Direct contact for the pharmaceutical sector with healthcare professionals and other key stakeholders within the healthcare sector has slowly been decreasing over the years.
The development of alternative communication channels via multi-channel marketing has been playing a permanent role in accelerating the development of stakeholder relationships, however, with a keen focus on exhibiting customer centric care how can organisations maximise their impact via multiple channels whilst demonstrating that customers are at the centre of all engagements?
Engaging customers with compelling, personally relevant experiences is the new competitive benchmark. The Economist Intelligence Unit (2016 survey) conducted a survey that included responses from 499 chief marketing officers (CMOs) and senior marketing executives worldwide. When asked about their priorities, survey respondents chose customer loyalty and retention and customer acquisition as the top two strategic programmes for their organisation.
By engaging with your customers via multi-channels, which suit them at the time and place applicable to their needs, as you might expect, will inevitably secure higher quality engagement with better quality real time insights that in turn will shape and enhance health outcomes, leading to customer loyalty.
Healthcare tele-research campaign planning.
Optimising the customer experience across multiple channels means that by providing engagement in a channel suitable to the requirements of your stakeholders, you are able to open up new lead sources, support sales and create new models for service.
By combining traditional telemarketing, tele-research, email marketing and remote online digital engagement campaigns, more cost-effective connectivity with healthcare stakeholders can be achieved.
The focus has to start with your customer, by understanding what information they need and how to best deliver it to them, with a variety of methods available that are cost effective. The agility of a campaign will be a key differentiating factor, requiring an organisation to recognise stakeholder trends and respond and alter the campaign quickly and according to need.
Multi-channel healthcare professional engagement telemarketing.
Top 4 Tips For Successful Multi-Channel Campaign Planning and Execution
The right planning and measurement of appropriate metrics is a good starting point, some of the other critical success include:
- Successful stakeholder engagement starts with thinking like your customers. Put yourself in their position, what information do they get exposed to on a daily basis, what do they engage with and why. Consider geographical differences in need. Telemarketing and email research can help gain valuable insights into the start of this journey. What pressures do they have and what are their key challenges to achieve their professional objectives? Think about what information they need, how it is best received (at what time, through what channels etc.) from their perspective and how they can procure additional information when required.
- In addition to field sales teams, consider how to harness communication to develop long term relationships between the stakeholder and brand. Consistently focus on providing the customer – whether they are doctors, nurses, clinicians, payers or patients – with information that facilitates better health outcomes and decision making, prepare campaigns with long term objectives in mind. Take them on a journey that can incorporate varied communication tools.
- Define clear stakeholder segmentation, personas, and messaging and engagement strategies. Need for market share growth and the defence of competitive markets may be driving stakeholder engagement campaigns, but designing the campaign around the customer need directly rather than the business requirement may prove to be more beneficial in returning valuable data insights. If commercial value is to be derived from engagement, then clarity in messaging and targets will need to be defined and messaging will need to be consciously measured.
- Plan for the need to evolve fast, responsive campaigns that can advance will be able to reflect the needs of stakeholders more effectively than static, inflexible campaigns. Contingency planning may be necessary to provide agile responses to unexpected insights gained during customer contact.
In summary, customer-centric multi-channel marketing should start with the customer always in mind. Campaigns with the ability to adapt to change will be a critical success factor, whilst harnessing a blend of multi-channel engagement that works to suit the customer in the most personalised means possible.
Using a healthcare specialist telemarketing and multi-channel lead generation company such as Sales Accelerant as your route to market can help you to maximise revenue opportunities within the healthcare sector.
