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DIGITAL MARKETING | 20 Min Read

Digital Marketing For Growth: A Guide For Sleep Business Leaders

Discover how to use digital marketing in your sleep business for each stage of growth.

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Introduction

Improving the results you get from digital marketing is undoubtedly one of the most challenging tasks you can undertake as a sleep business leader. 

Despite many sleep companies making sizeable investments in it, the increasingly complex nature of digital marketing means many are suffering from poor lead conversion rates and underperforming campaigns, often without even realising it.

Fortunately, it’s possible to change this and realise digital marketing’s potential to be a highly effective way of delivering growth for your business. This is particularly relevant now, in 2020, when promotional opportunities through marketing tactics such as conferences and live events have been all but ruled due to COVID-19.

We’ve put together this guide to help sleep business leaders who are ready to reap the benefits of digital marketing – and want to know the practical steps they can take to elevate their business’s performance.

What CEOs want from digital marketing

Here are some of the challenges that you might want digital marketing to solve:

  • Replace opportunities lost due to COVID-19 and the cancellation of live events and conferences. 
  • Retain market share in the face of increasing competition.
  • Become more patient-centric by engaging patients directly.
  • Build awareness around your new sleep devices, treatments and/or products.
  • Quickly grow your presence in new markets and with new audiences.
  • Get higher quality leads for a lower price.

DIGITAL MARKETING | 20 Min Read

Digital Marketing For Growth: A Guide For Sleep Business Leaders

Discover how to use digital marketing in your sleep business for each stage of growth.

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Tired of scrolling? Download a PDF version for easier offline reading and sharing with coworkers.

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1. Getting Started With Digital Marketing

2. Moving Up To Managed Marketing

3. Next Level
Marketing Activity

4. Quantifying Your Marketing Efforts

5. Data Is Ingrained
In Your DNA

Step 1: How to start using digital marketing

All businesses need to start somewhere – even some established companies still haven’t dipped their feet into digital marketing.

If you’ve recently launched a sleep business, sleep apnea device or other sleep product, you will nearly always make the most gains with digital marketing by using pay-per-click (PPC) activities. 

PPC is ideal at this stage of business, because it’s relatively quick and easy to set up through search engines such as Google and Bing. Results can be more or less measured instantly. By comparison, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a longer-term commitment

Pay-Per-Click versus SEO

 

Pay per click – also known as paid search, Google AdWords, Microsoft Advertising or Digital Advertising – is like renting a house: it’s quickly implemented and instantly gives you results (a home), but ultimately can cost more money in the long-term because you don’t own the space, you just rent it.

Owning a home through a mortgage requires longer-term investment (SEO) but ultimately, after several years, guarantees you own your property (in the case of SEO, this will be free search engine results). 

Trialling PPC as an activity helps your business to gather data. Given that data is the new oil of the 21st century, it is fast becoming a valuable commodity. It can help you answer questions such as, ‘Which customers are likely to convert, and which are not?’ and ‘How can that data be leveraged?’

Create a high level PPC plan
PPC can be challenging to get right. It requires experience to create the campaigns and manage them. So, it’s recommended that first you have a high-level plan in place.

Your plan should:

  • Define your PPC goals. It might be to increase traffic to your website (ie, the click-through rate), increase sales (ie, your lead conversion rate) or increase brand awareness (ie, by using Google display ads and/or remarketing)
  • Include research into your target audiences and related keywords.
  • State your budget.
  • Determine a realistic cost-per-click.
  • Include KPIs that show what success will look like.
  • State how often you’ll measure your KPIs.
  • Include segmenting your campaigns to give you greater control over these – and so they attract a higher Quality Score from Google.
  • Include ad extensions that might be relevant to each of your campaigns.
  • Incorporate tracking and attribution.

To download a PPC plan template click here. 

Optimise your campaigns

Once your campaigns are live you can optimise these to ensure they keep delivering on your goals. 

This includes regularly:

  • Monitoring your customer acquisition costs (CAC) and reducing this if you can see opportunities to do so. 
  • Monitoring click-through rates and making improvements such as changing your calls-to-action or adding Sitelink Extensions.
  • Promoting your top-performing ads.
  • Tracking your keywords and stopping those that aren’t performing. 
  • Keeping track of how your campaigns are performing on mobile and desktop and adjusting your bid strategy to produce better results.
  • Analysing the keywords that are delivering impressions and seeing what other keywords you could add to your list. 
  • Looking closely at your targeting and making changes to your keywords to improve the quality of your leads. 
  • Analysing the performance of your ads, making editing changes or removing them completely if they’re not working. 
  • Monitoring metrics such as time on page and bounce rates and making changes to your ad copy or website to help improve the outcome.
Step 1. Checklist

Knowing what changes to make that will have the biggest impact on your business is vital at this stage. By introducing PPC and implementing the checklist below, you’ll be a great position to take your marketing to the next level.

1. Create Customer Personas

1. Create Customer Personas

These should include demographic information, how much your ideal customer earns and their health condition, for example. These should also include details that will impact how your customers access your business offerings, such as how digitally savvy they are and the websites they visit the most. 

Your personas should constantly evolve as you develop a better understanding of your patients / customers from the data you gather. This information plays an integral part in how your business responds to leads and how it tracks and measures your marketing success.

2. Remarket (if you can)

2. Remarket
(if you can)

If it’s possible to use remarketing for your sleep treatments, devices or products (it pays to check with a digital marketing agency that specialises in the sleep industry), then you need to include this in your strategy. 

According to CMO by Adobe, remarketing can boost ad response by as much as 400 percent. It works by keeping your treatments and products top of mind as patients search and compare these with your competitors’ offerings.

3. Create a digital marketing strategy

3. Create a digital marketing strategy

Your strategy should define your brand and its unique selling points. It should also include measurable goals, the priorities you will achieve these in, your target audiences (i.e. your personas), the channels that will help you reach your target audiences, and the tactics ­(i.e. PPC and remarketing) you will use to deliver your goals. More on this in Step 2.

4. Segment your contacts

4. Segment your contacts

A good way to gain traction quickly is by segmenting your contacts and creating targeted email campaigns to your audiences. This could be a promotion for first purchases or news about a sleep device update. According to DMA, targeted emails generate more than half (57%) of all email revenue, so it makes complete sense to do this.

5. Set up regular reporting periods

5. Set up regular reporting periods

Start tracking the metrics that matter most to your business, such as your referral traffic. This shows how social channels are leading new patients to your site. Use Google Analytics to create monthly reports that measure the success of your campaigns and enable you to compare your monthly, quarterly and annual results.

6. Track the buyer’s journey

6. Track the buyer’s journey

Knowing the path that new patients take to purchase your sleep devices and treatments is key to improving the customer experience and understanding which channels to leverage. You can start tracking the buyer’s journey by looking at your previous sales and determining which campaigns were the most effective. 

Use a general buyer’s journey to begin with and work with your team to define stages that make the most sense to your business, based on these previous wins.

7. Prepare to make SEO changes

7. Prepare to make SEO changes

SEO results are cumulative, so the sooner you start planning to make even small changes to help your website rank better in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), the sooner you will see improvements. More on SEO planning in Step 2.

TIP: Before moving on to the next stage of activity, make sure that you can track sales or leads and can attribute these to your advertising endeavours.

DIGITAL MARKETING | 20 Min Read

Digital Marketing For Growth: A Guide For Sleep Business Leaders

Discover how to use digital marketing in your sleep business for each stage of growth.

Get the print version

Tired of scrolling? Download a PDF version for easier offline reading and sharing with coworkers.

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Step 2: Moving up to managed marketing

By this stage, you would have seen the results that PPC delivers and can confidently commit funds to ensure PPC activity is nurtured on an ongoing basis.

If you’re not quite at this stage yet, then at the very least, you’ll be keeping an eye on PPC and trialling an increase in spend, and an expansion of your PPC campaigns. 

Some sleep businesses will instantly see the importance of PPC and may opt to employ someone specifically for this task, others will invariably attempt to get their catchall go-to member of staff to manage it (often not a good idea).

Now is the time to start building out the digital marketing strategy you started working on in Step 1. As well as the personas, unique selling points, channels and the tactics that you’ll use, it should include SEO planning.

Your SEO strategy

If you’re outsourcing SEO to an expert, which is recommended due to the complex nature of it, then they should provide you with a plan or strategy. This will detail the changes they’ll make to achieve the results they expect to produce. 

Your SEO strategy should include:

  • The most important activities needed for your website to rank higher on Google Search Engine Results Pages (commonly known as SERPs).
  • An effective keyword plan for the search terms that you want your business to rank for.
  • An evaluation of the keyword search terms your competitors are using. 
  • Your personas, which will give you insights into your audience’s pain points and what they really need.
  • Content to attract, engage and convert new patient audiences.
  • Ensuring your website is responsive and has a clear and simple design. 
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (ABM) for faster webpage loading times.
  • Plans for how voice search will be handled. 
  • A social media channel strategy. 
  • Split testing (also known as A/B testing) to improve conversion rates. 
  • Link building plans.
  • Local search and Google Phone Call ads.
  • Tracking and measuring your return on investment.
  • Details of who will be carrying out these activities.

TIP: In smaller businesses particularly, this stage of growth is likely to include educating your employees about the importance of SEO, website content and digital marketing in general. They may need to be trained on how to update website copy and publish new pages that you consider important for the longer-term goals of driving traffic to the website.

Step 2. Checklist

At Step 2, you will be starting to:

1. Prioritise Your Activities

1. Prioritise your activities

Managing your activity involves having clearly defined processes in place for generating and converting leads. Here’s a step-by-step example:

1. Re-engage existing customers.
2. Capture more existing traffic.
3. Respond to leads immediately.
4. Improve the customer experience.
5. Ask for referrals.
6. Upsell to existing customers.
7. Optimise the marketing process.
8. Nurture new patients; and
9. Promote devices, products and treatments to new patients.

2. Create Calls-To-Action

 

2. Create Calls-To-Action

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are powerful ways of motivating prospective patients to take the necessary steps to becoming your customer. By clicking on your CTAs, they are indicating that their trust in your business is growing and they’re becoming increasingly receptive to purchasing from you.

3. Improve Your Landing Page Conversion Rates

 

3. Improve Your Landing Page Conversion Rates

As your knowledge of your target audience grows, you may realise that your website and landing pages don’t accurately reflect who they are and what they need. 

Using your audience insights to continually optimise the questions you ask on your forms, the images you use and the content that you provide for example, will help to position your brand more favourably when new patients compare your sleep devices, products and sleep treatments to those of your competitors.

4. Add Testimonials And Reviews To Your Website

 

4. Add Testimonials And Reviews To Your Website

Most customers (92%) read online reviews and testimonials before deciding to buy. According to the Spiegel Research Center, these help to establish trust in your brand and can improve the conversion rates of your offerings by a staggering 270 percent, compared to not featuring any product reviews at all.

5. Assess The Quality Of Your Leads

 

5. Assess The Quality Of Your Leads

For businesses that rely on leads (whether B2B or B2C), assessing the quality of those generated by your digital marketing is paramount. Lead quality can be improved by targeting your audiences more accurately and by continually improving your website content, and the ways it creates greater interest in your sleep equipment and treatments.

6. Respond To Leads Immediately

 

6. Respond To Leads Immediately

When a new patient contacts your business, you need to reply to them as quickly as possible. Ideally your lead response time should be within five minutes of receiving their enquiry. If you leave it longer than that you risk losing that prospective customer and the funds you spent acquiring them.

Hiring the right agency

The skill and time involved in getting digital marketing right means it cheaper for many businesses to simply outsource it. In doing so, they can potentially gain access to a fully integrated marketing team with years of experience who can work on a wide range of digital tasks for them.

When you’re hiring a marketing agency, it’s important to be clear in your own mind that the agency satisfies these 3 criteria:

  • Agency resources: the agency has sufficient resources available to deliver the results you need. 
  • Skills: the agency has the right skills within its team to produce the return on investment that you require. 
  • Expectations: you and the agency have a shared understanding about the results the agency will deliver.

Questions to ask marketing agencies

Knowing exactly what to ask digital agencies can help you ascertain if their services will work for your sleep devices, products or sleep treatments. These questions include:

What channels will work best for our product?

How can our sleep treatments, devices and/or products appear at the top of Google search?

How quickly will I see results starting to come through?

How long before I’ll see an impact from the SEO changes that your team makes?

How much will I need to spend on ads?

What is the cost of sale likely to be?

What’s the fee structure and do you offer a success-fee model?

What is the length of the agreement and is there a break clause?

When will my campaigns go
live?

How quickly will I see a return on investment?

What channels will work best for our product?

How can my business appear at the top of Google search for our sleep devices, treatments and/or products?

How quickly will I see results starting to come through?

How long before I’ll see an impact from the SEO changes that your team makes?

How much will I need to spend on ads?

What is the cost of sale likely to be?

What’s the fee structure and do you offer a success-fee model?

What is the length of the agreement and is there a break clause?

When will my campaigns go live?

How quickly will I see a return on investment?

Can I see the results on a dashboard in real-time?

How often will we speak with an account manager and when will they update us with results?

What happens if the campaigns don’t perform well?

What do you know about the sleep industry?

What other companies or types of products do you work with?

Do you work with any of my competitors?

Can we have an exclusivity clause in our agreement?

How can we leverage existing dental networks?

Why shouldn’t we do digital marketing ourselves in-house?

Can I see the results on a dashboard in real-time?

How often will we speak with a dedicated account manager and when will they update us with results?

What happens if the campaigns don’t perform well?

What do you know about the sleep industry?

What other companies or types of products do you work with?

Do you work with any of my competitors?

Can we have an exclusivity clause in our agreement?

How can we leverage dental networks that exist in the market?

Why shouldn’t we do digital marketing ourselves in-house?

What to expect from an agency relationship

It goes without saying that your agency team should be highly skilled and experience in digital marketing. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case, so it pays to do your due diligence and check their credentials before you consider hiring them.

A high performing agency should have an in-depth understanding of your business and the type of leads you’re generating. Agencies that specialise in the sleep industry often have better insights into this than others, because they will have honed their skills in this area. 

If you’re considering hiring an agency that serves a broad range of industries, make sure they have enough resources to go to the level of depth required to get the results you need.

You and your agency should have a shared view of what can realistically be achieved with your existing budget. Expecting more than your agency can deliver could leave you incredibly frustrated, so have a clear understanding from the outset about your goals and how these will be achieved.

Your agency should provide you with a main point of contact (your account manager) who has a good overview of everything the agency is doing on your behalf. You should receive weekly and monthly reports from them that show, for example:

  • The progress that’s been made with search engine rankings and local SEO rankings.
  • The increases in traffic coming through to your website.
  • The number of new patient enquiries and phone calls you’ve received from the advertising across the different types of campaigns that you’re running for each sleep device, product or sleep treatment.

TIP: If your digital marketing agency is tasked with delivering leads, it may rest with you and your team to convert these into new patients. Be clear with your agency about the amount of time and the level of skill required to achieve this. For businesses that experience high volumes of leads, then lead distribution and response software is the way to go here. Drop us a line if you’d like us to make some recommendations.

DIGITAL MARKETING | 20 Min Read

Digital Marketing For Growth: A Guide For Sleep Business Leaders

Discover how to use digital marketing in your sleep business for each stage of growth.

Get the print version

Tired of scrolling? Download a PDF version for easier offline reading and sharing with coworkers.

SELEEP

DOWNLOAD PDF

Send download link to:

Step 3: Taking your marketing to the next level

With a sales and marketing funnel in place, you've now reached a stage where you're generating revenue from your owned, paid and earned activity.

An upward trend in traffic, leads and sales should be apparent by now, as a result of the marketing activities that you’re carrying out on a range of different channels.

Your team should now know how to use Google Analytics to understand where your website traffic is coming from. They should also have tidied up your PPC advertising to the point where you know what works and what doesn’t work. You should understand your cost per lead or sale from PPC and be able to scale spend accordingly.

Businesses at this stage may have increased their PPC budget and spend, possibly reaching a ceiling budget or using an unlimited budget, as long as profit has been achieved.

You should ideally be trialling email marketing to nurture your existing leads, re-engage your database and to promote your sleep device products and sleep treatments.

The way you collect and store consent to email marketing message needs to be complaint with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Non-EU countries are also introducing their own laws and regulations that affect email marketing, and you should be aware of how these could impact your efforts.

Your SEO plan should be in place, with an expectation that it won’t generate quick results, but longer-term success. Ideally, you would have outsourced this to an SEO expert who is also tasked with implementing it.

Technical and PR-based activities are needed for a successful SEO strategy. Some is this can still be done internally, while some elements, such as the technical aspect, may need a trusted developer to help complete.

TIP: Managing your SEO activities takes skill and expertise, so it’s worth hiring an expert. Activities that are carried out less than perfectly can have a negative impact on your existing rankings.

Step 3. Checklist

At Step 3, you will be starting to:

1. Implement a multichannel marketing plan

You should now be using organic SEO, paid search, paid social and organic social to effectively drive leads to your website.

2. Create an inbound marketing strategy that generates revenue

Your inbound strategy will include tracking and measuring the types of visitors coming to your website and the actions they perform while on your site. 

Your explainer videos, chatbots, landing pages, forms, blogs and other content play an essential role in engaging leads and nurturing them to conversion. These should strive to answer their questions, build trust in your brand and create a positive customer experience.

3. Commit to analysing every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey

Most businesses today (89%) assume they will have to compete on the basis of customer experience, according to Gartner. Every touchpoint that you have with new patients / customers – from your paid search ads to your customer support – should be viewed as an opportunity to improve this. 

Your goal is to show that your business is human-centric and trustworthy, but also that you understand their needs so well that you can exceed their expectations and delight them.

4. Start engaging audiences with a range of emails

 

The return on investment for email marketing is US$38 for every US$1 businesses spend, according to Litmus. This makes email marketing key to the success of your overall digital marketing strategy. 

By this stage, you should have be sending a range of mobile-optimised emails as part of drip campaigns or workflows. The types of emails you send will include welcome messages, lead nurturing emails such as newsletters, product update emails, event invitations, survey requests and so on. 

To increase open rates always provide audiences with personalised content that’s targeted at them. Also segment your lists and send emails at a regular rate each month.

5. Survey patients to uncover ways to improve the customer experience

 

Surveying your patients and ascertaining how they feel about your brand enables you to make data-driven decisions about how to improve your devices, treatments and products. This can help retain customers for longer, encourage them to become brand advocates, and ultimately increase your business’s profitability. 

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that can help you determine just how loyal your customers are. There’s more on this in Level 4.

6. Provide educational content to build your brand

 

By providing content that prospective patients value and that helps them to self-educate about their condition, you’re giving them a reason to trust your brand. According to Conductor, consumers are 131 percent more likely to buy from a brand as soon as they’ve finished reading a piece of educational content compared to those that didn’t read any content at all.

7. Set up dashboards to monitor performance

 

Marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and lead distribution and response solutions (LDRS) are key tools in your marketing technology (MarTech) stack. These offer configurable dashboards that give you real-time overviews of your business’s performance. With this information, you can develop short and long-term campaigns and report on your marketing outcomes.

Using Direct-To-Patient Marketing

There was a time when many sleep industry leaders only marketed their products to medical professionals. Now, with digital technology empowering patients to become more involved in their healthcare outcomes, leaders are asking, “How can I make patients aware of our product so they can ask clinicians for it by name?”

Direct-to-patient marketing is game-changing because it empowers patients to ask for branded products. If you’re not already marketing to patients, here are some reasons why you should consider it:

  • Patients are online, self-educating about sleep apnea and other conditions. They’re actively looking for sleep devices, products and treatments. Direct-to-patient marketing can make your brand visible during their searches. If you’re only marketing to medical professionals, then you’re relying on them telling patients about your products and treatments when they remember to have that conversation with them.
  • Direct-to-patient marketing empowers patients to be aware of your brand. When they’re ready to purchase, they can be connected with a suitably qualified clinician who provides your products and treatments.
  • Patients are using technology to make convenience-driven choices. Direct-to-patient marketing tactics quickly connect them with an appropriately trained clinician who is located nearby.
  • With direct-to-patient marketing you can control exactly how much interest your products and treatments generate, giving you control over your marketing outcomes.
  • When you provide patients with educational information that they value, it helps to builds affinity and trust in your brand.

A digital marketing agency can help

Digital marketing agencies that specialise in the sleep industry, such as Somnowell Marketing, are experts in marketing to both patients and medical professionals. By leveraging their deep industry knowledge and data-driven methodology, you can capitalise on opportunities that exist in national and global markets.
Learn More

Step 4: Quantifying Your Marketing Efforts

Business leaders who see the value of digital marketing as a means of achieving business growth – particularly when they can see that it more than pays for itself – will almost certainly have trialled a full range of digital marketing activities by this stage. This may include all or some of the following:
  • PPC (Google, Bing, social platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram).
  • SEO.
  • Social media (organic/traditional/customer relational).
  • Blogger outreach and guest blogging.
  • Remarketing.
  • Display advertising.
  • Email marketing or electronic customer relationship management (ECRM).
  • Affiliate marketing.

Some of these may have been profitable for your business while others not so successful. It’s vitally important that your marketing agency provides you with data in easily digested form, so you can make the appropriate financial decisions. At this stage, dedicated marketing managers may be required to work in-house to collectively bring together the myriad of data from across the business to provide you with greater insights into your customers and how you can improve conversion rates.

Alternatively, you can outsource the work to an experienced marketing agency who can report such data and work closely with the business to help it reach its goals.

A digital marketing drive should be fully ingrained within the business mindset. At this point, you should be considering ways to increase traffic  to the website and increase conversion potential.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), involves continuously optimising a website to influence purchase / lead behaviour in order to maximise the value of every visitor on the website. Businesses at this stage probably won’t have a full CRO program in place, but will have dabbled in some split-testing and other internal tests based on conversations and debates that regularly take place in the office (‘What’s more important to our customers, this page or that page; this USP or that USP?’) Additional tracking and data will probably be required for this to be successful.

Nurturing your customers’ lifetime value

Thinking about the customer and how to nurture their overall lifetime value should also be considered at this point.

Email should already be an ongoing activity, but with increased traffic, sales and data other avenues open up in addition to a standard blanket email, such as:

  • Lapsed customer lists: reaching out to old customers.
  • Abandoned shopper emails: attempting to claw back lost business.
  • Upselling / repurchase emails: trying to increase the lifetime value of customers by offering them related items based on what they already purchased.

Email activities like these should include a level of automation that provides effective reporting and attribution of email activities.

An important question that every business at this stage should be able to answer (and if not, they should at the very least put a plan in place to work on it) is, what is the customer lifetime-customer value? The LTV figure helps to forecast growth and moves the business away from quick-win profitable sales or leads, to truly understanding what their affordable cost-per-acquisition is for future growth. More on this in your Step 4. Checklist below.

Overcoming growth challenges

At this stage, some marketing channels may have reached a bottleneck and appear unable to expand further, at least without considerably broadening their targeting to reach wider audiences that are located further down the sales funnel.

PPC, for example, may have reached an apex in terms of ROI, and an unlimited budget has already ensured that the core services or products have maxed out traffic and sales potential. 

Constant experimentation with a test budget can be used to trial new avenues, with the business considering how best to expand its range of services or its product range, in order to move into newer markets and drive new avenues of traffic.

Step 4. Checklist

At Step 4, you will be starting to consider:

1. Customer Lifetime Value

LTV tells you how much revenue you are likely to generate from each customer over the lifetime that they purchase from your business. You can use this to inform decisions about how much you pay to acquire new patients and how changes to a sleep device, product or treatment could affect the revenue generated from each patient. 

It can also indicate the revenue you’re missing out on if a patient doesn’t become a loyal customer. You can work out your LTV using this formula: Average revenue generated by a customer minus the cost of acquiring them and the cost of serving them.

2. Building a tech roadmap

A MarTech roadmap helps you define the technology stack that you need to strategically grow your business. This should include marketing technology that helps you acquire new patients and improves how you engage and upsell to existing ones. 

As your business becomes more data-focused, it should also feature a customer data platform (CDP). This pulls together data from all the customer touch points across your organisation to provide a single, unified view of the customer.

3. Use programmatic to reach patients at scale

Programmatic enables you to automate the buying of ads across several different mediums – including website display ads on mobile, tablet and desktop – so you can maximise your reach. You then have the flexibility to adjust your campaigns based on the real-time data you receive while these are running.

4. Segment your email list based on lead scoring

Your MarTech roadmap will probably include lead scoring software, which can be used to segment your email list. This enables you to determine which leads are more likely to convert sooner than others. Your main persona might be an affluent 55-year-old man who is suffering from sleep apnea. When a person matching this persona opts into your emails, you can assign them a high lead score. They then go into a list to receive emails tailored to them and their stage of the buyer’s journey.

5. Create a referral program

Referral programs reward your most loyal clinicians and patients who refer your sleep device, products or sleep treatment to others. For your B2B strategy, this is useful not only as a way of growing your network, but also as a way of creating a ‘happy to refer’ list. 

These are clinicians already in your network who you know you can call on to provide testimonials for marketing campaigns and as brand advocates when potential customers ask to speak to someone who is currently in your network.

6. Create a loyalty program

As a marketing tool, a loyalty program can attract, retain and reward patients with discounts and exclusive offers. Patients within these clubs can provide data-driven insights about what they value. This can help you to engage with audiences more effectively, and cross-sell to existing patients more successfully. 

Loyal patients are also more likely to promote your business – all of which can potentially increase your revenue and LTV. 

In return for your partners being able to access your hard-to-reach audiences, your patients can receive co-branded products, discounts and offers they would not otherwise have been able to access.

7. Use Net Promoter Scores to gauge customer satisfaction 

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Much of Corporate America is obsessed with its net promoter scores”. NPS is a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s based on one question: “How likely are you to recommend our products and services to someone you know?” 

NPS can help you track the customer experience. It is also used as an indication of individual, team and business performance over a period of time. If your competitors are using NPS, you can benchmark your business against theirs. 

An alternative to NPS is RAP Scores (Referral plus Purchase Score). Instead of tracking patient intent, it tracks the actual behaviour of patients who have purchased from you.

8. Make your branding clearly identifiable 

A key part of your branding is your business’s tone of voice. It forms the basis for your website copy and marketing materials. It should resonate with your audiences and be used to help you stand apart from your competitors. 

As a starting point, consider what brands you do and don’t want to sound like. Develop a Brand Voice Chart to help define this further and to provide consistency across your website, content and other marketing materials. 

If you’re dealing with more than one agency, it’s especially important to share your Brand Voice Chart with them in case they have their own ideas about what you should sound like.

Step 5: Data Is Ingrained In Your DNA

At this stage, your digital marketing efforts should have come to fruition and marketing is now a full-time job for a member of your team.

Even with the experience of a dedicated agency, you will probably need an internal liaison and digital marketing supplementary team to help implement the top-level strategy that dictates the direction the business will take.

A fully data-led approach (not based on feelings or assumptions and other guesswork) will be of utmost importance at this stage, so that small tweaks to campaigns can be carried out to drive potentially immense gains in the long-term. You should understand which channels deliver most of your short-term value and long-term value, and how best to nurture lifetime value and drive conversion.

A fully-fledged CRO program will be in place, with your website being continuously updated, tested and refined to increase conversion rates and customer value. The latest algorithmic digital marketing techniques and automation tools will be employed, ensuring the most cutting-edge activities are being undertaken to help ensure the company is reaching an increasingly savvy market.

Step 5. Checklist

At Step 4, you will be starting to consider:

1. Digital transformation has been ingrained in your sleep business.

Digital technology is now integrated in all areas of your business, enabling you to deliver your sleep devices, products and sleep treatments in better ways. You’re using automation to help meet patients’ expectations and – most importantly – to improve the customer experience. You understand what digital transformation means for your business and how to combine it with your strategy to deliver results.

2. Your marketing team is using artificial intelligence to compete

In organisations that are rapidly evolving there’s an increasing emphasis on digital initiatives such as machine learning, that deliver increased agility and speed for the entire business.

Businesses that use artificial intelligence to gain insights into their customers, have the ability to react faster with personalised responses. If for example, a prospective patient is searching for a sleep device on your website, a search engine with AI built into it can suggest similar items that are relevant to their search. This can help them discover products they may not have known they needed or existed.

3. Your CRO program is up and running

By now, you can understand data and can derive insights from it. You know for example, what attracts patients to your website, what’s stopping them from converting and what convinces other patients to convert. You’re using this data to continually improve your targeting – A/B split test your content assets – and you’re optimizing campaigns across channels to generate better results.

4. You’re using account-based marketing to engage decision-makers

Account-based marketing (ABM) is useful not only for enterprise sales but also if you’re looking to acquire new businesses or merge with others in a bid to stay competitive. ABM is the process of targeting individuals or groups of individuals within organizations with marketing that’s personalized to them.

It enables you to track and measure your marketing ROI more easily than inbound marketing, spend less time on campaigns that don’t generate results, shorten your sales cycle and build better relationships with your clients.

It also brings your sales and marketing teams together, because your marketing team knows exactly who to target and your sales team knows they’re receiving high quality leads.

5. Optimise the customer journey across multiple touchpoints

As patients move from say, your remarketing ad to your website, then download a resource, perhaps opt into your emails, purchase a product and ask customer support a question, the data they generate across the buyer’s journey and the many touchpoints, can now be managed from your customer data platform.

Your CDP can help you map and connect customer touchpoints across the whole of your organisation – not just marketing, but sales and customer success too – providing a single view of the customer. This ultimately gives you the data you need to continually improve the buyer’s journey and customer experience.

6. You’re using PR to grow your brand and online reputation management software to protect it

Your PR agency and online reputation management software (ORM) are like two sides of the same coin. PR is more outward facing, fostering influencer and media relationships, and managing our brand’s image.

ORM works behind the scenes, leveraging more technical-based tactics such as SEO, content and social media to improve the image of your brand. ORM software may well be part of your MarTech stack, performing tasks such as optimizing SEO, managing your online review sites and acting as a content management system.

Nurturing High Volumes Of Leads

At this stage, your campaigns may be so successful – and your lead volume so high – that you may even consider turning off your campaigns. Instead, weigh up whether it’s possible to automate the manual processes involved in managing and distributing these. In doing so, you should be able to free up your teams’ time to focus on other parts of the business.

Solutions such as The LDRS – Somnowell Marketing’s lead distribution and response software – help fast growth sleep businesses to automate the capture of leads and nurture these multiple times, across multiple touch points to conversion.

The solution is used by the world’s leading healthcare businesses to overcome the challenge of how to manage high volumes of new patients enquiring about life-changing treatments.

Learn More

Who is Somnowell Marketing?

Digital marketing is the core of your business’s promotional activity and we hope that this article has given you a framework for getting started and making improvements.

At Somnowell Marketing, we accelerate the growth of sleep companies using customer-centric, data-driven digital marketing services that dramatically increase leads. 

We are a fully integrated part of the sleep device company Somnowell, making us uniquely positioned to leverage the knowledge we’ve accrued from over a decade of working in the sleep industry. 

Somnowell Marketing’s end-to-end digital marketing services and solutions include:

  • Digital advertising.
  • Search engine optimization.
  • Social media.
  • Facebook Messenger Marketing.
  • Website Design and Build.
  • Website Management.


For businesses experiencing large volumes of leads we offer a lead distribution and response solution (‘the LDRS’) that automates lead management – automatically connecting patients with local dentists and nurturing would-be patients to conversion.

If you’re interested in discussing your digital marketing requirements please get in touch with us below.

Luke Clarkson

Director of Business Development

15+ years of management and business development experience.

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