3 Quick Steps to Great Vertical Marketing: Healthcare Case Study

It’s been a hot minute since my last APS Marketing client blog. Thankfully busy with several clients including SD-WAN, VoIP Security and Cloud Auditing markets. Writing today to share a well-used program idea in Vertical Marketing. Customers deploying a B2B tech product in their industry vertical often demonstrate great examples of business-level use cases vs simply selling on “me too” product functionality.

First, a definition.

Vertical markets focus on a segment where vendors offer goods and services specific to an industry, trade, profession, or other group of customers with specialized needs.  Our team at SAP worked extensively with 25 vertical markets GTM content. My mobile apps, development, messaging and security team pursued many of the top 20 vertical markets to help drive a sizable portion of $500 million plus annualized Mobile revenue within the tremendous SAP $25 billion annual revenue run rate.

Second, identify a target rich customer/prospect environment.

B2B suppliers have dozens of vertical markets to attack for sales. For APS Marketing client Nitro (collaboratively with GigaOM and Sepharium), we focused on the healthcare services market. Mary Meeker’s well-followed annual “State of the Internet” report reinforces the need for healthcare digitization and Nitro’s vertical market use case. 

Meeker notes, “Consumers are driving a steady digitization of healthcare. Internet research increases access to data and decision-making tools, while genomic testing yields a growing base of personal genetic data and on-demand urgent care reduces time to receive treatment. Telehealth and telemedicine are improving patient-practitioner relationships, prescription delivery is increasing convenience and affordability and health-incentive tools are driving positive changes via savings and personalized rewards.”

Why?

Easy. Billions of patients are forcing leading healthcare organizations to demonstrate industry leadership by investing in digital transformation through digital experience initiatives. Nitro helps digitize the billions of resulting transactions that are quickly overwhelming the existing mashup of analog and digitization schemes of both healthcare providers and the end patient. HIPAA and Electronic Health Record compliance mandates make the Nitro solution attractive to both tech and business leaders. 

Third, integrate your product message use case.

We helped Nitro define a successful digital experience migration. A migration where healthcare leaders are mapping every business process involving paper, portable document format (PDF) standards-based requests, e-signatures, mailing, faxes and overnight carriers.  Healthcare faces costly enterprise license and maintenance terms for disparate PDF document management, e-signature, cloud-based file sharing and Microsoft Office 365 document workflow. This vertical market piece also notes Nitro cost and centralized management efficiencies vs. brand competitors including Adobe Document Cloud and Docusign. These advantages will appeal to the business buyer with far less expensive enterprise license schemes.  

Enjoy the GigaOM-branded healthcare vertical market write up here and the Nitro Marketing team further leveraged this vertical market content nicely with a follow-on blog here. Well done.