Optimize your customers’ lifecycles with an omnichannel healthcare digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing for healthcare is all about the customer. In a sector experiencing rapid digital transformation, integrating your touchpoints and journeys is more important than ever

We all know research and decision-making for ‘your money or your life’ are lengthy processes for our customers. That’s why you need a dedicated healthcare digital marketing strategy to reassure your customers at every touchpoint in their journey.

Customer journeys and customer experience are important elements of all professional marketing, but where pharma and healthcare really come into their own is the complexity of their customer’s omnichannel decision-making journey.

As we know, Digital Transformation in the medical sector is rapidly altering the traditional marketing and distribution methods for healthcare and pharmaceuticals, empowering healthcare providers and patients with a choice of platforms and touchpoints to suit their needs. As an example, take McKinsey’s illustrated target prescriber journey below.

With new pathways to purchase comes increased competition for leads and sales. That’s why it’s more important than ever to optimize your digital marketing strategy to stay competitive.

If you don’t keep up, you risk losing your market share to companies with a stronger digital offering. As the infographic from Eye for Pharma demonstrates, customer experience is the new battleground.

We’ve got marketing solutions to support your healthcare business to plan, manage and optimize your digital marketing, so you can acquire and retain more customers in a competitive environment. Of course, it all starts with creating a winning marketing strategy.

A new framework for your pharma/healthcare digital marketing strategy

As you can see, digital marketing for healthcare and pharma is growing in complexity and competition. That’s why we recommend implementing the RACE Framework to streamline your company’s approach to digital and re-focus on your customer.

Your omnichannel touchpoints are your opportunities to reach and convert customers, but this will only be successful if you can integrate your channels and platforms across the customer journey. RACE breaks down this lifecycle to a 5-step process: plan, reach, act, convert and engage.

Through the RACE Framework, pharma and healthcare marketers can breakdown each step of their customers’ lifecycles, from the initial discovery through to repeat purchases and advocacy.

We’ve got marketing tools and templates to help you use this framework for benchmarking, persona research, forecasting, and objective setting, alongside improving your specialist channel-marketing skills. Find out more.

Content Marketing for Healthcare

One aspect of digital marketing for healthcare that remains constant throughout the customer lifecycle is that you need content to resonate with your target audience. Throughout their journey, the type of content used will develop, for example encouraging a sale.

In fact, less than a year ago, Health Industry Hub called for ‘customer-centric engagement during COVID-19‘. Of course, the pandemic is a challenging topic for all content marketers, but, crucially, an important topic for engaging with customers when done right. The challenge for healthcare is to ‘look beyond usual channels and content’ to engage their key audiences across multiple touchpoints.

Content marketing technique means creating relevant content that strikes the balance between what the customer wants to learn and will share and what the brand must effectively communicate. Referred to as the ‘intersection of brand communications and customer communications’, we’ve got marketing tools and templates to support you to create healthcare content to reach your goals at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

We’ve already identified that the role of your pharmaceutical of healthcare content will change according to your customer’s decision-making journey. Below is a useful table from our Content Marketing Learning Path which maps examples of content and distribution across the RACE Framework. TOFU (top of funnel) content types aim to create awareness whereas BOFU (bottom of funnel) drives the path to purchase.

Don’t forget about ROFU, content marketing designed to retain your existing customers and encourage their advocacy, a very valuable strategy indeed.

Through the RACE Framework, pharma and healthcare marketers can master content marketing strategy across their customers’ lifecycles to raise awareness, support evaluation and purchase, and maintain ongoing engagement.

We’ve got marketing tools and templates to boost your content marketing including trends keywords and personas, alongside improving your specialist channel-marketing skills. Find out more.

Customer Experience for Healthcare

As we’ve already identified, experience is key. Savvy healthcare marketers know that implementing the RACE Framework enriches your marketing strategy with a strong customer focus.

Healthcare marketing expert, Sarah Gill, Digital Marketing Manager at Newcross Healthcare solutions, recently shared with us her thoughts on User Experience:

• “Customer experience represents the holistic consideration of every interaction in the customer lifecycle and the resulting perceptions of the organization.”

In the example below, from our improve website customer journeys module, we’ve marked up a landing page for a popular laser eye surgery company. When a customer lands on your website that means you’ve effectively reached them, so now you need to get them to interact. You can see examples of this via the CTAs below.

Key:
1: Primary CTA button with strongest visual emphasis
1, 2 and 3: Top online tasks featured in secondary navigation
4: Supplementary CTA to download more information to support decision
5: An offline task to take the customer journey ‘offline’ via phone call or chat
6, 7 and 8: Main navigation elements to provide product information, customer stories and credibility

As demonstrated, this landing page encourages customers to interact by clicking on the primary CTA of booking a consultation, or the secondary CTA to download more information. Both CTAs generate leads for the business, which, according to the RACE Framework creates the bridge between ‘reach’ and ‘convert’.

It’s not just landing pages you need to consider for your customer journey. Depending on your business you may have a number of product pages with high traffic also. Our question and example table, from our improving product pages module, outlines the information your customer needs from these vital pages. If you can answer their questions efficiently and effectively, you’ll increase your conversion rates.

If your product is visually exciting, such as in the example below, ensure customers get a good look at it as early in their decision-making process as possible. Your product page templates are a great way to focus attention on the features you want to show off about.

Depending on the complexity of the journey, your product page may be strong enough to start converting customers so you’ll want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for them to make their purchase.

Through the RACE Framework, pharma and healthcare marketers can master digital experience strategy across their customers’ lifecycles, including utilizing landing pages, product pages, and more.

We’ve got marketing tools and templates to boost your digital experience including web personalization and conversion rate optimization. Attract visitors to your website and benefit from long-term customers, implement the RACE Framework to accelerate your restuls. Find out more.