Experience a New Era of Time, Finance, and Task Management. Say goodbye to missed deadlines and hello to a stress-free, productive life.
So, you’re launching an innovative medical device in 2024. Exciting, right? But, let's be real, it's also a bit of a roller coaster ride trying to plan for all the content needs that you’ll have to support your medical marketing initiatives. On one hand, you’re feeling the pressure from leadership to take the medical product to market, but deep inside, you know you should take a breath and look at the year ahead. What to do?
In this article, we will dissect the myriad potential content needs for your medical product launch, guiding you towards the development of a robust content generation system. Our goal is to help you craft a visually stunning product content library for your new medical product that can be used across your entire marketing and sales cycle in 2024.
When launching a medical product, initial considerations often revolve around immediate needs like a website landing page, brochures, or event marketing materials. Collaborating with your internal teams or production partners, you typically create tailored assets for these instances. However, as sales and marketing cycles unfold, the demand for more content grows, necessitating scalable solutions—a concept we delve into later in this article.
To streamline your approach, start by outlining a checklist of potential content outlets such as websites, landing pages, printed materials, presentations, event marketing, and social media assets (and a substantial quantity of them). Add out-of-home displays, email marketing, paid ads, educational videos, sizzle and hype videos, product demos, and sales toolkits to the mix.
The content list expands with growing demand and team size, emphasizing the need to anticipate various content outlets and plan proactively. Establishing a content repository for your product becomes key, enabling the creation of assets on-the-fly rather than relying on per-need requests, and streamlining your medical presentation process. This foresight is cost-effective and time-efficient, ensuring all necessary content is readily available for dissemination.
With an idea of your potential content needs for your new medical device launch, it’s time to start building your library of content. But how should we approach it? At this point, you have two options:
Advantages:
‍If you have a device that requires showing with a patient, it might make sense for you to take this approach, as representing this type of interaction in 3D or illustrative approach may not produce favorable visual results. Good, as 3D rendering has become, it will never replace the quality of a well-shot photo (we'll see what AI has to say about this).
Disadvantages:
‍Photoshoots are extremely costly. When you factor in crew, talent, location, and post-production costs, you could be looking in the range of 20-50k. You have to ask yourself if what you’re getting is worth the value, and more importantly, will it give you the variety of content you need to support your sales and marketing content plan.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
‍As mentioned above, 3D will always have a 3D-type look, no matter the skill set of your production partner or money you invest. So, if your goal is to show your device in the context of real-world scenarios only, then you might not want to choose a 3D approach.
No matter the approach you choose, the underlying need must be filled, that is to create a robust content library of imagery that will not get overplayed throughout your year ahead of marketing.
Like many things in life, repetition can get old, especially when you’re talking about serving paid ads to your audience. To stand out, providing your prospects with a variety of sales content will go a long way. Now, with variety MUST come consistency, which is what developing a library of pre-approved product imagery is KEY!
No matter the size of your medical product, the formula for creating a content library is formulaic and can be applied to any medical device. Let’s break down our approach using the 3D approach:
Building the Device:
‍It all starts with building your product in 3D. In many cases, we’ll receive a CAD file of the device from our clients, which not only saves them a considerable amount of money but also accelerates our production time and produces more accurate results because we’re working directly from the engineer files, not modeling from photography.
Building an Environment:
‍With many 3D medical product renders, you’ll see them on a white cyc with nice reflections and shadows, which is fine, but we like to build structural elements around our product as they tend to offer more visual interest and depth.
Mood Lighting:
‍In our opinion, this is the most important part of the process, as developing a good lighting setup will make or break your product renders. You need to define what visual tone you want for your product. Do you want it to feel like a sleek car commercial, or more of a sterile neutral setting? Either is fine, but you’ll want to work with your production partner to define the approach.
Now that you’ve got a rendering setup that feels right, it’s time to start placing cameras and rendering. When we’re creating rendering packages for our clients, we always aim to produce between 16-20 still renders and 5-7 animations. For the product stills, we work from the outer ring and work inward. So imagine your device in the center of the room; we’re anchoring our camera’s focal point on the device and rotating around every 25 degrees, varying the height for a variety of angles. Then we move the camera in towards the device, so it almost fills the frame, and do it again. Lastly, we go in for extreme close-ups. These renders usually focus on specific features of the device.
After we have all of the stills set up, we then set up our camera for animation. What we’re looking for here is to create long sweeping motions across and around the device. These are usually determined by the size of the device and specific elements that need to be highlighted. We render each shot out at 10 seconds as this gives our clients the option to use them individually or edit them together for longer content pieces.
With all your renders complete, you'll now want to create a sales content library to ensure they are organized properly so that they can be easily accessed when needed.
Now that you have a library of new product renders, have fun with them. One of the struggles that we, as designers, face is a lack of assets to use for creating our sales and marketing material. This often leaves our content looking redundant. The idea behind having a vast library of product renders is to create variety so that your brand content doesn't get stale.
See how you can take one paid ad layout and simply applying different product renders to create various variations of the same ad. This approach comes in handy with paid advertising on platforms such as Google, Bing, LinkedIn because you can create a variety of ads to test which is performing better than the others. In most cases, you would do this using alternating text, but now with your Content Library, you can test imagery that is performing better alongside text, providing valuable insights.
Also, think about the potential with your presentations. If your brand has a long sales cycle like most medical brands do, you should be ditching the blah medical device presentations template. Instead of using the same product imagery in all those presentations, you can vary it up so that your prospective client isn't seeing redundancy in the presentations you're sending them.
To take the design aspect a step further, start adding scales, zooms, rotations, and cropping to your product renders and see how you can now triple the number of assets that you have. In the example below, we're taking a single product image, using it in the same ad, but applying different cropping, rotation, and scaling to make the ad feel different in each scenario.
Remember, the goal with all of this is to create variety, giving your design team the tools they need to create a plethora of assets for your brand.
If all of this sounds relevant to your product marketing needs, all you need to do is work with a partner that understands the philosophy. You'll find a wide variety of production partners by doing a Google search, but not many understand the philosophy around creating a magnitude of content for medical brands. So, while researching a 3D visualization company to hire, feel free to use this as a guide to ask questions to ensure that you're not only getting quality-looking product renders but also getting the magnitude of content that you need to support your medical products' sales and marketing needs throughout the year.
At Nuvue, we are a creative studio that's 100% dedicated to medical brands and have a focus on creating not only high-quality content but also creating a sales content system that helps brand marketing initiatives scale as demand grows for their product. Schedule your hello call today to see how we're helping medical brands like yours succeed in content marketing.
‍
