With health care professionals’ (HCPs) rapid adoption of tablets and smart phones – digital is quickly becoming a powerful option for medical device and pharma marketers to drive more engagement with prospects. This is a boon to sales teams looking for more qualified leads and more sales-ready prospects.
Here are three tactics to help medical device marketing and pharma marketing teams increase customer engagement and improve lead conversion.
Choose the Best Marketing Channels
It’s not quantity – it’s quality. Not how many channels, but making sure you’re on the right channel. In a recent MMA roundtable, experts cited better results and customer engagement when the focus is on using the channels your audiences like.
Today’s HCP is far more likely to read news online or via mobile. According to Fierce Mobile, the average person now spends 65 minutes a day viewing content on a mobile device and about 40 minutes reading print. And with the high adoption rate of iPads (and smartphones among physicians (27% and 72%, respectively), an integrated digital (web and mobile) strategy is a must.
Focus on Engagement
Make them yours. Get them involved with your product and your brand. Get them to participate and interact (see the last paragraph of this article link). This is especially true of complex sales propositions common with new drugs or evolutionary treatments. Use technology to simplify your unique selling proposition and engage the audience. This works for both HCPs and consumers.
Entertaining experiences such as interactive videos, games and educational tools can be quite effective at appealing to the interest of prospects. Combining these tactics together can drive engagement even further. For example: a quick video animation showing a drug’s mechanism of action followed by an interactive educational game and finished off with a short testimonial from a patient or expert HCP.
Educate for a 360-Degree View of the Physician
You’ve taken them through an experience, now take them one step further—or actually closer to you and your brand. Provide content that not only helps them make a decision on your product—but shows them how to ensure high patient satisfaction. This means developing materials that address best recovery tips, best practices, post-treatment regimens and expectations, etc.
By placing these behind a form—or at least identifying the physician downloading the materials—you’ll gain valuable information about what matters to individuals HCPs. And keep it simple. You really only need an email and phone number to continue the dialogue and move the prospect to the next step in the cycle. Physicians will appreciate it. Sales will appreciate you.
What tactics have you used to increase engagement? Leave your comments below and let’s discuss it.
Photo credit: Toca Boca
With DTC advertising often so focused on human pharma, it's easy to forget the complexity and broad pet market. Marketers face many of the same challenges targeting veterinarians as they do traditional physicians.
With many of its brands like FRONTLINE® and HEARTGARD® considered to be the gold standard of veterinary medicine, Merial Limited sought an engaging and entertaining interactive solution that would create interest in various drug product lines, particularly at industry conferences where there are opportunities for one-on-one conversations between sales representatives and veterinarians.
To achieve these goals, Merial selected us to create an integrated interactive experience for Merial’s exhibits at major animal health conventions. This integrated experience featured integration of RFID to deliver personalized content for attendees, educational gaming, data capture, marketing analytics and reporting. The interactive experiences included:
Interactive Commitment Wall and Kiosks
Through this user-generated experience, veterinarians and technicians demonstrated to their peers their commitment to animal health. In this unique experience, attendees began at a kiosk in which they had their picture taken, chose a commitment statement and physically signed their support to animal health. These images were combined into a commitment tile that was projected on a large commitment wall—one of the main attractions of the exhibit. As more tiles were completed, the message Healers. Helpers. Heroes. appeared on the mural.
VetQuest Challenge Multiplayer Game
Through this 5-player iPad trivia game, attendees could test their knowledge of Merial products against their peers. The best scores were placed on a leaderboard for the rest of the convention to see. This provided a fun way to learn about the benefits and advantages of various Merial products. TheVetQuest Challenge was successful in bringing veterinarians and technicians back to the Merial booth multiple times to play the game.
If you've ever seen the Eat This, Not That series of books, you'll know that the author focuses on the behavioral changes that can help you lose weight. Branding is no different. Early-stage biomed companies don't have to "eat" the same as the more established ones.
This week, I had the pleasure of being part of a panel discussion hosted by the Larta Institute and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). If you're not familiar with the Larta Institute, they are a non-profit, professional services firm that helps turn government-funded innovations into commercial enterprises. The Larta Institute works with clients that range of U.S. governmental agencies to regional agencies around the world.
The panel targeted early-stage biomed companies to help them with marketing and branding as part of Larta's commercialization training workshop. Joining me on the panel was Ravi Sawhney, CEO of RKS Design and Scott Fox, author of Internet Riches and e-Riches 2.0.
Like many start-ups, early-stage biomed companies are challenged with how to efficiently allocate marketing budgets and to choose the most effective strategic path with regard to corporate and product branding.
You'll often hear marketers recommend multi-day branding sessions and significant investments in the look and feel of the corporate brand. But this should not be the hard rule for early-stage companies. There is too much to lose by not thinking differently here.
Early-stage companies should consider investing against the grain, focusing initial branding investments on the systems that will enable them to make better decisions tomorrow.
Here are four things early-stage biomed companies should consider:
1. Start measuring enagement now
It's true. Data drives better decision making. Invest early in the ability to capture and interpret marketing analytics. These insights will help you learn more about your customers and how they interact with your message and your products.
Brand impact: Marketing analytics provides you with a distinct understanding of what your customers want and what channels they prefer to receive it.
Marketing impact: The more value you provide customers and prospects, the more loyalty they will have to your brand.
Even if you don't have the bandwidth of resources to act on all these insights, collect them now. The historical insights will be invaluable when you are ready to act.
2. Dig deeper with personas
Early-stage companies are often in a hurry to get to market. While they may invest time in defining the target customer personas, marketers often don't go deep enough.
For example: assume you were bring to market a new cardiac device that was appropriate for certain situations.
By just defining marketing personas as cardiologists, you may be casting a net too wide. Instead include the details about a physician's practice that make them more likely to treat that specific condition.
Brand benefit: Physicians will appreciate your deep understanding of the nuances of their practice, and it will be more likely that you're seen as the expert in that space.
Marketing benefit: By refining these personas, you'll eliminate sales and marketing waste by only targeting those physicians most likely to adopt your product.
3. Mobile is already here. Adopt it.
Many early-stage companies still look at mobile as something that's "around the corner." It's here today, and it can make a huge impact on your business.
Mobile presentation and selling tools lead to more efficient detailing from your reps. Developed properly, they eliminate the calls spent fumbling through folders to find a chart or supporting data. Now with only a few taps, you can quickly get to the materials that make the most impact.
Add analytics to your mobile tools, and you'll indentify the selling best practices that make your best reps...well, the best. Then take this information, and replicate how they approach sales calls. Now you'll have the opportunity to raise the overall performance of your sales team.
Brand impact: Your customers will appreciate your respect for their time and tailored message.
Marketing impact: You'll have a clear view of how your sales team utilizes the tools you've provided. With this data, it's easy to invest more in what works and end-of-life what doesn't.
4. Tap Into Competitve Personalities
Physicians are competive people. They've been competing since undergrad. Combine that with the fact that everyone likes playing games and a unique marketing opportunity presents itself.
Educational games drive message recall. Using educational games that test product or disease, diagnosis and treatment knowledge can be a great way to drive home your marketing message.
Why?
Repeat play. Using public scoreboards or leaderboards, we've seen physicians play games ten or more times to see their name in lights. Considering that each new game attempt exposes the player to your message, message recall will be higher.
Add to this analytics that measures game performance, and your sales reps will know exactly what to focus on during the next visit.
Brand impact: Your physician will appreciate time spent on value-add discussions rather than information he or she is already familiar with.
Marketing impact: You'll ensure your most important messages are driven home to customers and prospects.
What other early-stage tactics have you seen successful with biomed companies?
We're happy to announce we received two more awards in the Best Shorts Competition for our pharma marketing work. One Award of Merit was awarded in the short documentary category. The other Award of Merit is in the directing category. Both awards were for work with client Acorda Therapeutics on the Southern California MS Challenge Walk Documentary.
The Best Shorts Competition recognizes film professionals who demonstrate exceptional achievement in craft and creativity, and those who produce standout entertainment or contribute to profound social change. Entries are judged by highly qualified professionals in the film industry.
The Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary is about Team OptiMiStic, a group of seven women, five of whom have multiple sclerosis (MS), who walk 50 miles in three days during the 2009 MS Challenge Walk. The documentary follows their progress from Carlsbad to San Diego, California, sharing their personal stories and demonstrating how teamwork and friendship walk hand in hand.
The documentary can be viewed on the I Walk Because website, which was developed by StudioPMG to help its client and movie sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics, increase awareness for the MS Walks fundraising events and provide a forum for people to share their MS experience with others.
You don't have to be a ringleader to better engage physicians at medical conventions. With some good interactives and a compelling experience, they'll engage you.
Boston Scientific tasked StudioPMG with creating an interactive educational game to help physicians better understand the advantages of using its new product technology as an option in reducing chronic neuropathic pain in the back, trunk or limbs. Dubbed the SmoothWave™ Challenge, this large touchscreen experience combined educational content, interactive gaming and a leaderboard to increase engagement with physicians.
The SmoothWave Challenge is played on a large touchscreen display presenting an illustration of a patient’s spine and nerves that transmit pain signals. Physicians play the game by touching a contact that sends an electrical impulse to mitigating the pain impulse before it reaches the brain. A metered scoreboard (indicating the amount of pain the “patient” feels) shows how the player is doing during the game.
The game has two modes meant to demonstrate the improved coverage and effectiveness of SmoothWave Technology over conventional neuromodulation. In conventional mode, fewer pain impulses are intercepted, resulting in a higher level of pain and a lower score. In SmoothWave mode, the player can intercept more pain impulses and yield a lower level of pain and a higher score for the player.
The physicians with the highest scores are placed on a leaderboard, demonstrating their expertise to the other physicians at the convention and instilling a sense of competition among them.
Take a look at the video below to see the game in action.
If you've worked in product management or marketing for a pharma or medical device company, you likely understand the legal and regulatory review process.
Introducing PMG Cartoons.
Here's the first in a series of fun little comics that celebrate marketing within these industries. If you like it, click to the left and pass it along.
Have an idea for a cartoon yourself? Let us know, and join in the laughs.
In the first post of this eight-part marketing analytics series, I discussed the importance of multichannel analytics in creating a more comprehensive view of customers. In the next few posts, we’ll dig into the different types of insights you can develop from multichannel marketing analytics and their benefit to marketers.
Behavioral Analytics – The Foundation
Behavioral analytics looks at patterns of consumer behavior (defined for the purposes of this article as either customers and prospects) and how those patterns can impact future behaviors.
Put simply, how consumers interact with today has a lot to say about how they will engage tomorrow. What interactions am I referring to? Interactions are events such as user gestures in a mobile application, participation in one more experiences at a convention, how far a consumer progresses through a video online, or which case study or brochure a customer downloads.
When marketers layer these data points together, it can shed significant light on an individuals’ preferences and interests—a key factor in determining future behavior, creating more accurate segmentation and driving better campaign results.
Unfortunately, the broad adoption of web analytics packages like Google Analytics has led many marketers to believe that behavioral analytics are solely web-based—tracking anonymous click-throughs, page exits and aggregate goals as the measures of success. Sure, these web-based tools have their place—even we use Google Analytics for some data analysis. But the real power of behavioral analytics comes when you measure the behavior patterns of individual named consumers across multiple channels—web, mobile, kiosks, games and others—to build a 360-degree view of your customers and prospects.
Example: Behavioral Analytics in Pharma and Medical Device Marketing
With the accelerating adoption of digital and mobile within the pharmaceuticals and medical device industries, many marketers are looking toward analytics to optimize their marketing ROI and selling strategies.
Here’s an example:
A pharmaceutical company invites physicians to a convention to learn about current products and compounds in their pipeline. They re-badge each visitor as they enter the exhibit. As physicians engage with various interactive experiences and kiosks, their interactions with content are recorded—gestures on touch screens, scores from educational games, how much time is spent with current and pipeline data, literature fulfillment requests, etc.
By combining the interactions of each physician across exhibits, marketers build a much better understanding of the type of visit that can help salespeople add more value. Now they can move from simply a “trade show lead” to providing strategic recommendations about how the salesperson can engage most effectively.
Prior to the sales call, the rep personalizes his or her iPad content to match the preferences and interests identified during the convention. As the salesperson shares content with the physician, gestures, content and the time spent with individual pieces of content is measured. These additional insights help marketing refine the message, offer and education materials to increase revenue with this physician and increase their loyalty to the brand.
Better yet, by applying some statistics, marketers can determine which sales behavior and/or marketing content are correlated to the highest revenue contribution. This means being able to eliminate what doesn’t work and double-down on what really moves the revenue needle.
More advanced multichannel analytics solutions integrate directly with existing CRM platforms to ensure that these insights are usable across the sales organizations. They also provide multiple reporting and dashboard options for executive management to visualize high-level trends and key behaviors of their target market.
In the next post in the series, we’ll talk about attitudinal insights and it’s the benefits to marketers.
Think about your own business, customers and prospects. How much behavioral data could you be capturing and optimizing for? How might behavioral analytics improve your marketing returns? Leave your comments below—I’d love to hear from you.
According to a study by eMarketer.com, online ad spending in the U.S. is projected to climb from 25.8 billion in 2010, to 44.5 billion dollars by 2015.
Marketers are increasingly reaching customers online by leveraging mobile and web applications. Digital is even infiltrating formerly offline channels like print, retail and live events in the form of scannable barcodes, RFID tracking and interactive kiosks and displays. B2B marketers that rely heavily upon mobile devices for education and selling—such as pharmaceuticals and medical device companies—are increasingly looking for ways to develop a more comprehensive view of their customers.
Yet with all of these new data-rich digital marketing channels in play, many companies still struggle with integrating data across channels to extract the insights they need to truly know their customers.
The Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2011, by Ecoconsultancy, studied the use of multichannel analytics across more than 800 clients from 2008 until 2010. According to these results, more than three quarters of businesses surveyed admit they have no current procedure for collecting and leveraging multichannel analytics.
Many companies are spending millions on mobile and web campaigns, but without any data or strategy to back-up that investment. As mobile applications and digital marketing channels continue to grow, it is paramount for businesses to integrate data across these and other channels.
Earlier this month, Nielsen, the leader in audience measurement, recognized the growing need for multichannel analytics when it acquired Marketing Analytics, Inc., a marketing analytics software firm. Founder of the company, Arthur Nielsen, had the prescient knowledge to once say, “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness."
Seeing the Light: True Multichannel Analytics Solutions
Customers interact with brands in different ways. It’s the combination of all of the channels -- web, mobile, live-events, retail and more, and how customers and prospects interact with them, that gives a 360-degree view of the customer.
To fill some of these gaps, many companies are investing in multichannel analytics software solutions that integrate with existing CRM, sales and other platforms to provide a 360-degree view of their customers. Multichannel analytics solutions will aggregate data for each customer and channel and deliver several useful categories of insights. The key is to utilize uses data and historical information to provide forward-looking analytics in these six areas:
1. Behavioral: Captures behavioral data in gestures, clicks, time spent with content to learn how customers interact with marketing content.
2. Attitudinal: Integrates demographic and other insights provided through surveys and response channels to provide a glimpse into the customer's mindset and attitudes to future products and services.
3. Propensity: Uses historical purchase and survey data to predict the likelihood of purchases and attrition.
4. Segmentation: Builds customer profiles based on demographics and user behavior and enables increased targeting and selling accuracy.
5. Geocoding: Provides location-based information to enable custom marketing messages based on audience location, language or regulatory issues.
6. Lead Scoring: Assigns value to previous customer behaviors and determines which customers have the highest (or lowest) probability of buying.
By incorporating multichannel insights, companies can gain the insights they need to increase marketing ROI and sales effectiveness. In subsequent posts, we’ll talk about each of these analytics and why they are important.
What is your experience in using analytics to improve your decision-making? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Photo credit: griraffe
It's always great to get feedback from your peers. When you win peer-reviewed awards on behalf of a client, it's even better. In June, we won three awards for our pharma marketing work with Acorda Therapeutics.
Stevie Award - Best Pharmaceutical Website
StudioPMG won a Stevie Award for Best Pharmaceutical Website. Acorda tasked StudioPMG to update the branding and messaging of the site, including a redesign to target Acorda’s core audiences, integrate with its PR and investor relations tools and present a robust grant application system to the community. StudioPMG also developed the website’s design look and feel, user interface, user experience, content and functionality. The site can be viewed at www.acorda.com.
Bronze Telly Award - Documentary
StudioPMG was awarded a Bronze Telly for its Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary. The documentary is about Team OptiMiStic, a group of seven women, five of whom have multiple sclerosis (MS), who walk 50 miles in three days during the 2009 MS Challenge Walk. The documentary follows their progress from Carlsbad to San Diego, California, sharing their personal stories and demonstrating how teamwork and friendship walk hand in hand.
The Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary can be viewed on the I Walk Because” website at http://www.iwalkbecause.org/, which was developed by StudioPMG to help its client and movie sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics, increase awareness for the MS Walks fundraising events and provide a forum for people to share their MS experience with others.
Bronze Telly Award for Public Relations
StudioPMG also won a Bronze Telly in the public relations category for its “Employee Profiles" video content on the Acorda.com website. The “Employee Profiles” campaign is a series of videos introducing Acorda employees to the company’s web audience in an effort to show the company's nationwide presence.
The short videos showcase the human side of Acorda, its passion for and commitment to the patient, and the ability for the employees to bring their diverse expertise together toward the goal of bringing remarkable new therapies to patients and physicians. The “Employee Profiles” videos can be viewed at http://www.acorda.com/About/OurEmployees.aspx.