Perspectives

Connected data and analytics: The key to brand relevancy

Supporting patients throughout their journey

How can data and analytics deliver a more meaningful experience for patients, health care providers, and the companies trying to engage with them? See how one company is overcoming limitations to better support its customers while optimizing marketing efforts.

A glimpse into meaningful brand engagement

Mari, a 45-year-old woman who has just begun treatment for diabetes, receives an invitation to a patient support group and meal planning tools. Ralph, who has been on his medication for nearly a year, gets information about a program that could lower his out-of-pocket costs. And Aarav, who is concerned that his therapies may no longer be working, is offered a symptom tracker and compliance tips.

These are examples of empathetic and meaningful brand engagements that pharmaceutical leaders strive to deliver to customers throughout their patient journey. But what customers often receive instead are disconnected, one-off interactions that don’t meet their needs and don’t promote long-term relationships or ongoing dialogues with their pharmaceutical providers.

In this article, we’ll explore how a large, global biopharma company is leveraging a data-linking strategy to power insight-generation tools and techniques—and supporting customers through their journey with dynamic personalization and modular content. We’ll also show how this approach to data enables deeper marketing effectiveness measurement and optimization, all while promoting transparency and preserving customer trust.

Customer dialogue depends on data

Pharmaceutical brand leaders are driven to save and improve lives. But to do that, they need to ensure that the right information gets to the right people, on the right channel, at the right time. And that requires being able to answer a series of critical questions about how and where to spend their marketing budgets, including:

  • Which tactics have the biggest impact?
  • Which tactics work best for each customer segment?
  • How do we optimize investment to achieve the highest conversion rates?
  • What content is most effective at guiding patients through their customer journey?
  • How does attribution change over time, amid dynamic marketing efforts?

Answering these questions can prove tricky because the omnichannel ecosystem is often disconnected and episodic, giving marketing leaders limited visibility into what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust. Key limitations include:

  • Siloed marketing and sales functions: “Stovepipe” patient marketing, health care provider (HCP) marketing, and sales functions contribute to disconnected engagement.
  • Data access and integration challenges: Promotional data comes from a variety of sources, making it difficult to identify, integrate, and leverage data from impression to script lift.
  • A priori business rules: Engagement strategies are often based on rigid and simple business rules, making it difficult to identify and optimize engagement drivers.
  • Loosely coupled decisioning and engagement layers: Precision engagement isn’t tied to a robust decisioning layer that can be fine-tuned to support marketing execution.

These limitations can create an inconsistent or irrelevant customer experience for patients and health care providers alike, leading to a low return on marketing spend.

Data linking powers insight and personalization

To overcome challenges and better support customers, a large, global biopharma company is working with us to implement a data strategy that enables the company’s team to work across customer types in four key areas: insight generation, measurement, optimization, and content personalization. With this strategy, our client can pinpoint which tactics motivate patients to engage in their health care at different points in the customer journey. The company’s data strategy is:

How it works

Customer data is the foundation upon which personalized brand experiences are built. As customer experience becomes the new battleground for customer loyalty and competitive advantage, our client recognizes that first-party customer data is a critical business asset—one that must be owned and protected in-house. With this data strategy, our client can integrate clinical and campaign data to optimize brand spend and support the customer journey—from risk identification and diagnosis through treatment and disease management.

Preserving privacy, promoting trust

As first-party data collection increases, customer journeys must be founded on trust, privacy, and the ethical management of this data. Using a customer-first approach, our client’s data strategy was built with key privacy principles and consent-driven processing at its core, including:

Consent and preference management: Obtaining customer consent and preferences, maintained centrally and supplied to downstream systems.

Individual rights: Enabling customer rights to data access, erasure, restriction, and portability.

Identity-based tracking: Tagging customer-based choices and requests to their identity and honoring these choices in marketing campaigns.

Data cataloging: Maintaining a real-time data catalog to facilitate holistic management of individual rights, consent, preferences, and data processing.

By embedding privacy—and providing the control and transparency that customers expect and deserve—our client’s data strategy is designed to promote a trust-based customer journey while inspiring brand confidence.

Sophisticated solution, real results

Our biopharma client is in the process of integrating the new data strategy with its MarTech stack, and the early results are extremely promising. With the solution, the company plans to:

  • Coordinate timely marketing messages and behavioral nudges across the customer journey.
  • Connect online and offline measurement capabilities to provide a holistic view of the customer.
  • Maximize the use of data sets to target personas and predict behavioral responses across content-channel combinations.
  • Develop customized content that’s relevant, authentic, and based on a comprehensive understanding of the patient or HCP.
  • Reduce data vendor costs.
  • Improve return on ad spend allocation by understanding what’s behind conversions—and the amount of revenue those conversions are generating.
  • Drive more meaningful engagements with customers while increasing business efficiencies.

With new insights in hand, our client can reallocate its budget to the best performing tactics and placements—and explore messaging and content optimization to enhance the customer experience. And that will boost the company’s ability to support customers like Mari, Ralph, and Aarav with the information they need to manage their health and live happy, productive lives.

The article was published on PharmaExec on September 15, 2021.

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