Catalyzing Change in a Bad Economy
Shar VonBoskirk over at the Forrester Blog has an interesting post today noting that “the down economy is actually the *right* time to catalyze marketing change.” I couldn’t agree more, especially now when the technologies available to enable such change are so vast. In fact, the ability to leverage web marketing, email, and social media (as is covered mostly in her post) make it both easy and cost effective to do so. This is especially true in healthcare, given the fact that many of these techniques are still emerging.
As I noted in my earlier post, 9 ways to do more with less, something as simple as testing campaigns through electronic mediums first can prove to be an extremely valuable exercise in determining what kind of effectiveness you can expect when making a bigger investment in launching a broader electronic or print campaign. While monitoring social media is certainly a great way to get a sense for what your target customer base is looking for, in healthcare we don’t necessarily have that as a tool in all cases.
That being said, the growth of both physician and patient use of the web has created opportunities to engage with your customer base that was not prevalant as recently as 18 months ago. We are now starting to see the use of web and email in the space that drives enough traffic and use to capture a statistically significant sample size for getting this insight. What’s even more exciting, is that those results will help indicate whether the entire initiative can move to an electronic format – dramatically reducing the total cost of execution and lowering the cost of customer acquisition in many cases.
Companies that use these tools (email, social media, web) are creating an opportunity for themselves to engage customers in a way that will determine how they do business in the future, both in terms of the medium, the message, and the metrics that can be captured. And as Shar points out, exploring these techniques is even less risky than just doing the “same ol” and can drive innovation during a time where many marketing orgs can benefit.
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