The Six Types of KOLs

How to Match the Right KOL to the Right Opportunity

Blog Post

The value of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in your market strategy cannot be overstated. You need them to launch a product, to tell your story, to train others on your procedure, to sell your device, to expand your market reach. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to engaging KOLs in the medtech space. Your company’s needs will vary, and you’ll need different types of KOLs based on potential opportunities.

When managed effectively, working with a well-balanced group of KOLs can have a major impact in product adoption and moving the market in your favor. With that in mind, here are six types of KOLs and how to engage with them to drive your business.

The Academic

Data-Driven. Objective. Outcome-Focused.

This KOL is often heading up clinical studies and working with medtech companies to provide the data that helps get a product to market. Typically associated with an academic center, they’re well published and work for an institution that is accomplished in clinical studies. These centers have the infrastructure in place to complete a study on time, making them ideal to use in your next trial. They’re the knowledgeable and objective voice you want on the podium delivering results and disseminating the data-backed information that your product has to offer.

Opportunities to Engage:
These KOLs shine as primary or sub investigators in clinical studies and are great for publishing. They have read all of your studies and the competitor’s studies as well. Get them involved early to help develop study protocol and incorporate the voice of the customer early in process. This is often your “go-to” KOL for speaking engagements as well. Workshops, podiums, booth presentations…they have the presenter chops and expertise to be a credible advocate.

Ways to Nurture:
Help them brush up on public speaking skills necessary to deliver study results — offer training opportunities to enhance their podium presence. Keep them engaged throughout the year and at major shows so they don’t fall prey to competitors.
The Trainer

Technically Skilled. Approachable. Process-Focused.

These KOLs are efficient champions of technique. Not only are they frequent users of your device, they’re diligent about learning how to use it correctly and passionate enough to promote it. As far as KOLs go, these people can often become your teammates, working with you on educational programs to train new users and share best practices with their peers.

Opportunities to Engage:
Education is a large part of your marketing budget, so you need faculty for peer-to-peer proctorships, cadaver labs, live courses, and workshops. These all call for someone who is a natural facilitator that is good with process. This KOL also has a fondness for teaching and sharing knowledge — and hopefully for your product as well.

Ways to Nurture:
Develop a comprehensive training program for your faculty KOLs – one that covers everything they need to know about the product and builds public speaking skills, enhances business expertise, and expands their digital horizons. Provide them with opportunities to grow their skills and they may help you grow your business.
The Marketer

Tech-Savvy. Creative. Expert.

Marketing may be a lower area of interest for most KOLs, but finding one who understands and values this type of work can be a huge win for your company. They can contribute to product value discussions even before your marketing messages are finalized. Having that voice of the customer involved early is crucial to positioning your product beyond just safe and effective.

Opportunities to Engage:
These important key experts can effectively impact uptake by acting as the voice of customer early on. They can help with product usability, industry trends, competitor insights and market research. Pull them in downstream, too, when creating brochures and other sales collateral. Be sure to engage these experts before they are enlisted by a competitor.

Ways to Nurture:
Identifying up-and-comers in the field can be critical. This focuses marketing resources on KOLs who will have a long-term impact on product adoption and creates opportunities for future leaders.
The Innovator

Inventive. Research-Driven. Resourceful.

This is an internal facing KOL who will not seek the spotlight — you know the one. They walk right past the marketing group and head for the R & D department. Creators who love to think outside the box, they often approach things with an engineer-like mindset. They are a valuable consultant who looks for ways to improve your product and add new ones to your portfolio.

Opportunities to Engage:
Advisory boards, product testing and development, research opportunities. They are looking for opportunities to pitch new ideas and move technology forward.

Ways to Nurture:
This type of KOL is most comfortable doing behind the scenes work, so getting them involved as a consultant, doing one-on-one sessions with executives and making them feel valued through engaging them in the technical side of things will help grow and sustain the partnership.
The Influencer

Digitally Fluent. Collaborative. Engaging.

What does a medtech influencer look like in the digital age? Researching the online communities in your industry will be critical to identifying digital influencer KOLs. They may be on public platforms like Twitter or in groups and forums on social platforms that are sometimes private and require invitation. Once you know where people are building community and sharing information online, you can determine the experts and potential moderators you want to nurture. And hopefully some of those people are already on your roster.

Opportunities to Engage:
Opportunities can start with leading virtual advisory boards or webinars. Once you build the relationship, discussions can be had around sharing information and advocating for your brand online. Peer-to-peer recommendations in these virtual communities can be very impactful and this KOL can be a positive voice for your brand when you can’t be there.

Ways to Nurture:
Are they ready to take their advocacy offline? Maybe this KOL is comfortable behind a computer screen but needs some guidance on becoming a leader in the industry outside of the digital jungle. Act as a resource to help them grow professionally, and they may be able to start filling other roles.
The Leader

Industry Veteran. Influential. Impartial.

The identified authority of subject matter — this KOL may not be a direct promoter of your product but the industry embraces them because of their credibility and unbiased nature. Well-connected with associations and healthcare companies, they have their finger on the pulse of the medtech space. Their long history and high level of engagement in the field allows them to see the future of healthcare better than anyone. Their proven track record means that when they say something, people take note.

Opportunities to Engage:
Often these KOLs are no longer practicing and are on speaking tour. They may have never actually used your device, but they can still speak to the value of your product in the market. Their expertise is highly valuable on advisory boards where they can work with executive leadership to take your company to the next level. On podiums they can be a credible voice to demonstrate how your device fits into the medtech ecosystem. These visionary-type KOLs know where healthcare is going and can help keep your company on track to success.

Ways to Nurture:
With almost a celebrity-like status in the field, the Leader KOL is best nurtured by CEOs and Executive teams. They can act as medtech business consultants and their expertise and influence can undoubtedly move the market in your favor.

Established & Emerging

In addition to identifying your KOLs, assessing their strengths and creating an engagement plan that fits their skills, you should also keep experience in mind. Keeping a balanced mix of well-established experts and up-and-comers is crucial to the sustainability of your program.

There will undoubtedly be overlap with these categories. Maybe you’ve found that rare KOL that does all of these things for you or performs several of these roles well. But these are some important categories to think about when building out a successful KOL strategy that helps you make a big impact in the market.

Going Beyond Safe and Effective

Aligning Marketing and Clinical to Tell a Powerful, Data-Driven Story

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Beyond Safe and Effective

The Triple Aim guidelines set out by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement are pushing companies to aim for more than just “safe and effective” when getting a product to market. So how can a well-rounded, cross-functional team that includes marketing bring varying perspectives together to take your clinical claims even further? You want to go for the aspirational claims that will differentiate your product in the market and develop data-driven messaging that hits home with your target audiences.

Just like a vehicle’s suspension, your mechanic will say that the key to proper alignment is adjusting the angles of the tires which affects how they make contact with the road. If your road is the path to approval, your wheels are the teams it takes to get you there. Getting them angled together towards that common goal is the secret — it gets you there faster and builds a foundation for a seamless transition when you go to market, so you can start improving patient care and delivering significant return to investors.

Align Teams, Early

We’ve seen this happen time and time again in our work. When teams are aligned at the start of the product cycle, before study protocols are even written, great things happen. When a trial is designed with health care claims, product positioning and customer messaging in mind, everyone wins. Marketing may not know how to write a study protocol, but they can provide valuable insight and act as the voice of the customer in the development process. They work closely with the Sales team in the field, and know the clinical evidence required to move customers along the marketing funnel. Having a discussion around what your prospective customers care about before designing a clinical study, will ensure that your organization will be able to go to market with differentiated messages once the product is approved.
Align Messaging with the Triple Aim

How do you go for those aspirational claims that will differentiate your product in the market? One way could be to consider the Triple Aim framework, as laid out by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, which says a new design should improve three things: the health of populations, the patient experience, and the per capita cost¹. Applying these aims to your clinical claims matrix and then designing your clinical studies to support them with compelling data, will have significant impact when your product is introduced in the market. In essence, prove the device will help healthcare providers, has a valuable economic story and will enable patients to have a higher quality of life. When your go-to-market team uses this as a compass for their clinical study design and launch strategy, you can be sure you’re hitting your key audiences and, hopefully, making an impact.

1. The IHI Triple Aim Initiative, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
An Outside Perspective Can Align your Inside Strategy

Sometimes progress is best pursued on neutral ground. Pulling your teams from their day-to-day lives in order to delve into a meaningful discussion, free from distraction, can sometimes best be done offsite. Working with an outside team of experts who can offer a fresh perspective, while remaining impartial, can help facilitate critical change and progress in an organization that may be weighed down by process or politics. We’ve seen it many times and have witnessed the almost therapeutic experience that teams can have when they come together, really listen to each other and agree to collaborate. Goals may be different, but the ultimate goal of getting a product to market that will change the lives of healthcare providers and their patients should not be lost.

Compelling Stories Drive Business

In our work, we’ve found that compelling stories drive business and move markets, no matter where you are in the world. Aligning your clinical and marketing teams early, using guideposts like the IHI’s Triple Aim framework to develop messaging and taking advantage of outside perspectives and processes, can help you move beyond “safe and effective” claims. When you develop a powerful, data-driven story that is unique and relevant to your customers, you can position your product to move the medtech market in your favor.

Finding Physicians in the Digital Jungle

The Best Platforms for Engaging with Medical Professionals

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Engagement, Activated Through PPC

No one is immune to advertising, but when you’re trying to increase awareness or educate around a medical device, it can seem like physicians are in fact that — borderline elusive. Often, they’re extraordinarily busy, receive direct contact from a wide variety of sales reps at regular intervals and can sometime be overwhelmed when it comes to learning about medtech innovations.

So how do you reach these time-strapped prospects when the competition is fierce and their attention is limited? One of the answers is PPC: pay-per-click search and paid advertising on different social media and search platforms.

This makes PPC a critical piece of your integrated digital marketing strategy. Being there to guide the conversations happening online about your product when you can’t be face-to-face will support your revenue-driving efforts anywhere along the funnel. From awareness ads that introduce a new technology or procedure to lead generating ads that require prospects to submit their contact information to access a case study or offer, PPC advertising offers a direct line of access to relevant customers as quickly as you can get your ads approved and uploaded.

LinkedIn often feels like the obvious choice when it comes to advertising to physicians because it is the social media platform for professionals, but it offers a relatively small pool of prospects and somewhat less sophisticated targeting and retargeting options compared to the other big-name advertising platforms. In addition, not all physicians regularly log on to LinkedIn the way professionals in more socially-driven industries do.

LinkedIn’s prime advantage lies in its demographics breakdowns — highly-specific metrics showing a wide variety of demographics (including job title) for prospects who are viewing and clicking through your ads to visit your website. This makes it easy to identify what types of physicians find your product most compelling and which types of job titles can be immediately weeded out of your advertising pool to increase the efficiency of your ad budget.

In addition, LinkedIn offers built-in lead form ads, which allow you to request, collect and store prospects’ information all within the LinkedIn advertising platform itself. For advertisers with little experience creating landing pages for their own site or limited access to a developer to build those pages for them, LinkedIn lead forms ads offer a quick, easy solution with the credibility of LinkedIn’s platform behind it.

Because of these qualities, LinkedIn may be most suitable to a smaller, lower-budget advertising campaign for a medtech device that appeals to physicians working in popular specializations. (Oncology advertising might be a great fit for LinkedIn. Advertising for a rheumatology device, on the other hand, might be less successful.)
The greatest advantage of Facebook is straightforward: (almost) everybody is on Facebook. While Facebook’s broad appeal may make it seem like an odd choice for the type of highly-specialized advertising required to reach physicians, its extremely sophisticated targeting options allow you to drill down into the prospect population to reach the audience you’re looking for. With a vast bank of users and literally thousands of possible audience configurations, it’s a great choice for advertising to physicians with rarer specialties, who may be more difficult to reach on other platforms.

Facebook and Instagram advertising run from the same advertising platform (both social media networks are owned by Facebook), so extending advertising into Instagram as well as Facebook is exceptionally easy. And, while Instagram can seem like a strange fit for physician advertising, running ads on both Facebook and Instagram allows potential prospects to experience touchpoints for your product within different contexts, solidifying their awareness of the product and sense of its legitimacy. Instagram may not be part of every advertising campaign for physicians, but it offers an additional advertising space for message reinforcement that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Google Ads offers both display ads (ads that show up when a prospect is browsing one of the many sites affiliated with Google’s advertising network) and search ads (ads that show up when a user googles something related to the product being advertising).

This flexibility makes Google Ads a reliable go-to for building brand awareness, but requires you to access your target audience based on what they are searching or specific content they are accessing. Since physicians often search for new medtech products by brand name based on referrals from peers and patients, Google search ads, in many cases, offer limited usefulness beyond ensuring immediate access to your website.

Google display ads, on the other hand, offer a direct line of awareness advertising on professional websites that doctors are likely to browse in their downtimes. While finding a significant number of professional sites related to the audience you’re attempting to reach may be difficult, it’s worth an attempt to ensure you’re not missing out on valuable awareness advertising space.

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The Six Types of KOLs

The Academic

Data-Driven. Objective. Outcome-Focused.

The Trainer

Technically Skilled. Approachable. Process-Focused.

The Marketer

Tech-Savvy. Creative. Expert.

The Innovator

Inventive. Research-Driven. Resourceful.

The Influencer

Digitally Fluent. Collaborative. Engaging.

The Leader

Industry Veteran. Influential. Impartial.

Established & Emerging

Let’s work together.

Ready to prioritize KOL identification and mapping? Need to incorporate KOLs into your engagement strategy? Want to move your market by harnessing KOL share of voice? We can help.

Going Beyond Safe and Effective

Teams, Aligned

Clinical may say,

“Marketing doesn’t need to be involved yet. We’re not designing a campaign; we’re designing a clinical trial.”

Marketing may say,

“We want superior and differentiating claims for this product, but clinical won’t work with us to elevate clinical endpoints that will get us something more beyond “safe and effective.”

Beyond Safe and Effective

So, what can be done? We’ve worked with medtech companies across a multitude of specialties and have seen some common threads that help determine success. But the key to success from our perspective? Alignment.

Align Teams, Early

Align Messaging with the Triple Aim

An Outside Perspective Can Align your Inside Strategy

Compelling Stories Drive Business

Let’s work together.

Ready to align your teams and move forward with your strategy? Develop a roadmap or a messaging matrix for your next clinical trial? Ready to remove some roadblocks so you can launch a new product or therapy? We can help.

Finding Physicians in the Digital Jungle

Engagement, Activated Through PPC

Is PPC Still Relevant?

How Can PPC Help Me Move a Market?

A recent study by the Journal of Medical Research states that 61% of physicians are on social media and use it to research new information.

Which Platforms Should I Use?

Physician-focused Social Media Networks

Let’s work together.

Ready to connect with you physician audience using a PPC campaign? Need to develop your content strategy? Build the necessary creative? Manage and optimize your campaign? We can help.