“Push marketing” is in decline as customers have gained more control over what marketing they interact with. Therefore, modern marketing requires more direct interaction from marketing with customers. This goes hand in hand with promotion. Types of promotion include: viral marketing, internet, televised, and printed advertising. Internet advertising particularly provides both an opportunity for companies to promote their products and customers to dismiss their promotions. The rise of social media platforms have given medical device companies another avenue for promotion. For example, I specifically have seen healthcare product ads on Spotify and Youtube recently. Youtube typically allows its users an option to skip most advertisements. Unlike Spotify ads, Youtube ads however enable advertisers to have longer, more in-depth promotions.
Is this type of marketing on popular social media platforms an effective way to reach a wide audience? Are there certain groups that may be excluded from this promotion avenue? Which social media platforms are better suited for marketing medical products?
In the current age of social media, it has proven to be a very successful way of reaching a wide audience. Social media allows for a more interactive experience with an audience through the use of polls and a comment section, in which a company could answer any potential questions. Additionally, suppose the content produced by the companies is informative and engaging, through the use of statistics about the device's effectiveness and through patients' accounts of their experience with the device. In that case, it can result in an increase in popularity since social media gives the greatest opportunity to reach the largest pool of people. Most groups would likely come across these promotions on social media, but some older individuals may not be on social media, making television commercials a better route to reach them. Therefore, a medical device company may choose to prioritize social media promotion, but should not cut off other streams of promotion in order to reach the widest audience possible. Different social media platforms could have different benefits depending on the group a company is trying to reach. For example, if a medical device company is hoping to reach hospitals, medical professionals, or other distributors, LinkedIn would likely be the best social media for that purpose, whereas other social media platforms may be better for reaching patients.
The way products are promoted has been significantly altered by the internet. Prior until now, clients were reached through meetings, exhibitions, newspaper ads, and television advertising. Nowadays, online and viral advertising are among the main methods of product promotion. Everyone can sell their products to millions of people across the world at once utilizing social media platforms, making internet advertising a particularly effective way to reach a large audience. This is a very big advantage that the sales representative has today compared to the past. There are certain groups that can be excluded from this promotion route where we can mention the elderly who are not very adapted to the internet and are not very users of social media platforms and applications such as YouTube. Sales representatives may decide to market their products on more commercial platforms like Facebook if they want to increase sales to patients, but they may pick LinkedIn or Twitter if they want to improve brand or product awareness among healthcare professionals.
Marketing on popular social media platforms can be effective for reaching a broad audience. Exclusions may occur based on the platform's user demographics. The choice of platform should align with the target audience and the product's nature. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube offer different advantages for medical product marketing.
I would say it all boils down to what social media platform you are using to push your device. It can be argued that social media such as TikTok or Instagram are places that have ads targeted more for the main demographic that uses those platforms; people from the ages of 18-25, or late-teens to young adults. Are these people that are necessarily going to benefit from the push marketing of medical devices? Perhaps, but it can also be argued that the party that will be impacted most from the advertisement of medical devices would be those in the older age groups, as most will have the physical limitations that may require a medical device. In order to target them, one would need to determine what platform they are using the most, from this I would guess Facebook or any website that has current event updates (YouTube or Yahoo). From here, I think it would be more advantageous to go outside of the social media space to target the demographic that would need medical devices the most, and "pushing" it towards the customer is a fine way of encouraging healthy practices such as self-wellness. That obviously doesn't mean that a company shouldn't advertise on social media platforms that target younger audiences, but I would say their resources would be better spent determining where their specific age group gets the most ads, and anything outside of that should just be PR to support the device that your company has developed. From a PR perspective, I would say on more "viral" platforms, showing success is more important than pushing the product itself.
