Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - 4 Ideas Your Medical Device Company is Missing from its Marketing Strategy: Interview with Joe Hage, Chairman of the Medical Devices Group

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

This interview is part of a throwback mini-series from several years ago when I chatted with my good friend, Joe Hage. He’s the CEO of Medical Marcom and Chairman of the Medical Devices Group, a community of over 350,000 medical device members. In this entertaining interview, here are some of the things we talked about:How Joe, with a limited medical device industry background, helped Cardiac Science become a medtech marketing leader.Why Joe thinks search engine optimization (SEO) is among the most important elements for your marketing mix.How you can use editorials to demonstrate medical device industry leadership.And why sending prospects to your website homepage may not be the best idea.See more...

Welcome to Medsider.com, where you can learn from a mix of experienced medical device mentors through uncut and unedited interviews. Now, here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey, everyone, it's Scott Nelson. Just a few quick messages before we get started. First, as a reminder, MedSider is on iTunes. Just do an iTunes search for Medsider and you can subscribe to the podcast for free. That way, all the new interviews will automatically download to your iTunes account. It's super easy. Also, if you like the podcast, don't forget to read it.

it. That really helps us out. A couple other ways you could follow Metcider. Subscribe to our email newsletter, like us on Facebook, or join our LinkedIn group. Second, since 2005, my friend Ryan Gray has been helping thousands of medical sales professionals keep an edge on the competition. He gathered a team of sales managers and top sales reps to discover the best ideas and practices that drive more business and yield the most commissions. Their findings are highlighted in the number one medical sales sales book of all time, the medical sales desk reference. You can find the medical sales desk reference at amazon.com or go to ryan's website at vendizigr group.com. That's V-E-N-D-E-S-I-G-R-O-U-P dot com. And here's your program. Hello everyone. Welcome to

Medsider, home for ambitious medical device upstarts. This is Scott Nelson and for those of you who are new to the program. This is a show where I interview dynamic people that are doing interesting things in the medical device and med tech arena. And on today's program, we have Joe Hage. He is the founder and CEO of Medical Markom, which is a medical device. marketing consultancy that specializes in marketing communications, marketing strategy, lead gen, web development, and social media. Joe is a warrant MBA and a 20-year marketing professional. Got a very interesting background, did some very cool things at a previous company before

he started medical marcom. So without further ado, welcome to the call, Joe. Thank you very much, Scott. And so I want to definitely get into your background, especially some of the remarkable things that you were able to accomplish well at cardiac science. I also want to talk to you about what you're doing now with medical marcom, but you recently posted a Twitter doctor list that I thought was really interesting because I've never seen something like that available online.

So explain that. Let's start there. So I keep an active blog, and it's certainly a way that I attract traffic and attention to my brand and my selling proposition. And I created an Excel spreadsheet. it's downloadable and it's sortable, so it's not like anything that I've seen elsewhere because it required a lot of work and time to put together. And what I did was I looked at all doctors that are on Twitter that I could find in the U.S.

And people can come to the website and download this spreadsheet and they can sort by the doctor's specialty and by their clout, that is how much influence they have in the social media community. by how many tweets they typically do a day. It references their bio, their location. It's a whole bunch of facts that I need to go to a couple of different applications to pull together. And I think one of the reasons that it really seems to have hit a chord is how much work it took to put together. People don't have time for that kind of stuff.

And so what I did was I made this accessible to people who give me their email information. So at the same time, I'm building a list of connections, potential prospects, maybe not. The beautiful thing about social media and about being in business for myself is, I can try stuff. If it works, great. If it doesn't, also great. I learned something new. What I'm finding with this is I seem to have hit a cord. In the 48 hours since I've launched it, I've increased the size of my email subscription based by 20%.

And to me, that's a huge win. I'm really excited about it. Right. And that honestly doesn't overly surprise me because, like I said just before, I've never seen a Twitter list of doctors. And so obviously with amazing content typically comes interest. And so that's very cool. But what I'm curious, though, about this doctor Twitter list,

is there – did you find – did you see any trends since you know, since you put it together in terms of like, you know, there's, you know, 5% of doctors heavily used Twitter while the rest of the 95% barely use it, that kind of stuff? Actually, among those that I found, most of them were somewhat active. I have, you know, a couple dozen who, you know, have a handle, and they hardly ever tweet, and they have absolutely no clout, and you can sort the list and see who they are. If you're instead interested in finding who's in the palliative care part of the industry, you can sort by specialty and just choose to follow those people.

So I think it's a convenient tool. And if I may for your listeners, the implication for you is relating to lead generation. If you're medical devices in my experience, and I'll just quickly say that I was Director of Marketing Communications for a publicly traded medical device company called Cardiac Science. We sold automated external defibrillators, cardiac monitoring, and rehabilitative equipment. And each lead could be worth thousands of dollars. So it was in our best interest to capture contact information whenever possible on the website. And that's really the selling proposition that I have for medical marcom.

when people show up at your site, don't squander the chance of starting a dialogue with them. And my doctor list, for example, gives me that opportunity. Somebody has to say, hi, Joe, I was here. I don't know why they needed the list. I don't know how they're going to use the list, but I knew who they are. And I can look at, for example, their domain. So if it's Scott at Yahoo.com, not so helpful. If it's Scott at Boston Scientific, I can go look up Scott, Boston Scientific on LinkedIn, see what that person does, and poke around a bit.

And I may have something that can be helpful for him. Sure. Sure. The one thing that I thought of right away when I saw that you posted that, that Twitter list, is a piece that I think that I see most medical device companies missing out on is that, for those positions that are on Twitter, they tend to post, you know, I'm not going to say personal things, but they tend to use Twitter as sort of an outlet into what they're thinking. You can get a different take on a position that you may not have otherwise gotten

if you see what they're posting on Twitter. And so that's an amazing tool to engage with a physician in a very unique way. And so that's immediately my first take on your Twitter list, and I think would be a great, great tool for anyone, really, and in a sales and marketing capacity at a medical device or a MedTech company to download. So they can just go to your website right to download that. Medicalmarkcom.com?

Yep. I'll have an easy link. You'll be able to find it. Gotcha. Okay. And I'll make sure to post that link within the body of this post. So very cool. So what I'd like to do now is,

is learn a little bit more about your background. I'd like the audience to get a feel for what you accomplished prior to your work at cardiac science and then some of the cool things you did there. And then we'll go into what you learned while at cardiac science and then what you've learned so far since founding medical marcom in terms of what most medical device in that tech companies missed in terms of online marketing, internet marketing, et cetera. So let's dig into your background a little bit.

Before, can you give us just – I don't want to go into too much detail, but can you give us a brief overview of what you did prior to, you know, your position at cardiac science? I will, and I desperately want to keep this interesting for your followers, so I'll be real short on the bio, and you can go to medical markcom, and you can read all about me. Sure. But I'm a 20-year marketer.

I grew up at Kraft Foods and dial, you know, forward many, many years. My last position, as I shared, was Director of Marketing Communications for a medical device company. and I really want to applaud my supervisor there who brought me on with absolutely no medical experience. I had done nothing medical in my career, and he basically took a chance with me and was open to leveraging online contemporary marketing strategies, which can be applied to any field. And I think one of the reasons that I'm finding some nice early success with medical marcom is I'm catering to a niche that is woefully underserved. It seems to me, looking at medical sites in general, that it's almost like the Internet has passed them by.

Yes, they have sites, but they aren't spending their effort behind using the media. as effectively as they can. And so that's kind of my selling proposition. And what I found at Cardiac Science, for example, the things that work so well, when we redid our website, we increased page views by 253%. When we added multiple places on the site for lead generation, for people to actually get in touch,

we created in a 15-month period a sales pipeline worth in excess of $7 million. These are big numbers. And when I'm evaluating a prospect, for example, one of the things I'll look for is how easy do they make it for someone to raise their hand and indicate some interest in their product. Repeat that again. I think that's important. when I'm evaluating a prospect, and by prospect, when I'm looking at medical device companies that I think need help, increasing their sales, I look to see how easy is it for me to leave my contact

information? And I'll expand on that because I do think it's an important point. If you have to find a contact us page, and it's not easily found, either in your primary navigation, and by that I mean, you know, the top five categories, easy places to click, you're making it too difficult. If when you go to the Contact Us page, the Contact Us page is about you and not them, you're missing out on an opportunity. For example, if I just want to find out about your stress machine, you don't have to ask me for my physical address.

what does that have to do with I want information about your stress machine? Sure. I don't want you to mail me anything. I don't need to tell you that I work for a hospital or I'm a primary care physician. I just want to know about it. So let me give you my email address so you can send me something. And it's incumbent on you, the manufacturer or marketer at that point, to make something fruitful from that email address.

on my website and I've done some testing to get me to this place, the only piece of information I ask for is your email address. I don't even ask what your first name is. I don't worry about, well, later on when I want to send you an email, I have to say, Dear Scott. That's not so relevant. Not to mention that you might say something silly in there because it's, you know, a field.

If you don't give me a relevant email address, I can't send you the information that you want, so you're inclined to give me something that you can get, you can unsubscribe later as well. But I make it very easy for you. Just tell me who you are, and it's incumbent on me to write you back. I'm not talking about exact target

and all these other fancy applications that have an automatic response so that whenever somebody fills in the field, they automatically get this campaign one after another, after another, after another. each prospect for me is potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars. I can take the time to find out about Scott Nelson, do a little research, 10 minutes worth, and write a relevant, personal, timely email back to you.

So let's stop there. Let's stop there because I was going to ask you what the next step is to set up like an auto-drift campaign, but you brought up a good point because this arena, is so much different than traditional internet marketing because one lead, the cost of a, I should say the lifetime value of a customer and maybe the internet marketing world is, you know, $100, $200, I'm not entirely sure what that number is. But the lifetime value of a customer in the device base could be worth thousands, tens of thousands, maybe sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a, you know,

two to 10-year period of time. So you're saying that once that customer enters, it's just their simple email address. Maybe that pools to a team that then has the capacity to write a very personalized email of that person getting in touch with them, et cetera. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Yes. Okay. That's a great point. That's a great point. Like I said before, I was just going to ask you if you put that into some sort of auto-drip or auto-responder campaign, but you're saying no, that's a great idea. That's a great idea. I mean, to be sure there is a role for auto-responder campaigns, I'm not, you know, saying no. and there's nothing wrong with, you know, once they sign up,

they get a welcome email of some kind. But that's also not to say that it doesn't deserve a specific personal follow-up. Now, mine is a small shop. People expect to hear it from me. That needn't be the case at a major company. But there's certainly nothing wrong with the, you know, director of, you know, vascular sales for, you know, the Western region to write back.

what I hear sometimes from clients, and I have a funny story to share, back a job or two ago, I wrote a campaign that helped retain clients. And what I wanted to do was to actually put the name of the head of the person of that group and that person's email and that person's phone. In fact, his cell phone. and he was like, what are you out of your mind? You're going to send my cell phone out to 20,000 people? I don't have time for this, blank, blank, blank.

Yeah. Now let me ask you, when was the last time you did call somebody because they put their phone number on the bottom of a piece of written mail? Now, that's rhetorical. You might still say, well, still a dozen phone calls. Well, what if these dozen phone calls? are from prospects worth tens of thousands of dollars. You have time for that call?

What's more is, if you think about, if I put the CEO of your company's cell phone number on a piece of paper and I distribute it to everyone, who would have the audacity to phone the CEO of a company on his cell phone without a really, really good reason and that really, really good reason is reason enough for that person to take the call. Otherwise, they completely shoot their credibility

and any chance of doing whatever it is they wanted to do by nature of the phone call itself. What's the point of the story? The point of the story is show how incredibly accessible you are and people will self-select who really needs to talk to you because everyone's busy. don't be afraid of putting yourself out there.

Gotcha. That's a great, that concept of almost making the CEO's cell phone available, and media thinks, you're probably familiar with Richard Scoble, the big tech kind of, you know, a guy that does interview on tech startups, whatnot. He puts a cell phone on his blog and encourages people to reach out to him, And he does it for a reason because most people don't. They'd rather shoot an email.

And, of course, his inbox is probably just jam-packed, but no one actually takes the time to call him. Which that's a fascinating point that, you know, device companies should operate under that mindset, that they should open up things to the point where the CEO should readily provide a cell phone number. But that's the right strategy for everybody. You know, I don't imagine that Jeff Immelt wants personal calls from our age shareholders. I'm sure he could get a few of those. but I think you get the point I'm trying to make.

Sure, sure. I wanted to get into a little bit of things about cardiac science, but while we're on this topic of these key things that almost most med tech and medical device companies are missing in terms of marketing, let's go into some other things. Do you care if we dive into that right now? Sure, sure. Let's do that.

So maybe in your day the cardiac science and then in your time since founding medical Markom. What else are you seeing? What other big areas or trends that you see most med tech and medical device companies miss out on? I just had a conversation with a publicly traded medical device company earlier this week. And he said, you know, what's the first thing you would do for us? He was kind of evaluating my services. And I said, well, you know, I haven't spent the time doing the due diligence just yet, but I would say that the model for marketing, really just about everywhere, especially in the B2B space, is turned on its head with search engines because people don't want to be marketed to. Instead, they'll find out information on their terms.

And the way that they do that is they enter their terms into a search engine, usually Google. and they say, I'm looking for, you know, vascular equipment, whatever. How do you rank? And the term SEO and search engine optimization sounds like voodoo to people, like a made-up industry. You know, I'm going to get, you know, people just, you know, sucking up my budget and what am I going to get for it? I really believe that it is the most important thing you can do to be where people are when they are looking for you. It's like if you want to have a jewelry place in Manhattan, you know, diamonds, you'll want to be in the diamond district because that's where people are shopping. And you can

save a lot of money having your place in Queens, but you may not attract the kind of traffic that you want. And you think about, we talked again, about the lifetime value of a customer. what's each customer worth. Calculate what you be willing to spend to acquire a customer. And make sure that if somebody does click through, they go to a place that's relevant for what they're looking for. So the right answer is not send everyone to the homepage. If you were talking about stress machines, for example,

make sure they land on your stress system category. Don't make them go looking around. Have something on that. that engages them, that gives them a reason to give their contact information. And remember, too, that the barrier is high. People don't want emails. Emails is homework for people. So, you know, you maybe put in a guarantee.

I am not adding you to a list. I am not, you know, all these things. Sure. That it is a one-to-one communication. On cardiac science, we added a form. We called it a short form. and on most of the product pages, if not all of the product pages, and I don't have it in front of me.

It was something like, what's your name? What's your email? What are you looking for? It's as open-ended as that. And one of the early pieces of feedback I got was, well, Joe, we're not getting leads on this. Some of them are just, you know, really wanting to talk to customer care. And I said, good. We're here for our customers.

So whatever it is that the customer is looking for make it as easy for them as possible. So number one, don't dismiss the next person who says, oh, SEO is important. It's vitally important. And make sure that when somebody gets to your site, you have engaging content and a reason to offer your contact information. I mean, if you were to stop the interview right here, that would be my main message. make sure that you can be found, and when you are found, make sure that you are relevant, engaging, approachable, and give the information that they're looking for, and give them a reason to tell you who they are.

I'm just jotting these notes down because it's actually really good stuff. So SEO is important, or in other words, make sure you can be found, and then make sure your content on your side is relevant, engaging, approachable, and make sure you're giving, whether it's a customer or a prospect, a reason to submit their information, is that what you said? Yep, yeah. So just raise their hand and give their email address or call you or whatever.

I had a prospect call me yesterday, and I said, how did you find me? And he said, I typed in medical marketing, and I found that to be a terrific mess. There was things about, you know, make your practice better and all these things that were really irrelevant to me. So I went and I self-selected and I narrowed my search criteria and I called it medical device marketing. And I showed up on the first page. Now, I'm not the number one medical device marketing results.

I'm lower down on the page. He said, well, I clicked on the ones above you first. and quickly clicked off of them because they didn't seem to be what I was looking for. But when I showed up on your site, I watched the video about what you were saying, and then I poked around some more. And I saw that you put in some little, you know, a little bit of humor here or there that made me feel that I could relate to you. And then I looked at your blog, and I saw that you were keeping it up and keeping it refreshed

and giving me relevant information. and then I decided I'll let you know who I am. That's a great story because I'm thinking, like, if I'm listening to this in the audience, and I'm thinking, well, Joe, I'm listening to you tell that story, and I'm thinking, well, Joe, you run your own business, a consultancy business. It's not the same. And my counterpoint to that is why isn't that the same? That person is a customer for you, but what about a patient that's searching for you?

but what about a patient that's searching for a treatment for their swollen leg or their irregular heartbeat? Or what about the doctor that's looking for a different way? You know, maybe their equipment in their office is getting old or in their lab at the hospital is getting old or they just do a random search for new equipment. So in a sense it's different, but in reality it's all the same. It's still customers and they're still looking. Back to your point of making sure your information is relevant, it's the same thing, right? There's an application for just about any industry.

Right, right. And that goes back to an early question I was going to ask you, is you didn't have any medical experience when you were brought on at cardiac science. And I wanted to ask you this at some point, but it kind of fits. Is that one of the reasons why they saw the different value in terms of what? marketing that you brought to the table and said he can learn he can know we can teach him enough about the the medical space we just want we just want all the marketing engine behind joe h is that is that kind of what they were after i think that's fair to say now i was the director of marketing

communication there was also a director of defibrillation and a director of cardiology um i never needed to be the subject matter expert and to this day and i'm happy to offer it to anyone who's listening. Yeah, I know a thing or two about medical devices and medicine and healthcare, and I talk about it a lot, but I know a lot of smart people, much more specialized in this than I am. The value of working with me is the value of working with my Rolodex. Actually, I have to stop myself. I have an 18-year-old intern who looked at me and said, what's a Rolodex? Anyhow, it's my whole network, and a lot of my selling proposition is, I don't do all of the work.

I've spent most of my career on the client's side, just like you. I'm kind of like your VP of Marketing for Hire, sort of, far less expensive than, you know, bringing someone on full-time. And I interact and address all those issues that come with working with all. all those agencies with whom I've built a level of trust that, you know, my team, I literally consider to be extensions of myself. I would bring you to them and know that they are representing the Joe Hage Medical Marcom brand. And that's the kind of level of trust that I like to build up with my partners.

Okay. I wanted to make sure I ask you about that because that's interesting. I mean, a cardiac science, publicly traded company bringing in someone as director of marketing communications that doesn't have any medical background. I think that speaks to a lot of different things, and I think it's definitely an interesting topic to talk about. So that's why I wanted to ask you. So let's circle back around because we talked about the fact that SEO is relevant,

making sure your customers can find you, making sure your content on your website is relevant, engaging, approachable, et cetera. What else? What else do you see? What other big issues that you see medical device companies or med tech companies, life science companies are missing in terms of their marketing? out of you. Hey there, it's Scott, and thanks for listening in so far.

The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. You'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Renee Ryan, CEO of Cala Health, Nadine Yared, CEO of CVRX, and so many others. As a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible medical device and health technology entrepreneurs.

In addition, you'll get a copy of every volume of Medsider mentors at no additional cost. To learn more, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash premium. Again, that's Medsiderradio.com forward slash premium.