Recent successes give a sense of the promise of digital marketing for medtech companies. Also, while more than half (55 percent) of the companies in McKinsey’s survey sample, regardless of location, indicate they run multichannel campaigns, more US companies also run cross-division campaigns (30 percent, compared with 20 percent in the EU5), often using multichannel and cross-division campaigns in combination. Successful companies are including digital campaigns along with more traditional channels, such as inside sales and face-to-face rep visits, as an important component of their omnichannel strategy to reach HCPs. By using a coordinated, multichannel approach to marketing campaigns, medtech companies are able to engage with HCPs at the right time with the right message in the right format. In more advanced applications, some life-sciences companies are incorporating machine learning to build integrated data pipelines and dashboards that can help sales reps segment and prioritize each account, and enable a more customer-centric approach to engaging with each HCP, including next-best-action solutions to meet each HCP’s needs. Additionally, analytics can help medtech companies to reach HCPs with additional product solutions that can complement their current purchases and create value for the HCP, the healthcare facility, and the patient. The impact is a better coordination between channels. There is a strong need for that, highlighted by 74 percent of respondents. “Next-best-action” analytics can help enhance digital-marketing campaigns to work closer together with other marketing and sales channels. In recent years, it has become important to convey a value proposition that goes beyond a single product to the broader portfolio of solutions. What’s more, about one in five of this group had redirected at least 50 percent of their marketing budget to digital marketing (Exhibit 1). However, by 2020, most of the companies surveyed (84 percent of those based in the United States and 74 percent in the EU5) had shifted more of their budget to digital marketing.

As recently as five years ago, the majority of medtech companies (65 percent of the survey sample) spent no more than 20 percent of their marketing budget on digital marketing. To understand how digital marketing is evolving in medtech, McKinsey conducted a survey of 100 companies (44 in the United States and 56 from the EU5 1 France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.) in early 2021. And they have embraced digital-channel management, web-platform and app management, and other new commercial disciplines. They have developed expertise in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). They have built skills in designing and implementing marketing campaigns via email, social media, and other channels. In the past few years, medtech companies have been ramping up their digital-marketing capabilities to serve HCPs and healthcare systems more effectively. Here, we explore how leading medtech companies are using digital-marketing and analytics tools to tailor the content, timing, and format of their interactions with HCPs to improve the quality of engagement and the returns on their marketing investments. This important shift to omnichannel engagement in medtech was highlighted in an earlier McKinsey article where we reported that 45 percent of HCPs expect few in-person interactions with sales reps. As they have become more comfortable with remote work and digital communications, medtech companies have realized the importance of adapting to digital to better engage with HCPs, including digital marketing, e-commerce, and virtual sales channels. Healthcare professionals (HCPs), like many others, have been profoundly affected by the shift to remote work triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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