Using Big Data in Real Time Marketing

Dr Andree Bates

Real Time Marketing’ is marketing based on up-to-date – real time – events. You may remember Oreo’s “You can still dunk in the dark” social media post from the 2013 Super Bowl power outage. Oreo’s social media team’s fast thinking resulted in over 10,000 Retweets and 20,000 Likes on Facebook.

That’s an example of using a live event (the Super Bowl) and moving quickly when an opportunity presents itself to stand out from all the other ads and increase engagement.

Other examples of real time marketing include:
   •   Triggered emails (emails that send when users take a specific action)
   •   Social media engagement (customer service responses)
   •   Coverage for breaking social media events
   •   Live event promotion (tradeshow or conference coverage)
   •   Location-based deals (deals that appear when a user is at a specific location)

So instead of creating a marketing plan in advance and executing it according to a fixed schedule, real time marketing creates a strategy focused on current, relevant trends and immediate feedback from customers.

Done well, this approach can be a powerful boost to performance. Done poorly, it can alienate the customer because it crosses the line from helpful to an invasion of privacy.

Let’s look at the elements of real time marketing and consider how it can be applied in Pharma.

1. Speed
This one is obvious given it is called ‘real time’. It’s about being able to respond to something at the moment of engagement, such as the Oreo example, or responding to a complaint via Twitter.It can be very powerful in both a positive or negative way. A quick response to a customer complaint is a positive example, and I saw this from Jet Blue. A customer tweeted about how frustrated they were about their flight being delayed. Jet Blue responded with up-to-date information and sympathy for the situation.
I experienced a negative example. I was flying to Hong Kong, and stretched and felt an unfamiliar lump on my back. As soon as I got to the hotel I checked and found a mole I had not seen before. Like anyone, I immediately Googled ‘melanoma’ to compare that with my new mole. Within minutes I got a text on my mobile phone that invited me to a talk on melanoma – near my home 6000 miles away. Since I had not entered any details about myself, I could see that Google had connected the information I entered using Chrome and merged it to form a very detailed picture about me and sold that information to the people doing the talk. This all happened within minutes.

Unlike the customer-oriented tweet from Jet Blue, this felt like an invasion of privacy and annoyed me so much that I deleted Chrome from my computer and changed search engines. It’s a great example of poor real time marketing.

2. Personalization, Customer Service and 24/7 Treatment

When you personalize the content, as Jet Blue did for that individual customer, you are able to have a one to one interaction and tailor the message. That’s powerful and creates loyalty. As you know, people leave behind vast amounts of personal data – such as browsing history in Google and social media activity – which all builds a detailed picture. When used well, in a helpful and valuable way, you can use this information to drive strong engagement and loyalty.

In the Pharmaceutical world, the market is moving to improved patient outcomes and as such, the drug itself is only a small part of the ecosystem. Currently, we can monitor a patient’s biophysical signals 24/7 and use this to help the patient improve. For example, many drugs use chip-in-a-pill technology to ensure that patients take their medication as prescribed, and it monitors their condition.

With advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics we can mine electronic medical health records, diagnostic results, medication history as well as genomic, proteomic and gene expression data to identify early signs of a condition in order to assist people get treatment faster. In the UK, we’re doing this using AI with a specific neurological condition that has traditionally been diagnosed too late; we can now get them the medical help they need. We can also mine this data to identify what combination of variables mean a patient is more likely to respond to treatment.

Additionally, treatments can be tailored to the individual with remote monitoring using the ‘Internet of Things’ (IOT.) We are already merging IOT data from our clients’ devices with their other data in order to improve healthcare. This personalization will only become more important for drug brands in the future.

3. Relevance

You may see a brand desperately trying to cash in on an event, but clearly the event is irrelevant to the brand. This only makes the brand look desperate, even irrelevant, and out of touch with its values. This was seen when the latest royal baby was born. So many brands tried to become relevant to the event, given it was getting so much press. However, if you are not relevant to something and there is no obvious way, don’t prostitute your brand.

4. Omni-channel Optimization

With the integration of data from all channels – including offline ones like TV – we can automate data capture, data integration and analytics to offer insights to marketers in real time that they can use. In fact, AI can predict who and what will create even greater engagement and reaction. This can be used in Pharma for clinical trial recruitment, sales rep discussions with their physicians, informing nurses about patient needs, filling scripts, enabling patient communities to connect, and much more.

Adding value is about delivering something that the audience/customers want, when they want it.

You may wonder how you can incorporate real time marketing. How do you begin?

    1.   Get The Technology Infrastructure In Place. You need to combine all the data you have (structured, unstructured, semi-structured), clean it, and integrate it into a uniform format (in real time). Next, add a temporal element to it and apply appropriate AI analytics to the real time data in order to give you the insights you need. You require a technology that’s scalable and modular so you can get going with the data you have, but when you add new formats of data and new functionality, that can be programmed into the system also. Without being able to integrate everything together, you will end up with platforms of siloed data, and that is not going to give you all the power you need.  
   2.   Move Your Real Time Marketing from One Social Media Channel (Twitter is the most commonly used RTM channel) to multiple channels from all data sources. In Pharma, this can be in CRM systems, web content automation software and more.  
   3.   Optimize. Don’t be scared of AI algorithms. Take advantage of them. However, AI is not magic; you need the right data, the right algorithms (one size does not fit all data) and the right business decisions to be planned and made from the results. It is sophisticated, and as with anything sophisticated, you need to have the right team doing the strategy, the AI algorithms, the data cleaning and the programming. The algorithms learn with more data, but adding new forms or data and new functionality requires work. Keep improving.

Studies show that when conducted properly, real time marketing can provide better customer experience and customer engagement, improved customer retention, increased sales, and better brand perception.
If you’re ready to see how you can incorporate real time marketing into your Pharma brand, Eularis.com will be happy to have a confidential discussion with you.

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To learn more about how Eularis can help you find the best solutions to the challenges faced by healthcare teams, please drop us a note or email the author at abates@eularis.com.

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Using Big Data in Real Time Marketing

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