Social media could be the newest and most profitable trend in medical market research. Through monitoring social media platforms, companies can easily and often very cheaply, gain access to more information on end consumers and health practitioners than ever before.
What role can social media play in medical market research?
Given the ever-expanding reach of social media, it should come as no surprise to learn that it is continually fascinating marketers, both as a valuable source of information and as a powerful marketing tool.
Like their counterparts in other sectors, healthcare companies can use social media to conduct medical market research on their potential customer base. Healthcare companies may face special challenges in this regard, not least because of the regulation surrounding their products and services. But none of these special challenges are insurmountable, in fact most healthcare companies should find more than enough benefit in social media medical market research to make it more than worth their while.
Monitoring the social media interactions of healthcare professionals could be the most valuable medical market research you collect.
Healthcare companies interested in conducting medical market research in healthcare should direct their efforts and other resources examining the social media-based interactions of healthcare professionals. This is because healthcare professionals exert the largest influence over product sales, making them the most important people when it comes to online and offline marketing strategies.
Here are the main benefits for healthcare companies that can be had from monitoring the social media-based interactions of healthcare professionals:
Social media accounts can give you a better understanding of what consumers want and what additional medical market research you may need to collect
No business can hope to succeed without understanding its consumers. To name but some of the problems, such a business would not be able to either come up with a product or service that its consumers will want or be able to market it in a way that speaks to potential consumers. In fact, it is possible that such a business would have no clue who its consumers might be, which is the first step on the path to financial ruin.
This simple rule is as true of healthcare companies as it is of their counterparts in other sectors. As a result, examining the social media-based interactions of healthcare professionals, as part of their medical market research activities, is useful for healthcare companies because it provides them with a better understanding of their consumers. This has an enormous number of applications, which range from helping healthcare companies understand the concerns of their potential consumers to helping healthcare companies come up with more marketable products and services based on meeting exact consumer concerns.
Furthermore, social media is a powerful tool in the sense that healthcare companies can use it to conduct medical market research on the segment of healthcare professionals that concern them the most rather than healthcare professionals in general. Better still, healthcare companies can focus their efforts in this manner without having to spend too much time and other resources. Healthcare companies can also easily identify gaps in their knowledge and design targeted medical market research activities to create a complete picture of their market.
Combined with the fact that the medical market research collected from social media is real time, the rising appeal of social media as a market research tool for healthcare companies becomes more and more understandable.
Healthcare companies can capitalise on the word-of-mouth nature of social media to boost the reach of online marketing campaigns: Market research in healthcare is the gateway to implementing online marketing strategies
Of course, examining the social media-based interactions of healthcare professionals provides healthcare companies with the best insight for their online marketing strategies. In part, this is because healthcare professionals using social media are also more likely to consume online marketing campaigns.
It also helps that social media marketing tools let healthcare companies collect more useful information in less time and with less effort than otherwise possible. This is an important benefit because online marketing strategies that use social media can have benefits that far outstrip their costs. This is largely due to the fact that social media makes the best use of word-of-mouth, where a satisfied consumer can be convinced to share news of a product or service with the people in his or her social network. Since most consumers trust the people in their social network more than businesses interested in selling to them, there’s a better chance of leading to a sale. Never mind how word-of-mouth can also spread news of a product or service to a bigger proportion of the consumer base via the same mechanism.
Social media medical market research is one of the lowest cost methods, and possibly one of the most rewarding.
One of the most important concerns of healthcare companies when it comes to market research in healthcare is the need for pharmacovigilance. The need to file adverse event reports means that healthcare companies have to be careful when conducting medical market research since carelessness can see their resources being sapped by the need to fill out hundreds and perhaps even thousands of reports.
Examining the social media-based interactions of healthcare professionals is perfect in this regard because such events come up less often in the course of their conversations. This makes it possible for even the smallest healthcare companies to collect useful information in the course of their medical market research without having to spend too much of their limited resources. Something that makes it that much easier for them to compete with their bigger and longer-established counterparts in their sector.
Social media is becoming more and more popular with healthcare companies as a means of conducting medical market research. This is because examining the social-media based interactions of healthcare professionals provides healthcare companies with better understanding of their consumers while keeping their research costs as low as possible. This new level of understanding can be used for a number of beneficial purposes, which combine to make healthcare companies much better at designing a marketing campaign that boost profitability and ensures successful business or product launches. However, perhaps the most notable of these beneficial purposes is being able to use social media as a marketing tool in an efficient and effective manner, which is also increasing in importance as more and more healthcare professionals take to social media platforms to interact with each other.
