succeed at customer segmentation, focus on specific buyer personas, wants, and needs, like:
Patients – need effective solutions delivered in a considerate manner, with clarity on how these products work/affect them.
Healthcare professionals – benefit from solutions powered by new innovations and finding more cost-efficient ways to serve patients.
Show that you understand their most pressing issues by laying them out in a personalized manner and explaining how the medical product/service addresses them.
Understanding your audience is vital for crafting effective messages and choosing the right testing methods. You’ll learn how to:
Qualitative and quantitative research methods offer different ways of determining communication effectiveness.
Qualitative methods focus on unique descriptions showing the possible effects of your communications. In contrast, quantitative methods rank or measure various findings, indicating the extent to which a specific result occurs.
In communication testing, qualitative methods enable a deeper understanding of the suitability of a message to different people. Let’s dissect each communication testing method:
Some common qualitative research methods in communication testing for medical marketing include:
These typically involve a one-on-one conversation held physically or virtually. They add a personal touch to your research, they are particularly useful for understanding processes both in clinician research and patient research
This involves curating a small group that loosely represents a larger group. It can be a simpler way of determining the effectiveness of a specific message on an audience with a particular makeup.
In the healthcare sector, focus groups can be particularly helpful in:
Focus groups can also be more fun and efficient, demystify relationships and group dynamics, and support workflow flexibility.
Ethnography involves observing an individual’s behavior in certain real-world situations for more accurate insight into their influences. It provides original, uncompromised information on issues such as the consistency of usage, care for the product, and use customization.
Qualitative medical market research can produce many unique answers, so it helps to identify recurring themes. Spotting these patterns helps you arrive at more meaningful and actionable conclusions faster. You can handle this data more efficiently through:
Ultimately, conducting qualitative research with clear goals is key to avoiding blunders in data collection and preparation for analysis. It will keep you on the right path from the start of your research to obtaining valuable insights.
Quantitative research involves collecting and analyzing numerical data to discover patterns, predict events, test causation, and generalize results to the wider population. In medical marketing, quantitative research methods used in communication testing include:
These typically involve directing participants to a web page or app where they are invited to answer a series of closed questions or multiple choices, which are suitable for quantitative analysis.
Online surveys are also ideal for some forms of conjoint analysis, measuring customer preferences and the value they place on different product features and benefits that form part of your communications.
The main benefit of online surveys is that they enable you to access a wide audience, and gather a large sample of data, cost effectively.
However, it's important to to note that online are completed without moderation or guidance, so any questions should be straightforward and easy to understand to avoid any misunderstandings that can skew the accuracy of your data.
With this approach, a moderator guides the respondents through a structured survey over the phone.
The main benefit of this approach is that the moderator is available to explain questions and reduce misunderstandings - which can be particularly valuable if you’re completing more complex conjoint analysis or dealing with specialist topics.
But with the need for a moderator to be present, CATI can take more time to complete and can reach fewer participants cost effectively than an online survey.
Regardless of whether you choose online surveys or CATI for your quantitative communications testing, it’s important to have the right approach to data analysis.
A robust approach to data analytics helps you to extract meaningful insights from the participant data you collect, and turn them into actionable strategies for your medical device marketing.
Choosing the right market research methodology for your communication testing really depends on your specific objectives, and the insights you want to uncover.
Each market research methodology comes with its own unique benefits, which is why the most effective communications testing plans often combine both qualitative and quantitative market research.
For example, one-on-one interviews are excellent for in-depth qualitative research. They can help you gain insight into an individual's needs and preferences, and also enable you to understand the rationale behind their decisions.
Online surveys are more appropriate for generating a broad range of quantitative responses to your communications - helping to validate their overall effectiveness and identify any general trends in feedback.
Focus groups on the other hand, can be useful for understanding how your communications resonate with specific audience segments. While some participants may be reluctant to share their innermost thoughts and feelings in a shared setting, the group dynamics of a focus group can often lead to vibrant discussion and unlock insights that one-on-one interviews might miss.
Depending on the nature of your communications testing project, you might consider different types of focus group at various stages. For instance, exploratory focus groups can help you identify key issues in the early stages of research. You might then follow this up with a descriptive focus group to help you gain more in-depth insights on the issues that have been identified.
To ensure consistent data gathering:
Avoid bias and ensure data reliability when administering communication tests by:
When gathering data and organizing it for analysis, ensure that:
In qualitative data analysis, one go-to approach is thematic analysis. This involves coding, where you label various elements (like words or phrases) in responses.
These labels represent specific themes, so you can observe their frequency and understand their relationships.
In quantitative data analysis, you can use:
Combining qualitative insights with quantitative data is important to form comprehensive conclusions.
Once you have your test findings, list all the identified weaknesses, tackle the top issues, and gradually move to the less urgent ones. Try to resist implementing too many modifications at once.
Instead, test communication techniques progressively. To monitor the impact of changes in your communications over time:
IDR Medical has consistently delivered expert communication testing in the healthcare space. We draw from years of experience managing various aspects of product development and marketing campaigns. More recently, we’ve worked with a leading medical equipment company’s dental division.
They’d secured the latest CAD/CAM and intra oral scanning technologies and needed a solid global launch plan. Their major concern was how to penetrate the highly competitive North American market.
We quickly determined that they’d need to measure how their new product's messaging resonated compared to existing solutions, and understand the impact of different communication strategies.
After conducting multiple interviews and online surveys with various healthcare stakeholders, our marketing and customer insights eventually helped the client achieve successful European and US product launches.
You can learn more about how IDR Medical has used communication testing to enable various organizations to effectively build and market their products and services in these healthcare industry stories.
Communication testing is crucial in achieving market success for your healthcare products and services. To achieve this, it's important to take a methodical approach that includes:
Contact us today to learn more about how IDR Medical’s communication testing can help you succeed in the market.