It’s a tough life for healthcare marketers today. The harder you try to get close to your customers, the more elusive those customers become. We live in an age of channel proliferation with a new app or a new device appearing seemingly daily and with it yet another segment in the touch-point pie chart. In this era of multi-channel marketing, there are a dazzling number of media options and routes to market from which to choose. Faced with, say, a new product launch, where the hell do you begin?
Well, the answer is surprisingly simple – start by listening. The only reliable way of understanding just what it is your customers want, to understand their feelings, their motivations, their frustrations and their desires is to listen to the blighters. So before you go and carve up your hard-won media budget, make sure you’ve sat on their sofas and heard what’s being said in the hospital staff canteen.
But how? My old boss used to tell me to phone clients only when I couldn’t meet and to email them only when I couldn’t phone. Apply that logic to your customer base and you won’t go too far wrong. Of course, brands can’t truly have one-to-one conversations with all their customers but, actually, technology is allowing us to get closer than ever before and on a more targeted basis.
Brands can, for example, listen in on what their customers are talking about on social media. Tools exist that monitor sentiment around your brand. You can track down the influencers, the opinion formers and the early adopters like never before. Even good old Google Analytics gives you rich information on who, when and how people are visiting your website. What they do whilst on it, why they may be leaving. Technology and media consumption may be getting ever more complex but with it comes new opportunities to listen to – and converse with – your customers on almost one-to-one level.
Face-to-face research, of course, remains crucial. Focus groups (properly recruited) will help you get under the skin of challenges facing your brand. A cup of tea and some carefully considered questions will unearth the remarkable truths around which you can build a message and a brand personality that, come launch, will evoke knowing looks and empathy amongst your audience. That insight, that nugget, can come from the most unexpected of places.
And the beauty of social media and all the other channels at your disposal is that you can keep these customer conversations going. Yes, there’s a few more considerations if you’re a pharma company, and yes it takes resource, commitment and investment. But the rewards for the listening brand are there to be won.
