If I’m being honest, the digital marketing industry in Australia frustrates me. There are over 8,000 agencies. It’s highly saturated. Many of the people working in those agencies, or running them, have no formal marketing training at all. They’re not operating from any theoretical basis, they’ve simply learnt on the job. Worse, there’s no real barrier to entry. Someone can finish a LinkedIn Learning course on Saturday, build a Wix website on Sunday, and go to market as a marketing consultant on Monday.
The result is twofold. There’s a proliferation of low-quality marketers doing mostly tactical execution work with little thinking or strategy behind it. And there’s a fair bit of snake oil, people promising results they can’t deliver, setting expectations for outcomes that were never going to be achieved, describing technical work in technical language nobody can properly evaluate. The client buys it, and the outcome is either little to no movement of the needle, or a genuinely expensive waste of money.
The three tiers of agency
Despite all that, there are a number of genuinely great digital agencies in Australia. Broadly, they sort into three tiers.
There’s the corporate group, typically expensive, with a lot of resources and a lot of team across many different areas, but not necessarily dedicated experience in your specific space. There’s the mid-tier, where TheOnlineCo. sits, capable of taking on complex problems and delivering genuine quality. And there are smaller operators who’ll do cheaper, purely tactical execution work.
Beyond just finding an experienced agency, you’re looking for someone who understands your industry specifically, has worked in it before, and is familiar with what they’re up against.
The test: insight on day one
I’ve heard this directly from clients. They want a conversation with someone bringing insight and expertise to the table on day one. They don’t want to spend days, weeks or months teaching the agency about their own industry. They don’t want to be training the agency. They want the agency bringing them information.
If an agency you’re talking to claims dedicated medical device experience, they should have case studies and testimonials to prove it. And in that first conversation, they should be telling you things you didn’t already know, not the other way around.
What they will and won’t know
It’s also fair to say that a genuinely experienced agency still won’t know your specific business on day one. They’ll know the industry. They won’t yet know you, or the particular scenario your business sits inside. Every business is genuinely unique, and the alliance between you and the agency matters as much as the industry experience itself. A good agency knows the difference between the two and treats getting to know your business as real work, not a formality.
Why this decision is harder to reverse than it looks
This decision matters more than it might appear to at the time. Saving a few dollars now can cost you significantly later, particularly with a long sales cycle. If you run activity for 12 to 18 months and then discover it isn’t working, you don’t just reset the clock, you could be looking at a 3 to 5 year turnaround before things are genuinely working. Medical device campaigns typically don’t fail fast. They fail slowly. They die a slow death. Choosing well up front matters more in medical devices than in most other industries.
The questions worth asking directly
Do they understand the three potential buyers? The clinician, the procurement team, and the end customer. If they haven’t worked in this space before, they’re going to have to figure out, in real time and at your expense, how to put together messaging for three genuinely distinct personas.
How fluent are they with the regulatory guidelines? In truth, most agencies will need to partner with you and your legal department to get this right. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if the agency’s team has already been trained on these guidelines and can bring that fluency to the table, rather than learning it from scratch on your account.
How sophisticated are they about measurement and attribution? If an agency starts by over-promising, telling you everything’s easy, and they can deliver you lots of leads quickly, that’s the moment to step away. A genuine agency will embrace the complexity of a long sales cycle and a genuinely complex buyer’s journey, not paper over it.
What does their content process actually look like? How are they going to take complex medical information and turn it into bite-sized, readable content for healthcare professionals, procurement managers or end users? Ask to see it, not just hear about it.
Do they have a real strategic and onboarding process? A good agency will ask you to take the time to put together a proper strategy, to do the thinking work and the planning before execution starts. The difference we see between planned campaigns and unplanned ones is enormous.
Red flags worth naming plainly
People who’ve never worked in your industry. People who don’t understand the regulatory constraints. Agencies over-promising simplistic answers to genuinely complex questions. Be clear on who’s actually going to look after your account, is it a senior person at the pitch who then hands you off to a junior team once you’ve signed? Be wary of slickness. Look for someone genuine, someone you actually understand when they speak.
Where this leaves you
We’ve spent many years working with medical device companies. You can read our case studies. You can see the list of clients we’ve worked with across a variety of spaces. We understand the complexity, we’ve worked with it before, we’ve seen success, and we have the evidence to prove it.
If you need help in this area, we’d love to have a no-obligation conversation with you, so you can get to know us and see if we’re the right fit.
