Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Marketers of medical devices work in words and numbers, ideas, and data. But often, the more universal currency of words leads decision makers to undervalue data. This mistake kills a lot of good medical innovations.
As a marketing agency in our 14th year of business in the healthcare industry, we have seen more instances of data being underutilized than not. Why is that? It’s because people understand and can get on board with ideas, but they feel less confident when receiving numbers.
It is the job of marketers to bring data to the center of the work of driving marketing ROI. To do this, there must be three things in play: 1) a living data framework everyone understands and sees as reality, 2) a flow of accurate data at a cadence that serves the entire organization, and 3) a flow of insights that drives ROI up using experimentation.
Here are some steps to take to create this type of working relationship with data.
Medical Device Companies: Data-Driven Marketing Strategies
Free Yourself from the “Available Data” Trap
How do marketers gather the data they need? First, we relied on website user data coming from servers. Then, analytics tools like Google Analytics made it easier to see traffic sources. Now, we build goals in those systems and tie events like a purchase back to the traffic source (an ad campaign, for instance) to make it smarter.
Now, we are working in a time where change is happening faster than best practices are emerging. So, it is going to be important to get the right data in place quickly. But this is not what most companies do. Instead, they fall into the “Available Data Trap.” This is the trap in which one is given a lot of data sources and assumes they can work from that data to find a solution (like when Lucy lost her earring in the bedroom but looked for it in the den because the light was better in there).
Here’s the problem. The direct, or “primary” data that most tools can provide won’t give you the data environment you need. That is going to require insights and decisions based on experience to generate the right view of things.
The medical devices marketing leader must start with the end in mind and work back to the precursors of that data to have meaningful dashboards. This is “results-back” data planning. What do we want? Device sales. That’s easy—get the payment transactions, and you have a good data source. Then, ask, what is the precursor? This starts with the universal question: “How did you hear about us?” But from there, it gets hard to spread attribution and to automate.
At this point, you can plan a regular manual review and assignment of revenue based on what is known and what can be estimated. If you know, for example, the “last touch” revenue for ad and email channels, you can see what is left. If there are peaks or valleys in what is left, you can see if those correlate with activity in your other channels. In this sample, if you have a rise in sales in a month, it wasn’t in your tracked email and ads, but you see a rise in SEO traction leading up to it, check your direct and social traffic to rule those out, and attribute it to the trending channel. And note the decision in a timeline. Now, you have a working attribution model.
For non-ecommerce programs, you may be driving leads. Surveys are your best tool for attribution here. In our programs, a massive amount of effort is used to attribute leads to marketing channels. This is results-first data planning in action. It is hard, and building this data ecosystem takes time to get in place.
The big “ah-ha” here is not simply “use your data.” The key insight is that creating and maintaining data that is more directly useful is built on primary data sources, not a better presentation of primary data sources.
Identifying the Right Primary Data Sources for a Fuller View
With a more sophisticated plan for presenting data, we need to look at broadening our primary data. We recommend you start with (in a single spreadsheet) a list of the tools you have and each data point they can provide. If you have a basic approach of looking at your results monthly, you can ask, “What data points can we get in a monthly cadence that give us a view of us in the world we are moving in?” By seeing them in one view in a sheet, you can consider relationships you don’t get by poking around in different tools-provided dashboard. For example, if your CRM shows you returns volume, and your website analytics package shows you visits to your services pages, you won’t see a connection. But if you choose to use these primary data sources to create a new and more helpful data set, you can begin to report on a “negative sales funnel” that likely will show you upticks in customer service traffic ahead of spikes in returns. This is the way: list your data sources, consider and test the insights those sources can provide, look at the relationship to see if it does indeed trend, and then track and report the insights-based trends.
In addition to doing your “insights planning” from primary sources, we also recommend broadening your primary sources. There are amazing correlations to be found when broadening the sources list. Don’t overlook these sources:
Your CRM.
Competitor-based data, like where and how much they are marketing.
Industry trend reports and association-provided data.
Economic news and customer sentiment data sources.
Segmenting Audiences Effectively
Marketing is made of offers and audiences. Audiences fall into two groups: external and captured. A website visitor is an external audience member. But a website visitor identified with a pixel is a captured audience member for a retargeting campaign. Map your channels into a hierarchy, and focus on capturing audiences into your higher ROI channels, like remarketing and email marketing. See your channels as supporting and feeding one another in an interwoven path moving from your brand to your revenue. Then, you will see SEO, ads, video, social content, and events that lead to audience capture and nurture using email, social content, video to subscribers, and retargeting.
As you capture the audience, tag it, and get closer to it. You can tag and communicate by role, location, and known interests. Selling to consumers and healthcare providers? Great—get to know your audience with surveys and behavior, and tag them as B2B or B2C. Then, you can communicate accordingly.
Email Is a Great Marketing Tool When Done Well
Doing email marketing well requires one thing: providing valuable content to the right audiences. By focusing on audience capture and nurture, you can build segments. Those segments will allow you to better tailor your messages and content. As you see your email work, you can use the data to make your segments more accurate and valuable as you grow them. We use split testing on nearly every email we generate to optimize our subject lines. Then, looking at the winning vs. losing subject lines over time gives us an added secondary new data source to grow faster.
Measuring What Matters
Armed with a more valuable and translatable report suite, you will want to make sure you are also remembering the basics. It’s always good to track:
Brand strength
Marketing reach by channel
Channel activity, results, and ROI
Audience capture by channel
Cost per lead
Cost per sale
Customer acquisition cost
Revenue acquisition cost
Pipeline and sales funnel velocity
Conversions from awareness to sales-qualified traffic, leads, and engagement
A major evolution in any medical device sales program is closing the loop on attribution of sales to marketing. For all marketing, we recommend a tracked intake with form- and phone-tracking, as well as automation. For big-ticket sales, we also recommend a non-optional post-sales attribution interview of each new customer.
Smarter Gets Smarter
It’s best to start with a sustainable metrics dashboard and make it smarter over time by determining what is driving insights that move ROI up in real time. For many, this can be finding your “Good to Great” number: the one number that matters most to tell you if you are winning. Starting small allows you to discover what drives this number. Then, you can track the needed insights and build out the supporting primary data sources to expand from there.
