The Informed Marketer—intellectually curious by nature—strives to utilize data and facts to inform their insights and marketing ideas. This blog will reveal our passion and personality toward creating a world of Informed Marketers™ and we invite you to join the conversation.
Do You Know Your Customers’ Mobile Habits? Only 18% of Marketers Do.
In June, Chief Marketer released a study entitled “2011 Mobile Marketing Survey”. Its intent was to understand the knowledge that US marketers had on the mobile usage habits of their target audience. Only 18% surveyed claimed to “have studied their habits directly and had a clear picture of their mobile use.” The other 82% either made assumptions or did not know. While this study is general industry focused versus healthcare industry focused, a marketing target comprised of physicians, nurses, educators, patients and caregivers would likely fit pretty closely to this outcome.
There are two takeaways I will share that healthcare marketers need to think about:
#1) Start collecting usage habits and preferences of your target audience(s)
In your quest to increase the names in your HCP or patient database, make sure you ask what their communication preference is, including mobile. Airlines do this. Banks do this. Why not your healthcare brand? I was at a Forrester analyst meeting earlier this year where one analyst was blown away at the topic opt-in panel within the relationship marketing tool, Appature Nexus. There is an automated way to understand if this medium works for a particular customer segment.
#2) Integrate mobile into your overall campaigns.
Given that US marketers are surpassing $1B in mobile advertising spend in 2011 per eMarketer , it is critical to ensure that mobile campaigns are being integrated into your overall relationship marketing program. Currently, most brands have disconnected mobile campaigns. Ultimately this will not create an integrated HCP or patient experience, so if you are currently running (or plan to run in 2012) mobile campaigns, make sure the messaging and brand elements are tied across channels.
Please comment if you have other ideas on how to best integrate mobile into your healthcare marketing plan. I am sure those marketers working on 2012 would very much appreciate it!
Pharma Marketing Needs to Evolve: Pixels and Pills Interview with Kabir Shahani
Kabir Shahani Thinks Pharma Needs a New Marketing Standard from Zemoga on Vimeo.
This week, Appature attended the eXL Digital Pharma West conference in San Francisco, CA. Presenting during the conference was Appature’s CEO, Kabir Shahani who spoke about Appature’s passion for the Informed Marketer™ and the impending changes in the healthcare marketing space.
During the conference, Kabir was given the opportunity to speak with Pixels and Pills, an online publication dedicated to exploring digital innovations in Pharma and Life Sciences. In the interview above, Kabir emphasizes that in order to evolve with the shifting healthcare marketing industry, it’s key for healthcare marketers to enable themselves with relationship marketing technology like Appature Nexus. Kabir explains that as the average Pharma sales rep spends less time with physicians, healthcare marketers are becoming more pressured to seek other ways to drive effective marketing programs. Kabir sees this as an immense opportunity to use the vast amount of data available to healthcare marketers coupled with a relationship marketing technology to discover new methods to digitally personalize the HCP and patient experience.
From Sales Reps to Mobile Marketing, HCP Marketing is Pushed to Adopt New Strategies
A survey last year of nearly 11,000 healthcare professionals via eMarketer concluded that 12% of specialists and 14% of primary care physicians expect to spend increasingly less time with Pharma drug reps in the next six months. “I think sales reps are often a valuable source of information for doctors. However, there is an increasing amount of scrutiny of the doctor and sales rep relationship. It’s going to become harder and harder for reps to get access to doctors. That whole model is in jeopardy,” said Dr. Fred Tobis, MD, a cardiologist and healthcare consultant in Seattle, WA.
The pharmaceutical industry spends upwards of $11 billion on various promotions to healthcare professionals. According to eMarketer, $6 billion of that account for Sales reps detailing costs. “Looking very carefully at the pharmaceutical industry, more often than not, very expensive drugs are used when perfectly alternative options are available because the rep has detailed the drug and has left samples,” explains Dr. Tobis, MD.
In 2010, the Pharma industry cut 43,334 jobs. With fewer sales reps, brand and marketing managers are forced to invest in alternative channels to reach HCPs. “It’s extremely difficult for Pharma to come up with anything that’s been as successful and actionable as sales reps,” says Dr. Tobis, MD.
Healthcare marketers are beginning to move away from spending precious budget dollars on sales reps, and have begun investing in emerging marketing channels such as mobile and online advertising. From 2009 to 2010 alone, mobile medical applications increased a staggering 850%.
In a webinar regarding emerging marketing channels in the pharmaceutical industry, Executive Vice President of Appature, Mark Karch, emphasizes that healthcare marketers need to provide value by using an emerging channel, effective messaging, insightful data and an enabling technology to intelligently reach the HCP.
To learn more, please view the rest of Mark Karch’s webinar: Emerging Marketing Channels and Relationship Marketing Solutions to Reach Healthcare Professionals.
Lead The Evolution of Brand Marketing
A recent article noted that healthcare and pharma advertisers’ US online ad spend is expected to rise from $1.03B in 2010 to $1.86B in 2015 (source: eMarketer). For 2011, the prediction is an increase of 13% over 2010. While online ad spend is still around 4-5% of total ad spend, the increases are astonishing and are now in line with other industry verticals. Who said the healthcare industry is slow to adopt new technologies?
This means it’s time to get serious: Online advertising, social media, web properties, and relationship marketing initiatives were essentially test and learns that ancillary marketing departments worked on.
The “Skunk Works” era is over and two things are going to happen:
1. Accountability: Spending a bigger portion of the overall marketing budget will drive more scrutinization and demand for ROI analysis. The good news is that there is a ton of data involved in these programs to help justify expansion or modification. The bad news is that another data silo is created and is not being folded into the overall marketing mix analysis for true integrated marketing.
2. Organizational Change: I don’t mean layoffs, I mean “change”. I think “Digital Marketing” and “eMarketing” departments will fade away in just a few years and be integrated with the brand teams. The best brand marketers will be multi-skilled with experience in professional, consumer, channel, payer and medium. Bottom line, the marketing teams that get this integrated first, all else being equal, will win.
If you are a healthcare marketer in any of these departments, invite in some of your peers from the CPG, entertainment, or high tech industries, and have them tell you how they measure success with new mediums and how they have adjusted their organization to maximize it. It’s your accountability to drive this change for your brand. Your company is counting on it.
Twitter in Healthcare
We hope every healthcare marketer in the industry finds this useful, whether social media is part of your responsibilities or not. Is Twitter right for your brand?
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Twitter in Healthcare by Relationship Marketing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.appatureinc.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at Relationship Marketing.
Design for Today – Why Less is Often More
Everyday, we’re bombarded with images and messages from the moment we wake up until we go to bed (and some of us in our sleep – I’ve been known to have an advertising nightmare here and there…). With so much information being thrown in our direction all the time, it gets hard to decipher a lot of the intent and meaning behind them. As a minimalist myself, and an avid designer for over a decade, I have a personal affinity and appreciation for the simplistic forms of design. And there is a reason for that: less is more!
“Whether it’s a logo, a magazine page, or a website, sometimes the things you don’t design are more powerful than the things you do. This is often achieved by the use of negative space. In this article, we’ll teach you what negative space is, how it works, and what benefits it can add to your own designs along with some examples to help you along the way.”
The truth is we don’t have 36 hours in the day or time to read over every detail of everything we come across. The more technical we become, the more access we have to a myriad of information and the key to processing it all is getting to the point. The faster we can analyze the data to see if anything resonates with us, the more informed we can be about our interests and our choices.
What this means from a healthcare marketing and design point of view is that the simpler you make your message (while maintaining your visual aesthetic) the more people you’ll reach. Simple doesn’t mean boring, or bland. It means clearly and succinctly communicating your message for maximum reach. An effective design’s focus is to bring the message and point of communication to the forefront, rather than clutter the viewer’s eyes and mind with a sensory overload of images and content which will ultimately lead to disinterest. Simple design can be, as mentioned above, achieved with negative space, typography structure and layout, color usage, and other design effects to create a setting in which the viewer is able to accurately receive your important messaging.
With simple design, you control where the reader’s eyes go, the content they see first, and ultimately what their first impression of your material is. Remember, you only have once chance to make a first impression!
Below are links to great examples of simple designs that are sure to inspire you!
Why It’s Important To Know Your Audience and Tailor Your Messaging
I have spent the last ten years of my life making a living calling and e-mailing complete strangers. So, I am in a unique position to see how people respond to various types of sales and marketing outreach. Last week – during a bout of daily cold-calling – I received two reactions that can only best be described as polar opposites on the reaction scale. One person said, “Collin, I’m so glad you called,” while another person said, “I don’t want to talk about your marketing tool. I am in analytics now. Never call here again.” Why the varied reactions to the Appature Nexus technology? The product didn’t change in five minutes nor did my sales skills or personal charisma. I certainly know the message didn’t change – which was precisely the problem. If I had known that there had been a role change and started out my second call talking about how our technology enables better and easier data exchanges between the marketing and analytics teams, perhaps the call would have had a better outcome.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes people respond to both oral and written communications in the way they do (it’s how I try to make my creative writing degree pay off). Why do some people e-mail me back and say they would love to talk? Why do others tell me to take them off my list? What makes me ignore e-mails in my in-box? What makes me forward others to my wife to showcase what a great deal something is? Recently, a prospect asked me a question that clearly characterizes where the healthcare industry is right now in terms of its philosophical approach to the non-personal selling channels our technology enables and helps to optimize. He asked, “So how do doctors really respond to e-mails? Reps are expensive but I think doctors like talking to them too much to ever read an e-mail.” The answer to that question is a very qualified, “It depends.” Doctors will ignore e-mail communications that are not relevant and context-specific.
There is nothing magical about the human or the digital touch. The digital communication that adds no value is going to be ignored, deleted or unfriended – just like the rep who adds no value, will see his face time with a doctor decrease down to nothing. I have learned the most important thing about all types of communications is to know your audience and tailor your messaging accordingly. (There is a reason I focus on the economic value of a deal when I pitch dinner plans to my wife instead of talking about how delicious grass-fed beef is.)
That’s why I love selling the Appature Nexus relationship marketing technology – it enables healthcare marketers to get a comprehensive 360° view of their audience and communicate to them in an effective and measurable way.
21st Century Healing: How Patients Find Healthcare Providers
Appature created this fun infographic to highlight ways patients find their healthcare providers and make their healthcare decisions. We hope this infographic provides informed marketers some valuable and insightful healthcare marketing information.
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21st Century Healing: How Patients Leverage Technology to Find Healthcare Providers by Healthcare Marketing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.appatureinc.com
5 (Obvious) Lessons Learned Re-Launching Our Website
Let’s get right to it.
#1) Have a marketing objective.
We needed our site to have a specific purpose. Accordingly, we ensured that this website redesign tightly followed our lead generation marketing objective. For that reason, we moved our website from an “online sales brochure” to a “lead nurture machine”.
#2) Leverage your market research to drive design.
We know that visitors who come to our site expect (A) clear benefits, (B) product information, (C) customer success stories and (D) resources to learn more. This drove our site’s design versus using trendy and flashy gimmicks.
#3) Create easy and obvious opt-in paths.
We provided several easy ways for our website visitors to opt-in to learn more. There is no “golden rule” for what content you put in front of and behind a lead form. My advice would be to design forms that require the least amount of information from the visitor that is also the most critical for the marketer to know and segment on.
#4) The design should extend your brand character.
Customers refer to Appature as “a breath of fresh air” and “surprisingly simple” because we nurture, we teach and we take complexity and make it simple, fun and valuable. Therefore, we made sure that those brand characteristics were strongly integrated into our redesign.
#5) Create a great team.
Having a talented team never hurts, so, I have to give a huge shout-out to Methodologie here in Seattle for designing and building our “lead nurture machine”: www.appatureinc.com. Thanks guys!
This picture shows all five lessons learned:
Prescriptions Most Marketed to Doctors
Appature’s customers often ask us about top drug sales, allocation of marketing budgets, and typical attitudes of Healthcare Professionals and patients. We designed this infographic as a simple and fun way to answer some of these typical healthcare marketing questions.
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Prescriptions Most Marketed To Doctors by Appature Nexus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.appatureinc.com
