Archive for the ‘Segmentation’ Category

The Power of Targeted Healthcare Marketing

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

For centuries, healthcare was generally practiced under the assumption that the approach to men’s health worked just as well for women. But, advances in modern medicine and the evolution of specialized healthcare show that, even though there are similarities between men and women’s healthcare practices, it’s the differences between the two that mean the most.

So why then do so many healthcare marketers insist upon using the same approach when communicating to both men and women?

A recent study done by several healthcare ad agencies shows that women have different needs when it comes to their health than men. Furthermore, women can be segmented even further into age groups that have different healthcare wants and communication styles.

The answer to this dilemma, is effective, targeted marketing—a concept that many seem to have overlooked in the process of creating their advertising message. By looking at women as different segments, instead of a whole, the target audience can be reached more accurately and consumers are able to identify and connect more with the communications being sent out.

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Yelling vs. Whispering - Marketing Segmentation.

Monday, August 10th, 2009

There is yelling and then there is whispering. You yell when you have a message you want to get to a large group of people. It can be effective if you’re trying to give a generic message. But when you’re marketing pharmaceuticals, you and your marketing organization should be past broadcasting a generic message. Shouldn’t you then be whispering a specific customized message to each one of your target physicians? As Cynthia Ivan of Health Net of Arizona says in this video, “When you target everyone, you target no one”.

There are large variations in physician clinical behavior within individual practices, differentiated by variations in specialty needs, patient types and plan parameters, among other things. At the end of the day, how these physicians write prescriptions is greatly influenced by the many variations in practices.

Wait a minute, you say. Whispering takes more time and is one-on-one. It’s not effective. It’s not practical. I’m here to say it doesn’t have to be so. In fact, whispering can be very cost-efficient and can help you reach the right market with the right message. The only thing standing in the way for you to start whispering instead of yelling is effective use of technology.

Once you have segmentation in place, the other part becomes progressively easier. You can begin to deliver a customized message to each segment in the channel they are most comfortable utilizing. For example, once you know your physicians segments and the actual channels they are most likely to respond to and interact with, you are truly practicing segmented messaging and marketing. The technology infrastructure needed to accomplish this is already here.

In fact, this method can be so productive that you’ll certainly want to yell it out when you review the ROI report. As a pharma marketer, wouldn’t it be a huge boost to be able to target your communication to different physicians based on these variations? The economic lift to your marketing budget from such an approach would be tremendous.

In fact, this has been demonstrated time and again at Destination Hotels and Resorts. Here is what Andre Fournier has to say: “We had all these individual properties wanting to create their own messaging and their own timelines. With Destination Delivers, we can roll that up ahead of time…The consistency and the quality of the messaging was huge, and the return on investment was almost 10 times what we would have gotten out of on an individual basis.”

We’re preparing a case study video specifically focused on ROI-delivered marketing segmentation. The video will be posted on August 27, so be sure to mark your calendars.

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Marketing ROI

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

In today’s economy, every pharma CMO, marketing manager and director is being questioned on the value of each marketing program. The days of free-flowing marketing budgets with bloated sales organizations and non-defined goals are long gone. Today, it’s all about running highly focused campaigns with direct, measurable results. That is what AIR is all about: Analytics, Imagination, Results!

In your microsite video, Andre Fournier from Destination Hotels and Resorts succinctly states, “The past has been about frequency and reach. The future is about quality and are we touching the right people.” In essence, he’s saying the best way to ensure maximum ROI is to have a clear definition of your target audience. The two are intricately related. Marketing campaigns built on effective customer/prospect targeting have a much better chance of delivering a significant ROI. So, what makes targeting an effective marketing tool?
To answer this question, you need to begin by clearly defining the objective for the marketing initiative. Once this is defined, it helps you determine the type of data that can be used.

Once the goal is established, you really need to make sure the parameters defining the target market are adequate. If you’re seeking to lift the ROI of Brand X with a certain group of physicians in a particular geographic market interfacing with specific plan formularies, then having as much information as possible along these parameters will prove to be very useful.

Armed with this kind of targeting definition, your next steps are to determine the most suitable channel(s), develop effective creative and deliver the message through the preferred channels of the individual physician. With this approach, it will be very easy to answer those tough performance questions everyone is asking in a tough economy.

Here are some of the comments on the kind of ROI you can expect when you have a marketing campaign based on segmentation:

Patrick Servino: “The campaign in itself allowed us to target audiences based on profiles that we thought were the most profitable and we developed messaging according to those profiles and custom offers…We hit about a 38 to 1 return on marketing investment ratio.”

Cynthia Ivan, Health Net: “We provided the data, AIR worked their magic spinning it… We got much better responses and we were able to pull in more lead traffic by being more focused on each of the markets while it was the same campaign. It was successful; we pulled in two to three times the number of average leads.”

As I mentioned earlier, we’re preparing a case study video specifically focused on ROI delivered from marketing segmentation. The video will be posted on August 27. Be sure to mark your calendars.

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Developing a Target Physician Profile

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

I know I’ve talked a lot about marketing segmentation here on this blog. An important component to developing a strong market segmentation model is having relevant customer profiles. A customer profile is an integral part of an electronic marketing record and includes as much data as is necessary to provide an effective definition of physician behavior. Now the questions become, how much information do you need to develop a good profile, and how often do you update these profiles?

These are difficult questions to answer because it depends on the type of attributes and the number of possible outcomes within each attribute. Generally, a sample size of 10,000 or more will enable you to develop solid customer profile segments or “behavior buckets”. The actual number of criteria used in “spinning” a profile is usually from 7 - 12. Keep in mind that these are the result of sifting through sometimes hundreds of possible variables. Predictive models can sometimes bring in up to 20 variables; however, the most robust models have just a few variables.

The building blocks required for developing a robust profile of the target physicians may already exist in your organization. As in the case of one large IT provider, it may just be in need of consolidation.

“We had a real need within our enterprise to have a streamlined, consolidated view of our customer. With a lot of organizations, our data was… in a lot of different areas…Through technologies AIR Marketing offered, we were able to consolidate and streamline all of these data repositories both internal and external…It laid the foundation and framework for a very targeted campaign.” That is a direct quote from the IT provider that was able to develop the right profile for its customers as for a targeted marketing campaign.

Profiles do change over time, and as a result, should be updated at least quarterly, sometimes more frequent based on market conditions (new product entries, competitive moves, significant formulary changes, etc.). For example, one predictive variable could be capturing and profiling of the keywords physicians are using online as they search for drugs in different therapeutic categories.

Another example could be monitoring the changing brand preferences of each physicians as their patient load changes over time, which could be relevant with new uninsured patients coming into the market due to new health care reform!
Some profiles actually get stronger over time, which can be limiting. This can happen when all marketing initiatives are based on the profile; then, the only conversions fit the profile, thus it gets stronger and stronger. In this case, you need to watch performance results carefully and recognize that trends are changing if campaign performance begins to fall off. This can be avoided by constantly testing and having multiple tiers of profiles.

We’re preparing a case study video specifically focused on database marketing. The video will be posted on August 17. Be sure to mark your calendars!

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