Healthcare Research for SaaS and Marketing Teams: A Faster Approach

Marketing for a SaaS in the healthcare industry comes with a unique challenge: users may not necessarily be buyers. There is a lot to consider, including workflow, efficiency, impact on IT, finances, procurement and compliance. It's critical for marketing teams to know those differences to position a product, write and craft a message to the audience and who to focus on.

The problem is that you have to do that research in a timely fashion in order to affect decisions before a campaign, landing page or product launches go live.

To what extent do healthcare SaaS marketers need to research first?

Begin with decisions that are within your marketing team's control: audience, positioning, objections, messaging and value propositions. Rather than seeking general feedback from the customers, consider what specific decision the research is meant to support.

As an illustration, a healthcare SaaS marketer could need to decide on whether the emphasis will be on reducing administrative costs or enhancing operational visibility on the homepage. Another team might want to know whether their messaging could appeal more to the clinical leaders or healthcare operation executives.

These are more focused than the typical market research type of questions, but are asked time and time again. They also don't necessarily warrant a prolonged research project.

This is best done by linking each research question to an action. If the answer won't alter your headline, your campaign, ICP, positioning or sales message, then the research might need to be reconsidered.

How to speed up the process of healthcare research?

When marketers are able to distinguish between standard marketing decisions and extensive research projects that involve recruiting humans, research can progress at a quicker pace.

The traditional research process in healthcare may include the recruitment of clinicians or other specialized participant, scheduling interviews, analysing interviews and generating results. This can be weeks, and might not fall in line with a campaign schedule.

Synthetic audience research is a further level for testing at an earlier stage. Articos, for instance, employs synthesized users that are based on behavior to test concepts, messaging, pricing and reactions of the buying committee. It is able to generate structured findings in less than 30 minutes in its healthcare research workflow.

Articos has a human-accuracy benchmark of 86% in 46 studies, against the results of studies from the Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group. It has a methodology that is peer reviewed and is based on behavioral science instead of just producing generic AI responses.

The advantage to marketers is the speed: a marketing team can test an idea without investing large amounts of development or advertising resources.

What should healthcare SaaS messaging questions focus on?

The best healthcare messaging research is about what buyers get, appreciate, wonder about and reject.

As a marketer, you should ask:

• Does the headline convey a problem that the buyer is aware of?
• What is the most important benefit to the target role?
• What are some objections that are immediately obvious?
• Does it make sense to offer such a good value?
• What words do you know that are confusing or make you doubtful?
• Is it the same message for the members of the buying committee?

The final question is particularly significant in the healthcare field. What matters to a clinical champion isn't necessarily what matters to an IT director or CFO.

Research can then enable marketers to decide whether to have one general positioning line or multiple messages for each of the buyer roles.

What makes ad testing so important for healthcare marketers?

Paid campaigns help to magnify the message you give them. If the position is poor, a higher advertising spend won't help.

Headlines, ad copy, value propositions, and landing page ideas can all be tested prior to launch, to uncover obvious messaging issues, while they're still cheap.

Let's envision two health care SaaS landing pages. One starts with "Decrease administrative burden. The other leads with “Enhance visibility throughout your healthcare organization.” Both may be correct, but there's not enough information given to know which is more important to the prospective customer.

A focused audience test can be a proof prior to investing lots of money in traffic.

Here's one place where research in healthcare may be a normal marketing process, and not just a project for big launches.

What can be done to help human research by synthetic users?

Human research should be used in conjunction with synthetic users, not in replacement.

However, there are times when it is vital to engage in face-to-face meetings with actual health care buyers, especially when there are complex organizational dynamics, clinical behavior, patient outcomes, regulatory issues, or high-stakes decisions. Real world clinical outcomes cannot be demonstrated or formal validation can not be achieved through synthetic research.

It's worth is something else. It can serve as an evidence layer for a multitude of less formal decisions that don't get a formal research study.

Articos places its platform in this manner. It's helpful for agencies, SaaS teams, startup founders, product marketers and growth teams to test messaging, headlines, advertising copy, ICPs, positioning, landing pages, and more about customer-facing decisions.

The company also claims that its approach is 7.5× more accurate than directly prompting generic LLMs for this type of research use case. That is important because people don't ask an off-the-shelf model to mimic a healthcare buyer the same way they test an audience using a behaviorally-driven research methodology.

How to make healthcare audience research credible?

It's not just about how fast it goes but also the methodology.

Marketers in the healthcare industry need to take care to not interpret any response as market proof. A good research procedure should have specific boundaries, characteristics and limitations, a research question, and a structured analysis.

Articos methodology has been validated and peer reviewed, benchmarked against Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group, with an accuracy of 86% on 46 studies. The platform does not provide any healthcare population data in place of people, it presents output in the form of behaviorally grounded synthetic personas.

That is significant in the interpretation of findings. A research finding doesn't necessarily have to be a prescription on how all healthcare buyers will act, but it can be a helpful tool to consider when deciding which messaging option to take.

What is the greatest constraint in faster health care research?

The take-home from the restriction is that uncertainty cannot be avoided even with speed.

Synthetic audience research is valuable to answer reaction, reasoning, comprehension, positioning and messaging questions, but is not an alternative to real human validation when the decision depends on actual users or clinical outcomes.

In the case of a healthcare SaaS marketing team, the wise way to go is to enact the best technique based on the decision. Research faster to whittle down choices, spot objections, and test messaging. Introduce human research when necessary to the stakes, complexity or evidence requirements.

So, what's a healthcare SaaS marketer to do first?

Make one decision at this moment that you are just relying on your instincts.

Select a headline, value proposition, ICP, landing page or campaign concept, or positioning statement. Outline target customer and what you would do differently if you knew more about their needs. After that, test that question in that area before investing further.

Thus, healthcare marketing teams gain more practicality in their healthcare research. Instead of having to wait weeks to respond to all of the questions, marketers can sprinkle audience evidence into more of their decisions.

For healthcare SaaS businesses, it translates to more informed positioning, more clear messaging and less customer facing decision based purely on assumptions made internally. The object is not to get rid of human research. It's to provide audience evidence that is useful in a timely fashion that can impact the work before it ships.