By Rich Glew
Most high-growth life sciences technology companies establish their market presence through differentiated brands, event participation, strategic alliances, and thought leadership activities. Companies also generally launch their products and services to the industry effectively.
However, companies often hesitate or make half-hearted efforts when it comes to multichannel marketing campaigns. Concerns center on perceived expense, complexity, and lack of time or expertise.
Marketing technology leader, Hubspot, defines multichannel marketing as “communicating with and marketing to prospects and customers across many channels, online and offline.” Those channels include social media, pay-per-click search advertising, in-person and virtual events, company websites, search engine optimization and marketing (SEO / SEM), email nurture, outbound telesales by business development reps, among others.
Multichannel marketing is not as daunting to implement as the term may imply. With the right scope, even small clinical and commercial technology firms with finite marketing resources can develop campaigns that leverage several digital and face-to-face channels.
A good way to start is to focus on a specific solution customer segment with business opportunity for which you can measure campaign impact, such as growth in marketing qualified leads. Narrowing the focus makes a campaign easier to manage and less expensive to implement. Also, define a time horizon for the campaign like two or three months, which allows time to make an impact.
Second, running a multichannel campaign is an excellent forcing function to learn how well aligned are an organization’s marketing and sales operations. These are some components that must work effectively for a multichannel campaign to be successful:
- Strategic planning – any multichannel campaign needs a plan with strategies, channel tactics, and defined success metrics.
- Customer understanding – know which buyer personas to target – such as data scientists, therapeutic area leads, commercial operations – and how to reach them.
- Marketing execution – the marketing function needs expertise, either internal or with agency partners, in digital channels to plan and run the right mix of tactics.
- Lead management – campaigns often succeed or fail depending on whether the team has a strong combination of marketing technology and a process for nurturing leads and handing qualified prospects to sales.
- Marketing reporting – it is also imperative to have accurate and timely reporting in marketing spend, channel performance metrics, and lead flow through the funnel.
When reviewing the campaign upon its conclusion, the marketing team should assess whether they made data-driven course corrections during the campaign, used consistent messaging across the various tactics, and whether the sales team followed up on qualified leads.
Evaluating and making improvements to campaigns will mature the marketing function in your organization and improve subsequent campaigns. By running a series of multichannel campaigns, life science marketing teams become more effective at leveraging different channels and drawing insights from the data.
Still unsure of where to start? Contact us for guidance of how to implement multichannel marketing campaigns that generate a healthy lead pipeline and lead to real business impact.