New, interesting digital technologies, platforms and applications can keep many marketers chasing after the latest shiny object. There’s always an interesting new platform to explore and you can collect more data than ever before. There’s customer tracking, automated advertising, smart email, blending of physical and digital channels using wearables and the Internet of Things (IOT), and native advertising. Then there’s the personalized customization of content and design, social media platforms and tracking, content management systems; the list goes on and on. Yet, with all this capability, there is something missing. Too many Pharma marketers are still focusing on metrics like number of followers, retweets, likes, and of course, engagement. While these are fine, they don’t give you visibility into your most effective marketing efforts so that you can tie action to outcome and truly develop a strategy.
You may be familiar with marketing automation software that helps you create personas and prescribe rules to them. This is a great starting point for getting to know your customers. However, when it comes to marketing, your customers are individuals; they may have elements of those personas, but the reality isn’t as linear as the software may indicate. Personalization and customization based on behavior and results are easy to do now. People want relevant information when they need it – be it via a digital channel or a traditional one. It’s critical that marketers understand when, where, how and why their audiences are going to the places they are for information and interaction, and engage based on that.
The challenge I see is that although many marketers are buying great software tools that can create interesting, interactive online experiences for their customers (hopefully) while engaging their customers (hopefully) with social media and all the online channels their customers are using, there are some critical and fundamental flaws in numerous Pharma digital strategy teams. For example, you’re probably aware of all the Hackathons or Grants4apps that help fund digital healthcare projects. These and other initiatives offer tremendous opportunities to expand the base of knowledge and innovation. It’s great that companies are using different approaches in an effort to really be customer-centric; however, they run the risk of being very fragmented. It feels like many teams are trying a lot of things to see if they work but not really underpinning it with a well-planned, cohesive strategy.
The key is in the word — strategy!
Four Core Areas Where Pharma Digital Strategy Teams Could Improve Their Performance:
1. Think through the optimal data digital teams should be accessing in order to provide the sales and marketing teams, and the commercial teams. What do they need to know to achieve maximum customer engagement, revenue and profit? We now have access to big data online. In a single minute we have a huge amount of data created in social media networks alone. In fact, 90% of the world’s data now was created in the past year. How much data on your therapy area or brand is created in a day? Or one week? This is a huge opportunity to really take advantage of big data. If used properly, we now have one big market research project going on in real-time, 24/7. We are already creating data mining applications to take all text data from social media discussions, write AI algorithms to analyze it, and put a host of constantly evolving insights into a dashboard that analyzes it all in real-time. Then this can be integrated into your big data integration engine easily (if you have one; if you don’t, speak with me about getting a plan to get that sorted). When you mix the strategy with the big data and the opportunity, and add AI, you can do so much more than most companies in the Pharma space have even considered. Things you could know with just this social media analysis tool are:
◦ determine who are real influencers
◦ predict future influencers
◦ know what it is about your brand/s that is hindering uptake
◦ perceive threats to your brand
◦ gain insight into your competitors
◦ improve brand perception and engagement
◦ understand what caused any spikes in traffic and predict what you need to do if it is a potential problem brewing
◦ know who may be thinking of moving to a competitor
◦ know what content your customers are more engaged with (and by combining this with your other data, you can also strengthen the details on who should get what content to move them up the adoption curve
◦ spot emerging trends
2. Integrate the siloed data companies have from all the separate tools – e.g. Veeva, Salesforce, Marketo, and Radian6, IoT data, device sensor data (including needle sensor data for injectibles), etc. Each tool is in a silo and the data from all the tools are not integrated well enough to provide a 360 degree view of the customer when this 360 degree view should be one of the core responsibilities of the digital teams. Admittedly, this is not a quick easy task. Eularis was recently tasked with helping create the blueprint for the integration of data for a company for numerous platforms, in many countries and numerous brands in each country (many old, some new, and some pre-launch). Then the internal team could take over the blue print and implemented it. The technology to do this varies and it is simply a matter of understanding the companies systems and objectives as to which technology stack is best to use e.g. Hadoop (and do you go for Cloudera or MapR or HortonWorks), Cassandra, MongoDB etc. Eularis have created a map of all the different technology options for each component of the stack. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Each component has pros and cons depending on your data and objectives. However, that is just technology. The really interesting bit comes from what you can do once the data is combined, and that is where we excel. Because people don’t understand the parts, it is easy to get stuck on the technology, but the real differentiator for companies is not just about technically combining all the data (everyone is doing that and you ought to be also) – the real question you should be focusing on is ‘What are my business challenges and goals, and what data combinations and algorithms do I need to solve these and meet the objectives?’
3. Apply advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics to the integrated data with the purpose of providing transformative insights that will change the game for a company so they know not only what their customers want and need, but how to meet that need in a profitable way for their company. By applying Artificial Intelligence to your data, you can pull out critical insights previously unavailable. Think of the way Amazon offers you personalized suggestions based on past behavior. Whether you purchased, put an item in a cart but didn’t purchase or put an item on a wish list, Amazon’s algorithms uses this data to display similar types of offers to you. As Pharma marketers with a strategic eye to your marketing, you realize the power of predicting your customer’s interests, including what aspects of a message will engage and influence a specific physician or patient at specific points in their customer journey, and which sequence of channels and content are needed to move people along the customer journey faster, and keep them committed to your brand. With the client previously mentioned, once the data was integrated, we were able to write unique AI algorithms to solve many of their stated business problems including predicting physician switch, sales rep message suggestions for individual reps and understanding real influencers and not just the traditional KOL’s and a whole lot more.
4. Integrate the insights into a strong strategy that assists the brand teams. As mentioned above, it is about the right content at the right time in the right sequence and channels. This is not the domain of content management systems, as you may think. Content management systems were certainly a great leap forward but the flaw remains that most of them rely on humans to make hypotheses about their customers, and set up their personas based on market research data and simple linear rules. However, by integrating all your data platforms, then applying Artificial Intelligence to gain a 360 degree view of your individual customers, you can understand trillions of different pathways that your individual customers make (that is why you cannot rely on linear algorithms for this as the process is not linear and the data is seriously Big Data.) Also, these algorithms can be updated on-the-fly in real-time as different influencing aspects happen in your customers’ lives. Thereafter, this can be set up to feed into your content management system and your CRM to your reps to deliver real value in all channels.
You can see that when you get excited about basic descriptive things like traffic, likes, length of engagement, retweets and Klout scores, you are not seeing the kind of transformative results that could be achieved if only you integrated this information, real time information on what people are saying, and all the digital tools and applied a real AI strategy to your marketing.
