Healthcare organizations are changing the way in which they spend their now limited marketing resources. More and more Marketing leaders, Brand Managers and IT executives are looking for ways to develop more effective and efficient ways to drive campaigns using more data and fewer dollars. This article will explain the importance of taking advantage of aggregated market, sales, and socially-driven trend data to build stronger, cheaper—and yet more effective—campaigns.
In the face of shifting market dynamics, economic pressures, and regulatory demands, Healthcare and Life Science organizations must rethink traditional sales and marketing practices. Previous campaigns would rely heavily on spending money on trade shows, local HCP events, and large-scale advertising which did not necessarily allow organizations to accurately identify or target their campaigns to have significant impact based on demand. However, today’s sales and marketing budgets are predicated less on direct spend dollars and more on efficiently and effectively structuring the information needed to build targeted campaigns, launch new product offerings, and/ or identify affinity (loyalty) program relationships.
The goal of a successful marketing campaign is to attain equilibrium with all the inputs that would influence their demand creation. If you do not understand your competitive position, how do you expect to compete? If the constituents are not adequately educated, how do you expect them to make informed decisions?
An optimum equilibrium would entail balance across several elements:
- Data Transparency
- Predictable Outcomes
- Resource Mix
- IT Adoption
- Constituent Education
- Performance Incentives
- Achieved Results
- Privacy
- Competitive Position
Informed Marketing
Internally and externally generated customer touch points create huge volumes of transactions that are rich with information about customers/patients/members, their preferences, and their behaviors. Consequently, this information from several disparate operational systems supporting those touch points creates a rich repository of constituent knowledge in a very holistic fashion. Thus, defining the premise of Informed Marketing where a constituent’s data touch points can be leveraged to create more precise and tailored campaigns.
Through this correct collection and management of internal and external data, immense opportunity arises to create customized programming that is timely, contextual, personal, and relevant. An actionable, consolidated, and accurate view of customers across channels will lead to closing the loop on marketing efforts. Similarly, an intuitive, usable interface to all activity at the marketing manager’s desktop will enable consistent analytics of marketing activity to ensure effective marketing spend and constituent insight and metrics on behavioral , attitudinal, and demographic data.
To learn more about informed marketing and to develop a tactical action plan to take advantage of your healthcare marketing data, look for an upcoming white paper on this topic that will provide deeper insight by our subject matter experts and solution partner, Appature, Inc.: Today’s Healthcare Marketing Budget Equals More Data and Less Dollars. As always, feel free to reach out to the authors for more information.
Anwer Khan co-leads West Monroe Partners’ Healthcare and Life Sciences practice.
Jill Schubmehl is a Senior Manager in West Monroe’s Customer Experience practice.