(an article from PharmaLeaders sponsor: Data Smart Marketing)
Author: Jim Walker, Contributing Editor, PharmaLeaders
Driven by data-marketing breakthroughs and challenged by privacy-focused regulations, the online marketing space is undergoing a significant sea change, especially within healthcare marketing. As brand teams and agencies assess their campaigns for effectiveness and compliance, it is imperative to have a timely strategic marketing framework in place for reaching both patients and physicians in order to engage your customers with confidence.
The Data Smart Marketing™ approach helps ensure that your campaigns not only support brand objectives but are also compliant and cost-effective. By applying data-backed market intelligence to the entire campaign lifecycle, your team can build consistent and long-lasting customer impact.
Most importantly, Data Smart Marketing provides you and your team with the tools for tackling some of your biggest healthcare marketing challenges:
- How to create and deliver compliant content in a multi-channel environment
- How to target and engage the right customers at the right time
- How to manage costs throughout the marketing funnel
- How to quickly move prospects from consideration to loyal customer
- How to consistently build lasting brand trust
The Data Smart Marketing framework consists of five interrelated tactics – described below with a SMART acronym. While these tactics are certainly not novel approaches, integrating them in a cohesive and cost-effective campaign allows teams to see superior results while enjoying full compliance.
1) Strategic Targeting
More than ever before, marketing technologies and first-party data allow brands to very precisely gather and then address the exact customers they are trying to reach. However, with great data comes great responsibility – so teams need to make sure that their lists are fully opted-in, and that all FDA and HIPAA regulations are carefully adhered to. Not only does strategic targeting help ensure compliance, but it also drives a virtuous cycle of cost-effectiveness across the entire campaign process, allowing for more focused creative assets, less rework, and fewer review cycles.
2) Mobile First Design
Having tremendous clarity in terms of targeting allows campaigns to reach customers at critical turning points in their lifecycle journey. In today’s market, that means mobile! Campaign assets and customer journey mapping should revolve around these various key mobile touchpoints with specific calls to action. Within the mobile ecosystem, additional consideration should be given to the appropriate channel that each customer may prefer – be it text messaging, ringless voicemail, or email. By taking a mobile first approach and optimizing for channel preferences, campaigns can see significant improvements in initial reach, engagement, and pull-through.
3) Automation and AI
Building on a foundation of strategic targeting and a mobile first mindset, automation is essential for maintaining campaign momentum and managing costs. Successful marketing automation requires a specific combination of AI (artificial intelligence) and HI (human intelligence). In other words, teams need to do more than just deposit their messages in a series of emails with triggers and hit the send button. Instead, successful automation uses AI to sift through massive datasets to glean new, critical insights into the customer journey and then creatively align campaign assets to meet those particular “in the moment” customer needs.
4) Real-time Engagement
The real-time nature of today’s communications channels flies in the face of much of the necessary legal and regulatory frameworks that have been developed to deliver compliant messaging. However, new platforms that allow real-time targeting and deliver immediate marketing data can now be aligned with online approval workflows, giving brand teams the flexibility and confidence to respond in near real-time to patient and HCP communications. This type of conversational communications is the foundation for patient-first marketing.
5) Trust & Credibility
At the heart of the Data Smart Marketing framework must be the cultivation of trust between the brand and its customers –both in the initial acquisition phase, as well as throughout the many subsequent touchpoints over the length of the customer journey. Within healthcare, this trustworthiness is especially significant as customers are often facing severe if not life-threatening situations. By integrating the elements of Data Smart Marketing with a strong focus on building trust and credibility, campaigns can achieve an extraordinarily high degree of customer relevance and impact.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly changing marketing landscape, brands need to take a strategic perspective on how they target customers, leverage digital channels, apply automation, and engage in real-time conversation. Most importantly, they need to build and maintain exceptionally high levels of trust and credibility across all of their customer touchpoints. Data Smart Marketing provides a strong and consistent foundation for achieving this exceptionally high level of healthcare marketing success and allows you to create and deliver cost-effective campaigns with confidence.
PharmaLeaders thanks Data Smart Marketing for being sponsor of our May 2019 newsletter. To receive your issues, sign up at https://pharmaleaders.com. To learn more about Data Smart Marketing, click here or email [email protected].