Archive for August, 2009

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If the EHR Is Reality, Isn’t It Time for The Electronic Marketing Record?

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

The Electronic Health Record will change health care delivery forever with a complete record of all clinical patient encounters, as well as support other health care activities.

Pharmaceutical marketers want the same efficiency that comes from an integrated record of customer interests and interactions. It’s time for the EMR - Electronic Marketing Record. Essentially, the EMR is a single view of our target customers, the key decisions makers and influencers that affect the outcomes of our marketing efforts.

This EMR has the ability to aggregate data points across all important demographic, behavioral, preferential and customer interfaces into one longitudinal marketing record, a single view of your customer that allows you to make efficient decision, reduce spending and dramatically improve the return on your marketing dollars.

While the health care industry moves towards the EHR, we as pharmaceutical marketers continue to operate in a mode of silo-ed, episodic marketing to physicians. We rely on disparate databases from different vendors. We never aggregate the data to share intelligence (behaviors and communications preferences) so we can work as ONE marketing team and communicate to our customers in a continuum. And to really make matters worse, we never truly measure our marketing outcomes.

It’s been done in other industries with more complex media models and much smaller and tighter marketing budgets. For example, take the case of Destination Hotels & Resorts, an AIR Marketing customer in the hospitality industry. DHR manages over 30 properties across the United States. The sheer number of different properties in a range of geographic markets meant there were many redundancies with the organization.

AIR Marketing offered DHR a marketing technology solution to create the efficiencies needed to improve performance and reduce cost. The custom solution, called Destination Delivers, consolidated customer data across disparate platforms and rolled it up into one location. This allowed DHR to obtain a single view of the customer and devise custom messages, offers and promotions. As Andre Fournier from DHR explains, “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.”

It is time for Electronic Marketing Record (EMR) in pharmaceutical marketing. Watch this video on database marketing for more insights into the work AIR Marketing has done in other industries!

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Physicans Use of the Internet Increases

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

According to Manhattan Research, physician use of the Internet has increased rapidly over the past few years. Not only has the use increased, but physician’s expectations of what should be available to them have increased as well. As they inquire about information on the Internet to further their practice, these physicians are seeking customized, relevant and fresh content across a broad spectrum. Their online activities range from wanting online conferences and reading medical journals online, to watching product videos from pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In essence, they desire a single personal portal Web site experience that delivers the right information in the format they desire and in the place most comfortable to them. In other words, the solution AIR Health will be offering the industry.

AIR is not just bringing a “concept” to the healthcare marketplace; it has already done it with great success and delivered substantial ROI to its clients. For example, as a hospitality industry first, AIR developed personal Web sites for each one of enrolled Destination Hotels & Resorts customers, based on their personal and communication preferences. To quote Andre Fournier from DHR, “The brainstorm came from AIR Marketing, and its efforts, to create this umbrella that sits on top of [AIR's] Cyclone engine allowing us to send specific customized messages, through an integrated approach across the portfolio of our business.”

This is the type of breakthrough marketing communications the health care industry and pharmaceutical industry is in need of and is ready for. In fact, physicians say they are ready for some fresh AIR!

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AIR Health’s Innovative Pedigree - Lead Story in DM News

Monday, August 17th, 2009

As you have seen from the video testimonials, market leaders in their respective fields have chosen AIR to lead their marketing segmentation programs. AIR’s innovation has certainly delivered superior results for these clients, and AIR Health will bring this same ground-breaking thinking and expertise to the healthcare industry on September 9, 2009.

These are certainly not the only examples of client success. DM News (Digital Insider), a leading industry publication, recently highlighted AIR’s uniqueness with client Hershey Entertainment & Resorts. Here is an excerpt:

“We realized that we had not been doing enough with our data,” said Tjibbe Lambers, director of marketing analytics at Hershey Entertainment & Resorts. The company began working with direct marketing firm Air Marketing in 2007 in order to consolidate data across its customer relationship channels, sales, accounting and finance departments.

The theme park now has four audiences it targets with unique messaging: its family customers, couples segment, spa visitors and golfers. Hershey’s uses a combination of mailings, customer micro-sites and e-mail to connect with customers. A general brochure is still sent to all of the customer segments. After that, customers receive a follow-up postcard that is aligned with the recipient’s interest category, such as golf. The post card directs the recipient to a PURL, or personalized URL, that provides original content aligned with their interest. For example, golfers might find an “insider’s tip sheet” and spa-goers will see a health and wellness-related article.

“Consumers are tired of the old way of direct marketing,” Elaine Ralls, president of AIR Marketing, told DMNews.

There are many companies that are looking to capture and then analyze marketing and customer data across their organizations. However, Ralls believes her company has hit a “sweet spot” by tying in financial and accounting information as well. In the case of Hershey’s, Air Marketing is able to predict how much revenue various customers within each segment will bring in.

At the end of the day, the results are consistent across four market leaders in four different industries. Market segmentation has revolutionized their marketing, starting with a single view of the customer across all channels and ending with customized message delivery to attain remarkable ROI. In fact, one of AIR’s clients hit a 38 to 1 return on their marketing investment. Now consider how this could augment the usual 2-3 times return you see on most pharmaceutical marketing programs.

This week, you will hear more about AIR Health and its view of a comprehensive EMR/ Electronic Marketing Record for your target physicians. Stay tuned.

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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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Posted in Featured Post, Segmentation | No Comments »

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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Posted in Marketing, Return on Investment, Segmentation | No Comments »

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