8 Steps to Omni-Channel Marketing Success using AI

Statistics show that 60% of adults use at least two devices every day. Whether it’s timing, the task or desire for a larger screen/keyboard, it is a common phenomenon to start a search on your Smartphone and finish the task later on your desktop. Cross-device connection isn’t that difficult these days, yet it’s a powerful customer-centric approach that meets your customer where they are in their customer journey.


For example, your potential customer starts her search on her Smartphone, where she sees an ad for your company. Later on, she logs onto her desktop where she immediately sees the ad for your company again. The problem with this approach is that your potential customer has already visited this website and is at another stage of the customer journey. This recently happened to me and it’s probably happened to you too. I would have preferred a value-laden white paper or another piece of valuable content, and I felt they missed an opportunity to help me further down the sales funnel.

As a marketer, your real goal is to provide your customers with a seamless experience irrespective of device, channel and content i.e. always on, always right, always valuable omni-channel marketing.

A Valuable Opportunity
As you know, the customer journey typically consists of 20-30 touch points with a brand before prescribing or purchasing. Successful marketers add value to the customer at each touch point – no matter the device – and provide a strong and cohesive experience. The technology is available to add contextually relevant and personal experiences based on the activity and needs of the individual. Yet, much research shows that only between 23%-39% of marketers feel confident that they have the ability to recognize where the customer is on their journey. That’s not a lot. If you put that question to Pharmaceutical marketers, I suspect the number would be even lower. Very few marketers from any industry feel confident that they are delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. And, as a marketer, you need to understand not only the customer journeys but how to influence that journey valuably while helping your prospect become a customer.

So what does it take to maintain your connection with your prospective customer and do it well?

1. Map your customer’s individual digital journeys
Every customer (be it patients, physicians or payers) has a different customer journey on their way to you. The touch points and sequence vary, and people get through this journey in their own unique way. However, out of the hundreds of millions of people, there will be groups that follow similar paths with similar viewpoints at the same time; so, some of your segments may well be segments of one.
It sounds like a difficult task, and it is, but with Artificial Intelligence (AI) it is possible to create personalized experiences. We are already combining our clients’ multiple platforms, and other data, and enabling the analysis of trillions of unique digital journeys and engagement levels throughout that journey. The result is that our clients are able to provide value to their customers in a seamless way.

2. Segment your customers into divisions of similar journeys and needs
Some people can be grouped into like segments. Some cannot. Use AI to group the segments; that way, like is being grouped with like rather than an arbitrary human idea of what appears to be like but is essentially not. AI is the only way to do this effectively because it’s the only way to harness and sort the data for actionable decision making.

3. Understand your customers’ segments and their behaviors
By examining the different journeys, you gain a unique perspective on your customers. This allows you to look at the customer as a person rather than a patient, or doctor. Their unique behaviors can offer insights into what specific value they may want. And AI can analyze that for you so that you create the right types of content.

4. Create your strategic objectives and customer-focused strategy
Strategy and objectives should be at the heart of any project. However, I see a lot of digital marketing done in a piecemeal way. Developing strategy requires an examination of the current situation in terms of products, competitors, customers, market environment, etc. Once you have a well-documented, situational analysis, then you can plan a strong strategy and a strategic digital road map to achieve the strategic objectives.

5. Ensure you have the right data
Data is always at the heart of what can be done. In omni-channel marketing, it is the lifeblood of the approach. This means all data that you have, as well as other data gained from leveraging the right partnerships, must be integrated, standardized and cleaned, and the temporal aspects added to that to understand sequences of events (otherwise it is just a sea of data). A strong data discovery and analysis has to take place to ensure that you have the right data to create what you need.

6. Set up strong processes
One of the challenges we see with business processes in Pharma is the siloed nature of many companies. To do this effectively requires a cross-team effort, and with some Eularis clients who are doing this well, it involves the CMO, CIO, CTO and their respective teams.

7. Set up AI analytics to create the best of what you have
Ensure you have AI analytics in place to provide the insights needed to create the best message, touch points and sequence analysis. This requires preparation and planning. Every organization needs the appropriate AI algorithms to capture the information and combine the data to pull out what they need. This part is probably the most important but cannot be done without the right building blocks in place – strategy, data, etc.

8. Ensure your technology is in place to deliver
Position the technology to deliver the optimized experience in a seamless, automated way. For example, all companies have a CRM and most have an automated online marketing system. These are useful starting points. They can help develop a baseline for your data and guide you into asking strategic questions in order to establish the right AI algorithms for your organization. The plan for the technology integration is also critical and has to be in place to accomplish this successfully. Part of the problem we see within the Pharma industry is that too many vendors are focusing only on their own profits rather than their clients, and their clients’ customer needs, which means they aren’t sharing data.

In today’s hyper connected world, data sharing between vendors and companies helps everyone. Vendors who won’t share data with analytics companies are preventing growth and limiting their client’s success because the technology has to integrate with APIs and algorithms in the CRM and web automation software to automate the processes. When the technology works together, marketing can be automated and the right content identified, delivered to the right person in the right channel in the right sequence for the right next step, all of which contributes to the purpose of achieving strategic objectives.