At a recent Chicago Healthcare Marketing Summit, Jason Rushforth, Oracle Vice President of Industry Solutions for Mobile, Display and Marketing talked about the keys to healthcare marketing. His overall message was that marketers in healthcare need to crawl, walk and then run as fast as possible, because somewhere someone is running faster than you are! He shared Forrester’s estimate that 82% of enterprise marketers don’t have a synchronized view of customer data. The lack of a complete view of customer data is a major problem for marketers. He spoke about how marketers must lean heavily on a fragmented set of tools that separately deal with content, social, customer relationships, campaigns, e-mails and metrics. Targeted customers sense this fragmentation when they get bombarded with messages that are not relevant to who they are and what they want; so they do not convert, they leave and seldom come back.
Jason summarized the seven challenges marketers face in regards to customer engagement:
- Provide a single, consistent content platform accessible to all users, using all channels
- Capture a single source of information and history of audiences
- Create sophisticated web content tools with highly personalized content
- Provide cloud based tools to support enterprise marketing
- Communicate automatically with patients, family members & care-givers
- Measure & report on the effectiveness or promotions & campaigns
- Leverage an integrated social platform that promotes the mission and engagement
After covering these seven challenges in more detail, Jason provided a high-level road-map that will minimize these challenges:
- Scale marketing team efforts and reach – Execute, learn, revise, improve – REPEAT
- Support compliant processes – Workflow, encryption, archiving
- Develop actionable patient, physician and population health profiles – monitor web, forms, emails, activities and behaviors
Jason completed the presentation with the crawl, walk and run analogy:
- Crawl: Email, landing page, PDF content
- Walk: Discover insights, campaigns, launch and promote via social, create custom audiences and convert
- Run: Make it a win-win-win: timely, personal and high-value (like Uber!)
When it comes to healthcare marketing, much like other industries, it is a very competitive landscape. Technology is key in delivering a complete customer view and providing the necessary customer data to help marketers provide timely and relevant thought leadership content. People are inundated with content and if healthcare marketers want to be seen and heard they must deliver personalized content that provides high-value to the recipient.
