Navigating the Shift: Marketing Strategies for AI-Enhanced vs. Conventional Medical Products

Sales enablement: a new tipping point

Movéo believes that the changes in B2B buying behavior have been radically changed during the pandemic’s switch to almost 100% virtual approaches, representing an important tipping point for sales enablement. Download the white paper to read on for insights on how to leverage this critical business function to help B2B companies increase win rates, improve customer satisfaction, and accelerate revenue.

Marketing rules to follow during uncertain economic times

While uncertainty is reigning during the current global pandemic, economic indicators are pointing to a coming storm: recession. The speed and depth of a recession varies depending upon which talking head TV pundit you choose to listen to, but for marketers, there are certainties to which we can all cling.

Put a laser focus on existing customers, clients and partners.

Now is not the time to ignore the business you have. Place more emphasis on “inside sales” to your current customers. There are a million studies that show the higher cost of acquiring a new customer relative to nurturing a current relationship. Remember that those “clients” are people and they’re struggling with the same business challenges and decisions that you are facing.

So, speak with them. Reach out and see how they’re doing. Find out what is keeping them awake at night. Crisis is not a time for selling products and services. Crisis is a time to be a partner and a friend. Those relationships will strengthen as a result and will bear fruit when the market returns.

Remind management that a recession doesn’t mean retreat from marketing.

As Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” When recessions hit, marketing is often among the first budget line items to get reduced. Doing so could potentially cause long-term damage to the brand and allow smaller or weaker competitors to do so and steal market share. There are countless studies going back more than a century that show that the brands that maintain or increase advertising during a recession gain market share over time.

A March 2010 study from Harvard Business School and Kellogg School of Management tracked the performance and recovery of 5,000 companies through the 2008-2009 recession. Of those companies, 17 percent went bankrupt, private to acquisition. Roughly 80 percent did not reach full recovery until three years after the recession ended. But, nine percent thrived. Why? It turns out that the companies that reduce costs by focusing on operational efficiency while investing in growth strategies, such as marketing and R&D, are best poised to beat a recession.

Additionally, the lower costs during the economic difficulties means that more marketing can be done for less, pointing to better return on investment compared to good economic times. That brand continuity will create long-term brand loyalty. Not to mention that in the better economic times to follow, it will be that much more expensive to go out and fight to reclaim that market share.

Be nimble and open-minded to new technologies, tools and platforms.

Suggesting that companies shouldn’t cut their marketing altogether doesn’t mean maintaining their status quo. Marketing decision-makers need to look within themselves and their customer segments to determine which emerging marketing channels should be tested and embraced.

Procter & Gamble came out of the Great Depression as a much stronger brand than it was when the stock market crashed in 1929. Instead of cutting back its advertising in cost-cutting efforts, the company shifted its marketing dollars into new marketing channels, including radio. In a ten-year span, P&G produced 21 so-called “soap operas.” This was the original content marketing plan execution.

During the last two recessions, new means of reaching target audiences have emerged. Think about the advent of social media in the early 2000’s after the dot com bubble burst. Some marketing change agents saw the opportunity to use these platforms to reach audiences quickly and in targeted ways. Imagine being the first person to make a media spend on Facebook.

Use the time to focus on strategy, build content and an analysis of your customers’ behaviors.

Acknowledge that customer behavior is going to change as a result of the changing environment. Use data to anticipate what you believe your customer will be looking to do and use marketing to be there waiting.

One of the most successful businesses during the 2008 recession came as a result of a wholesale business model change. While the change was aided by advancements in technology, at the heart of the change was a careful analysis of customer behavior. This sort of careful reexamination of customer behavior is critical to controlling the company direction in the recovery.

Long before Netflix began producing award-winning movies like The Irishman, Netflix ran a profitable video rental by mail business for years. When home Wifi access coupled with high unemployment in 2008-2010 created demand, the company shifted its model to provide video-on-demand services through Comcast or Apple. Netflix gained 3 million members during the peak of the recession in 2009. However, even as the business has grown into a movie production behemoth, the company still provides DVDs by mail service. Who knew?

Shift from trade shows and conferences to more targeted approaches.

Trade shows bring you and your customers together. You can speak directly, which establishes a more genuine relationship.

With events off the table, think of other ways to keep that personal touch as part of your outreach. Investing in webinars, upping your organic engagement through social media platforms, smart video content and even one-to-one phone calls may pay better returns than a 20-by-20 trade show booth even when postponed or cancelled conferences and tradeshows return.

Use the time going into a tougher economy to build assets, materials and programs while you have access to resources.

Remember those few marketing assets or creative materials that you’ve been meaning to get to? Now is the time to push them through. Without trying to be too dark, management may take away internal or external resources or budgets. Use them while you have them to build tools that your marketing program will need to ride out the tighter period.

Longer term, there is no doubt that spending on virtual events and advanced digital engagement capabilities will increase. Plus, as remote work increasingly becomes the new norm, expect a dramatic rise in effective content in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) and similar digital technologies.

Provide certainty when people are overwhelmed with uncertainty.

Psychologically, brand consistency during uncertain times can gain brand loyalty. By being one of the constants in a world that is variable, your audience will begin to associate brand attributes like stability, consistency, commitment and longevity to your brand. Don’t believe me? Half of the top ten most trusted brands are nearly a century old.

In marketing as in life, certainty is a scarcity in this world. As marketers and people, if we can provide just a bit of level-headed thinking and stability, we will find that we will have a community and following cheering us on when the skies clear.

And, clear they will.

B2B marketing for healthcare providers: why and how to reach the physician audience

B2C and B2B Marketing: Why Both Are Needed

For years, healthcare marketers have focused on marketing to consumers — B2C marketing. Providers spent upwards of $10 billion on advertising in 2017, and that figure isn’t likely to drop any time soon. Healthcare organizations’ spending on ads will continue to grow at a rate of about 1.8% each year, reaching $11.56 billion by 2021. $2.1 billion in digital advertising was spent in 2017, and that could reach $2.9 billion by 2021.¹

Yet, this book is not about that.

It’s about marketing to physicians, a B2B audience. Why? Consistently overshadowed (and vastly outspent) by service line marketing or institutional branding, the physician audience is not always seen as a priority. Yet, physician referrals are still the primary drivers of volume for most hospitals and health systems — even in this much heralded age of consumer-centric healthcare.

Because of this and other reasons we’ll delve into, it may be a good time to re-assess B2B healthcare marketing. Not as a replacement for B2C marketing, but as a vital adjunct to it.

Physician referrals are still the primary drivers of volume for most hospitals and health systems.

B2B: A Whole Different Animal

B2B audiences are an interesting breed. They are consumers by nature, yet rarely make decisions on impulse. They are highly qualified in their fields, yet are always looking to learn something new. Most B2B sales are “considered sales” — there are enough complexities involved in them for buyers to research different options. For these reasons, many B2B companies employ a sales force in addition to their marketing efforts to help “close” the sale.

In healthcare, it is not uncommon for hospitals to employ physician relations departments as their B2B sales forces. Physician relations performs this function (with the physicians as the customer), along with customer service, consulting, and a few other roles mixed in. In the end, it is their job to build and nurture relationships with referring physicians. Traditionally, this was done through face-to-face encounters — physician liaisons visiting referring physicians’ offices regularly with updates on services and referral materials and to follow up on satisfaction with the referral relationship.

Likewise, when physician liaisons sought to establish a new referral relationship, they made frequent stops into the offices of potential referral partners in the hope of creating a connection, gauging referral potential, distributing educational material, and scheduling face time between the physician they represent and the potential referring physician.

But these face-to-face connections among hospitals, hospital-based physicians, and referring physicians are becoming less frequent. In part this is partially due to some hospitals shrinking or even eliminating their physician liaison programs. However, the work life of the modern physician also plays a role, as does the growth of new technologies and changing preferences in terms of how they receive information.

The implications of this shift are clear: healthcare marketers must be supplemented with new marketing techniques to form a comprehensive physician marketing strategy. Just as B2B companies utilize marketing and sales, so must healthcare providers.

The physician liaison function must be supplemented with new marketing techniques to form a comprehensive physician marketing strategy.

Reasons to Market to Physicians

There are a number of reasons healthcare providers market to physicians. Think of them as three Rs:

1. Recruitment
   We’ve all seen the stats. There will be a shortage of more than 100,000 physicians by 2030.² Providers around the country are looking for the best ways to market physicians and entice them to call their organizations home. Physician recruitment usually lives in the HR function rather than marketing, but wherever it resides, you first need to hire amazing doctors before you can start advertising for them — or to them.
2. Reputation
   Each summer, U.S. News & World Report releases its influential list of best hospitals in the nation. Like them or hate them, consumers find these rankings useful. As a result, a lot of resources are committed by providers participating in the ranking survey process — to say nothing of the “advertising arms race” that occurs post-publication. According to U.S. News, nearly 30% of their score calculation comes from “expert opinion” — board-certified physicians across the country in the 16 specialties ranked in the Best Hospitals issue. Due to this methodology, physicians have a magnified role in determining hospital reputations. This has led many hospitals to now target them with communications programs designed to increase familiarity and favorability for their institution, service lines, and own top-rated physicians.
3. Referral
   As the healthcare industry becomes more competitive, healthcare providers struggle with referral — including network integrity. Recently, even prominent institutions have seen out-migration rates creep into the double digits. In this environment, keeping physicians informed about your hospital’s strengths (e.g., procedural expertise, key hires, and facilities upgrades) is essential. Hospitals need to communicate these things on a regular basis, but as health systems get larger, connecting with individual doctors becomes harder. This is where marketing comes in.

Even prominent institutions have seen out-migration rates creep into the double digits.

Reputation has a more significant influence on the total U.S. News score than its objective counterparts.

Like or hate them, consumers find these hospital rankings like U.S. News & World Report’s useful in that they give patients information about the institutions they trust with their lives. However, advertising is typically created for and directed to consumers and not physicians. This is significant, because U.S. News’ annual rankings are determined by an index of quality based on objective and subjective measures — and a recent study confirmed reputation has a more significant influence on the total U.S. News score than its objective counterparts.

The Physician Persona

There are about a million practicing physicians in the U.S. and each is highly specialized in their daily work. Many of the things that hold true for marketing to consumers — and even other business audiences — do not for medicine.

Here are some examples³:

THEY DON’T DO DESK
The majority of physicians aren’t sitting in an office each day — their busy schedules have made them one of the first professions in the U.S. to be truly mobile-first.

AN APPLE A DAY
Roughly 85% of doctors are iPhone users, compared to 32.5% of the general population who choose the Apple phone over any Android model.

THEY’RE NETWORKERS
From late-night med school cram sessions to working in multiple clinics or hospitals, doctors rely heavily on professional networking throughout their careers.

PRIVACY RULES
Due to strict HIPAA regulations requiring all patient-related communications to be encrypted, doctors are virtually banned from using email and SMS messaging in their daily work.

SPECIALTY MEANS SPECIALNESS
Much of what physicians practice is extremely specific. Writing something for a cardiologist? Consider whether they are electrophysiologists, interventional cardiologists, or even better, “interventional cardiologists with a focus on coronary artery stents.”

THEY DIFFER (EVEN AMONG THEMSELVES)
Various studies have been done linking medical specialties and Myers-Briggs personality typing. In the one such study, neurosurgeons fell into three personality types (“The Logistician,” “The Commander,” and “The Architect”). Physicians in one specialty may not only differ against the general population, but against other specialties as well.

CONTENT IS KEY
Physicians as a group are highly skeptical, well-informed, and opinionated. They are turned off by consumer-centric messaging and marketing fluff.

The main point we’d like to make is that there are no “cookie-cutter” B2B marketing strategies to physicians. In general, you can focus on mobile instead of desktop advertising, find the right social networks where physicians connect, and make sure your marketing content is up to snuff. But fully addressing their needs can mean going above and beyond these approaches.

Best Practices

Many hospitals are still designing websites for desktop computers and then trying to shoehorn them onto mobile devices.

BE AN INFORMATION PARTNER
Studies have shown that medical professionals prefer marketers to act as information partners.⁴ Content marketing designed to establish your thought leadership in a specific area(s) builds trust — this is critical for referrals and reputation building. Our clients have told us that developing strong clinical content is their toughest challenge, but it is one that must be met because providing useful, relevant information and education is the best way to not only get their attention, but also to earn credibility.

OPT-IN IS THE GOAL
There are many great channels out there for reaching physicians, however, the costs to use them can spiral to the point of unprofitability. That’s why email is critical. Aside from being a preferred channel by physicians themselves, it is the most costeffective way to communicate on an ongoing basis. Note that this does not mean buying email lists (a worst practice), but rather getting physicians to opt-in to future communications because they value your content or partnering with a trusted distribution source and leveraging their subscriber base.

MOBILE FIRST
Many hospitals are still designing websites for desktop computers and then trying to shoehorn them onto mobile devices. For the physician on a mobile device, your content needs to be concise and clear, and your design minimalist. Additionally, consider using video — an engaging and mobile-friendly format. Also, feature peers rather than patients. Physicians prefer a more clinical perspective when reading about new treatments or technology.

THERE IS NO MAGIC BULLET
Go with what works. If that means using unglamorous newsletters and direct mail, so be it. If it means using the latest programmatic media techniques (using artificial intelligence and real-time bidding techniques to target physicians wherever they go on the web) or geofencing conferences (sending relevant messages to smartphone users who enter a predefined location), do that. Marketing to physicians is an imperfect science, and what works for one organization may not work as well for another.

Physicians prefer a more clinical perspective when reading about new treatments or technology.

Putting It in Context

CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING is the placement of ad campaigns on websites or site pages that are directly relevant to the ad you’re running.

In B2C, if you’re selling a kitchen mixer, for example, you might try to have it placed on sites listing recipes for cakes. The idea here is that people who are interested in baking are more likely to want a mixer than someone on a video gaming site. A more interested audience usually means better click-through rates and more conversions, so contextual advertising is a great way to improve the performance of your marketing.

• There are now a growing number of advertising- funded sites with content developed specifically for physicians. We will review select ones, but before we do …
• Sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Google are all used by physicians — they are just not contextually in sync with them. The sites we will cover all reach physicians, but they are utilized differently. A news site is likely to be visited by physicians 2–3 times a week, while a reference site is likely to used 2–3 times a day.⁵
• These sites do not represent the beginning and end of physician communications. According to a 2018 HealthLink Dimensions survey of more than 700 physicians, email followed by interactions via in-person visits (remember those physician liaisons?) and direct mail are still the preferred channel for receiving industry news, announcements, research, and educational opportunities.

Capturing physician attention and persuading them to change long-standing referral patterns or opinions about particular institutions usually takes a concerted, omni-channel effort to succeed. Look at the sites on the next pages as set of digital marketing tools that enable you to pursue that effort in contextually relevant way.

The sites we will cover all reach physicians, but they are utilized differently. A news site is likely to be visited by physicians 2–3 times a week, while a reference site is likely to used 2–3 times a day.⁵

Medscape

Think of Medscape as The New York Times of medicine. It is a premier source for medical news, clinical reference, point-of-care tools, and medical education for physicians. Owned by WebMD, Medscape boasts a 55% physician reach on mobile. Its precision targeting and ability to present brand messages to physicians through the flow of their day (apps, site, tools) and across devices make it a go-to resource for B2B healthcare marketing.

Doximity

While doctors are highly social, you won’t find them connecting to each other on Facebook or LinkedIn, at least for their day-to-day work — that’s where Doximity comes in. Billing itself as the “newsfeed of medicine,” Doximity’s fast-growing audience now exceeds that of the AMA — it has over 1 million members. While it (proudly) does not allow banner ads, it offers marketers an effective media mix through its Colleague Connect® and DocNews® products.

SERMO

If Doximity is the LinkedIn of medicine, SERMO is the Facebook. This social media site acts as a virtual doctors’ lounge in which practitioners vent about anything and everything. Since 90% of SERMO’s users remain anonymous, the site’s medical crowdsourcing feature does not run afoul of privacy laws. Much of the current advertising is from pharma companies, but that could change if this intriguing functionality takes off.

BroadcastMed

A recent Johns Hopkins study found that YouTube was the most valued social media channel by physicians — not surprising considering the instructional power of video.⁶ BroadcastMed, a contextual channel similar to YouTube, was first in the world to broadcast live surgeries on the internet using its ORLive solution and is still going strong after nearly 25 years. It lets industry participants post their educational content and run targeted campaigns towards the physician audience that they’re looking for.

Epocrates

Epocrates is designed for physicians for use at the point of care. App users check drug dosing, drug interactions, drug safety details, medical news, disease diagnosis, and management guidance as well as evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. Epocrates embeds brand messages at multiple points across the care continuum, inside the clinical workflow, when doctors are actively searching (often multiple times a day) for drug and disease state information.

Univadis

Univadis uses concise executive summaries to help physicians tame the onslaught of medical literature and stay up to date in just a few minutes per day. While the site has morphed a bit — it was started by Merck, and absorbed peer-to-peer physician network QuantiaMD a few years back — its current owner, Aptus Health, has made it a platform that features sponsored content delivered through various market access pull-through programs.

Starting a Pilot Program

The outcomes of a physician marketing program will differ depending on the objective of the program (recall the three Rs). There are basic measurements, however, that can be used across all objectives — engagement, perception, and behavior (see next page). Each of these has different metrics associated with them. Keep them in focus, and be prepared to make adjustments to strategies and tactics if needed. If your organization is new to B2B marketing, it may be beneficial to conduct a pilot program with one or two service lines in order to perfect the process. Pairing with an experienced partner can help as well.

For over 30 years, Movéo has worked in only two market sectors — B2B and B2C healthcare. Physician marketing, whether it be for a hospital, health system, or a medical manufacturer, is nothing new to us. It lies at the very intersection of what we do.

Even if you have a B2C agency or a strong internal team, Movéo can bring different experience and perspective to your physician marketing. To learn more, call Sheri Granholm, Senior Vice President of Consulting and Engagement, at 312.487.3621.

Outcomes

ENGAGEMENT
B2B digital programs are highly measurable. Primary metrics include REACH (impressions delivered), RESPONSE (clicks and visits) INTERACTION (time spent, link activity), and AMPLIFICATION (content shared with colleagues).

PERCEPTION
Perceptual metrics can take time to change. Initial benchmark and post-campaign quantitative research can measure positive trend in FAMILIARITY, FAVORABILITY, and INTENT.

BEHAVIOR
Desired behaviors — increased referral, network integrity, or institutional ranking, for example — typically lag behind engagement and perception changes. Although accretive, gains can be significant and long lasting.

Movéo is a demand generation agency uniquely built to help its clients measurably improve business performance. We focus on three interdependent drivers of growth –– branding, lead generation, and customer engagement –– to attract, secure, and retain profitable customers for our clients.
To read more of our thought leadership, visit moveo.com.

1 Source: 2017 BIA/Kelsey report
2 Source: Association of American Medical Colleges study released March 14, 2017
3 Source: MediaPost, “5 Things You Don’t Know About Marketing To Doctors,” January 12, 2015
4 Source: 2016 HealthLink Dimensions survey
5 Sources & Interactions: 2017 Medical/Surgical Edition Dashboard Copyright © 2017 KANTAR MEDIA
6 Source: Johns Hopkins “Physician Communication: Inform Strategy through Research,” May 2017

Using physician specialty personas as a tool for reputation management

“Reputation management” used to be a term and responsibility that fell solely within the province of public relations. Yet with the changing healthcare landscape influencing how various stakeholders interact with healthcare organizations, today the term implies far more than it once did. Reputation management needs a more expansive description of what it entails — and a closer look at a tool that can be used in its service to ultimately attract patients, physicians, and potential partnering organizations.

The reputation ecosystem

Reputation building is nothing new for healthcare providers, as most have been trumpeting awards, quality outcomes, and accreditations for years to do this. What is more recent, however, is the growing complexity of what Movéo calls the “reputation ecosystem,” including new players and layers that can often mitigate — if not blunt — the direct efforts providers used to count on to build reputation.

While direct to consumer communication remains a viable tool, it is no longer the onesided conversation it once was. Powerful reputation influencers abound, including ranking “authorities” (such as U.S. News & World Report, Consumer Reports, Leapfrog, and Healthgrades) and various review sites (foremost among them being Yelp). These sources of information combine with the pre-existing opinions and anecdotal experiences of friends and family members (now also amplified with social media “megaphones” like Facebook or Twitter) to influence decision.

The net result is not as much a filtration of hospital and health system communication, but an entirely new stream of credible and (mostly) independent third-party information that is added to it.

Hospital reputation, then, is increasingly an amalgamation of these two independent
communication flows combined with whatever opinions might be shared by treating physicians. It falls on the healthcare consumer to deconflict these sources if necessary.

Direct to physician communication

If this ecosystem is not complex enough already, there is another significant element with which healthcare reputation managers need to contend — direct to physician communication.

Again, hospitals and health systems communicating with physicians is nothing new. However, in the past, it has been primarily done for three reasons:

1. To help physicians on staff or affiliated with the hospital understand and believe in organizational strategy, drive change, or boost workplace satisfaction.
2. For recruitment (i.e., to reduce the time to hire as well as bring more qualified potential physician candidates to the table).
3. To strengthen relationships between physicians and a hospital or health system with the goal of driving more referrals in-network.

Today, however, there is another reason to communicate directly with physicians. And not just locally, but to the over 800,000 board-certified physicians practicing across the country — reputation management.

“What’s up, doc? Our ranking!”

Each summer, U.S. News & World Report releases its influential list of the best hospitals in the nation. Like or hate them, consumers find these hospital rankings useful in that they give patients information about the institutions they trust with their lives. As a result, a lot of money and time are invested by providers participating in the ranking surveys — to say nothing of the advertising “arms race” that occurs post-publication.

But that advertising is typically created for and directed to consumers and not physicians (although it may also be collaterally received by them and other important audiences such as payors, donors, and partners).

This is significant, because U.S. News’ annual rankings are determined by an index of quality based on objective and subjective measures. We italicize subjective because a recent study¹ confirmed that reputation has a more significant influence on the total U.S. News score than its objective counterparts.

According to U.S. News, just shy of 30 percent of their score calculation comes from “expert opinion” — board-certified physicians across the country in the 16 specialities ranked in the the Best Hospitals issue are invited to list up to five hospitals they consider to be the best in their area of expertise for complex or difficult cases. The figures displayed in the rankings represent the average percentages of responding specialists over the last three years who named hospitals.

Due to this methodology, physicians have an outsized role in determining hospital reputations. This had led many hospitals to now target them in communication programs designed to increase awareness of and preference for their institution, service lines and “rock star” physicians. One academic hospital we recently encountered had $3MM+ dedicated to this task alone.

Looking back to the reputation ecosystem, you can see why we’ve added a “direct to physician” arrow, by specialty, coming from providers. The rub is, however, communicating with physicians is decidedly different than communicating with consumers. In general, physicians are better informed, more skeptical, and are typically more opinionated than the latter. In fact, they can tune out “consumer-centric” messaging in a flash and be lastingly put off by perceived “marketing fluff.” In the specialty realm, they are often more interested in what a specific peer is doing than the hospital where the peer is doing it. In fact, they may not be able to even name it.

For most hospitals and healthcare systems, reaching and influencing specialty physicians does not fall under the purview of “business as usual.”

Enter the physician specialty persona

A persona is a qualitative tool used to create a composite character that acts as an archetype to guide communication. Often based on multiple inputs, a persona brings the abstract concept of a targeted audience to life.

Personas typically include demographic, technographic, psychographic, and geographic information as well as personal narrative elements that create a comprehensive picture of a group’s behaviors, environment, motivations, and needs.

Sophisticated health systems have used consumer personas for things like website development or media targeting for years, but physician specialty personas are something new for most. At Movéo, we believe they can be a useful tool in hospital reputation management. In context, they are particularly helpful in the process of defining the underlying points of differentiation between physician specialties for the purpose of developing tailored reputation communications.

By using personas, we are able to humanize data to develop messages that appeal to specific audiences. What’s more, they allow us to avoid utilizing internal stakeholders as physician specialty proxies — a practice that often results in stereotyping (“our Dr. Jones is a ‘type A’ personality so his colleagues across the country must be too”).

“Head cases”

Let’s say a hospital wishes to enhance its reputation for neurology/neurosurgery. Constructing a persona can yield important insights about this specialty that can enable it to do so. Here’s how to go about it: Geo-, demo-, and technographic dimensions

Geographically, neurologists/ neurosurgeons mirror each other very closely in where they practice across the country (sightly more in the South and East than the West and Midwest/47 percent located in urban areas for both). The major difference is their respective numbers. There are about 20,000 neurologists nationally, but only about one-fifth as many neurosurgeons.

Demographically, they align quite closely in age breakdowns and both specialties skew heavily male. Neurosurgery, however, is almost exclusively male (91 percent).

Neurologists and neurosurgeons are so similar in fact, that for our purposes we will combine them into a single persona — “neuro physicians.”

Technographics provide insights based on a person’s technology choices and use. By this measure, the data runs counter to the cliché that physicians are technophobes. The actual behavior of neuro physicians shows the reality (see column at right).

On mobile devices, there are a handful of medical apps neuro physicians use, each differently and at different frequencies. In line with their research habits, some apps, such as Epocrates and UpToDate, are being used on a daily basis. Meanwhile, others like Doximity and MedScape are used weekly for more in-depth research.

Neuro physicians are on social media. Facebook appears to be a guilty pleasure of sorts — it is the most used but least valued network. YouTube, on the other hand, is the most valued with these physicians. They watch videos to gain information about a specific procedure or treatment, for scoping out demos of new technologies, or to catch up on an event that they might have missed.

Speaking of events, physical conferences — of which neuro physicians attend two per year on average — remain important forums for dissemination and advancement of research, training, education, and networking. They are the number two source (behind the internet) physicians use to stay current in their specialty. But back to technology …

Whether on a computer or a smartphone, medical resources such as UpToDate and PubMed are consumed on-the-go for immediate answers and updates. Sites such as MedScape and AAN are being consumed less frequently, but are used for more in-depth findings and research.

Does medical literature still matter in this brave new world? Yes. To recap Doximity findings, 75 percent of physicians change their clinical practices quarterly or monthly based on reading medical literature. In this specialty, Neurology, Neurology Today and Neurology Reviews are most favored; however, there are others that are also widely read. But don’t necessarily think paper here — three specialties were found to be most likely to access clinical news through their phone or tablet: cardiology, orthopedic surgery and, yes, neurosurgery.

Psychographic dimensions

Neuro physicians are game to try new things (e.g., drugs, devices, or procedures⁷), especially compared with the general population⁸. However, motivation in these instances can be impacted by the innovation’s meaning. Clearly, a new treatment can have dramatic implications for people with brain disorders so neuro physicians may be highly motivated to try it to help their patients regardless of their personal risk-taking proclivities.

In any case, this type of analysis starts to cross over to behavioral and psychological layers that add further dimension to our personas.

Persona grata

So what does all this persona data mean? What does it matter if we know all we’ve presented here and more, down to what kind of car make neuro physicians prefer to drive most (Toyota at 18.5 percent)?

On a practical level, geographic, demographic, and technographic data can help improve media targeting and selection. This alone improves marketing efficiency and thus makes the persona construction effort worthwhile. But more than that, with psychographics, you can play “armchair psychologist” to improve your messaging.

For example, we know that neuro physicians view themselves as the elite of the elite. Yet, the autonomous, entrepreneurial role they have played in the past is changing. In much of the last decade, doctors in general have gone from being the lynchpin in the healthcare system to more of a cog in a larger wheel. That can lead to frustration, and the higher opinion of your abilities (neuro), the more the frustration. A forward thinking hospital can tap into this zeitgeist when crafting its appeals to this specialty.

You can play “armchair psychologist” to improve your messaging.

Carl Jung theorized that there are four primary psychological functions through which we experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. His wife, Katharine Cook Briggs, and daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, expanded this theory to create personality questions that would eventually turn into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This test produces a combination of four dichotomies:

1. Extraversion vs. Introversion
2. Sensing vs. Intuition
3. Thinking vs. Feeling
4. Judging vs. Perception

Most people are familiar with this test and know that it produces a four-letter personality type. For example, if you are ESTJ, that means you are primarily a sensing, thinking, judging extrovert. There are 16 different personality types in all.

Various studies have been done linking medical specialties and Myers-Briggs personality typing. In the one below⁹ you can see that neurosurgeons can be categorized into three personality types (with the majority of those falling into two of the three). By looking at the sum of these three types, you can see how rare they are when measured against general population (last bars on chart).

Your top physicians — a double-edged sword

A point of consideration when building your institution’s reputation is your own physicians. In one study, specialists around the country rate only “outcomes” higher than “peers” when it comes to differentiators among top hospitals. In some ways, that makes reputation portable. If your specialty is tied heavily to a certain physician(s), that physician’s reputation goes to the next hospital when they leave. More focus on the multidisciplinary aspects of each specialty can help mitigate this. The reality is, though, it’s an “occupational hazard” for all providers.

Viva la difference?

According to another type of personality test, the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule, surgeons express “a need to be the center of attention in a group” more than their non-surgeon physician counterparts. We can only assume this would apply to neurosurgeons as well.

Getting personal

Adding personal narrative elements can help us complete our composite sketch of the neuro physician. In general, they are:

Extremely dedicated.
Their profession is a passion, a calling.

34% more likely to speak at a local professional event
37% more likely to teach at a medical school
25% more likely to review articles for peer-reviewed publication
32% more likely to author a blog or article for publication¹⁰

Statistics are in comparison to doctors in other specialties.

All consumed in their work.
They are so busy, in fact, that burnout in the field is a national concern (as is the nationwide shortage in this specialty).

2 out of 3 neurologists indicated their work schedule did not leave enough time for personal/family life

It is grueling beyond belief. Prepare for virtually no outside life. The 80-hour limit is a joke.”¹¹

Insatiably inquisitive.

My oxygen is my colleagues and my intellectual curiosity,” said one.12 In fact, neurosurgeons read 30 publications on average. Neurologists, 29.¹³

Confident, some would argue, to a fault.

They talked about themselves and where they and their field stood in the world of medicine. They were, they said, still the jewels of hospitals and needed to demonstrate the worth of their procedures, to figure out a way, as one of them put it, ‘to have [hospitals] value [them] more than just for [their] good looks.’¹⁴

You have to have to deal with some bad problems. Most of them, hopefully, are not of your own making. But at some point, some of them are of your own making and then, what are you going to do? Are you going to quit? Are you going to crawl into a fetal position? In the end, everyone can have complications, and you have to learn from them, become a better surgeon, and move on.”*

Humbled by their profession.
They never forget a small mistake (or sometimes even no mistake) can end up with tragic consequences for the patient.

Implications for reputation building

The last step is to make your persona insights actionable by looking for the strategic and tactical implications that hide in the data. For example, in our consideration of neuro physicians:

They have sharp, fact-based minds, and a non-stop hunger for knowledge
Neuro physicians are always learning and constantly researching. This suggests using a blend of both “in-the-now media” and deeper thought leadership pieces that can be consumed in their discretionary time (what little of it there is). In either case, wrap your message to this group in a educational context to better the chance of it being seen. But remember to stay away from anything overtly promotional — they will see right through it.

They prefer autonomy and self-sufficiency to reliance on someone or something
Neuro physicians will gravitate toward/hold in esteem an institution that mirrors their bold, independent outlook. For example, do you have a “neuro vision for the future” (e.g., creating more pathways from the lab to the clinic to allow for faster progress? Advancing research lab capabilities to give physicians experience with innovations before they make it to the bedside?). Don’t be afraid to showcase new ideas or approaches to this specialty — they will likely be open to them.

Combine technology and traditional means to reach them
Neurophysicians are tech savvy, which makes them reachable on channels such as Doximity and Medscape, but they also like their in-person conferences. Geofencing, the use of GPS technology to create a virtual geographic boundary that enables a triggered response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area, can be used to target neurophysicians at physical events.

In summary

Don’t feel constrained to follow persona best practices (either the ones you’ve read about here or anywhere else). Your hospital or health system may have its own research, expertise, or experiential learnings that can and should be leveraged in this endeavor. Previous brand exposure/equity needs to be factored into the equation as well. Obviously, certain providers (e.g., ones located in Rochester or Cleveland) may have less work to do in the reputation-building area. For others, though, it may be time to start communicating directly to physicians nationally. But don’t wait too long — as a wise man once said, “Nobody ever built a reputation on what they were going to do.”

1 Santino Cua, Susan Moffatt-Bruce, Susan White. “Reputation and the Best Hospital Rankings: What Does It Really Mean?”, 1 Feb. 2017.
2, 3 Survey by reputation.com
4 Kantar Media. “Sources & Interaction: 2017 Medical/Surgical Edition Dashboard.”
5 Doximity
6 “Physician Perceptions Of Information Sources And Annual Reports Exploratory Research.” Movéo proprietary research, 2016.
7, 8 Sources & Interactions: 2017 Medical/Surgical Edition Dashboard Copyright© 2017 KANTAR MEDIA.
9 Everett M. Rogers. “Diffusion of Innovation.”
9, 10 Kantar Media. “Sources & Interaction: 2017 Medical/Surgical Edition Dashboard.”
11 SDN neurosurgery discussion forum answer to question, “How long and hard are the long and hard hours of neurosurgery?”
12 Janis M. Miyasaki, Carol Rheaume, Lisa Gulya, Aviva Ellenstein, Heidi B. Schwarz, Thomas R. Vidic, Tait D. Shanafelt, Terrence L. Cascino, Chris M. Keran, Neil A. Busis.”Qualitative study of burnout, career satisfaction, and well-being among US neurologists in 2016.” Neurology, Oct 2017. http://n.neurology.org/content/89/16/1730
13 Doximity
14 Charlene K. Petitjean. “Life, Love and Neurosurgery.” Project Wordsworth, 4 May 2013. Accessed from http://projectwordsworth.com/life-love-neurosurgery/

Author
Brian Davies
Managing Partner
bdavies@moveo.com

About Movéo
Movéo is a demand generation agency that focuses on three drivers of growth to help healthcare and B2B clients attract, secure, and retain more customers. For more information visit moveo.com.

Growing patient volumes: a demand generation approach

Our approach is built around volume growth. We have to have volume growth, I think, to be successful.

– Samuel Hazen, President and CEO Hospital Corporation of America

HCA is not alone in its focus on growth, however, how should it and other hospitals and health systems grow? Many have, over recent decades, focused on aspects of their business they can control directly in order to do so. This has led to a preponderance of inward facing strategies — consolidating market position through aggressive M&A and expanding outpatient settings, locking up referral streams through physician employment, and exerting price pressure on payers by leveraging market presence, for example. Movéo thinks of these strategies in terms of supply-side growth, since each in some way requires power over the supply of healthcare services, whether it be access, labor, or pricing.

M&A has helped providers on multiple fronts; it utilizes lower acuity settings, builds brand recognition, and allows for referrals across a distributed care network. Many markets are now highly concentrated, making attractive acquisition targets fewer and far between. Besides, if too much concentration occurs, regulators cast a weary eye, diminishing this strategy further. Additionally, sources of capital for new acquisitions are harder to come by.

On the physician front, nearly 40 percent of U.S. physicians are “locked-up” by a hospital or health system (a 50 percent increase over the period from 2012 to 2015). There are simply fewer unaffiliated physicians out there to hire, and competing for the loyalty of the remaining independents, while worthwhile, is a hard slog.

As for price increases, they become tougher when there is softening demand — which there is. The windfall of those newly insured by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has topped out, and contemplated federal ACA reforms (or repeal) will mean fewer, not more, insured in the coming years. The “new normal” of 1-2 percent growth in admissions — which may even be optimistic — is down from the recent 3-4 percent annually. There’s also been a slowdown in Medicare spending growth, even as the number of Medicare beneficiaries continues to rise. Population health initiatives are accounting for additional erosion in inpatient volumes, too.

There is a strong consumerism “movement” in healthcare fueled primarily by two trends: patient cost sharing and the shift to outcomesbased payment (i.e., value-based programs). Patient involvement and active management of cost are increasing as consumers now have more “skin in the game” as a result of highdeductible insurance plans. This leads to price shopping and fewer elective surgeries and procedures, further dampening volumes.

Hospitals and health systems can also expect outcome or value-based payments to rise and fee-for-service payments to continue to decrease. While not without its challenges, a real benefit to providers pursuing outcomes-based healthcare is having a patient-centered vision that motivates everything they do. Delivery systems that will succeed under these models will be those that can increase their number of lives under management. The key to increasing patient volumes, then, will be providing a consistently strong experience of care from the patient’s perspective. In such an environment, hospitals and health systems that remain inward facing in their strategies are at a distinct disadvantage, and may quickly lose relevance (and revenue).

For these reasons, we believe providers need to urgently reassess their strategies for growth beyond the supply side.

Demand-side growth

To grow patient volumes in the future, providers will need to generate demand for their services — earning marketing share instead of achieving it through supply dominance. This will be a paradigm shift for many, as it relies heavily on marketing strategy. While this may sound like an indictment of current hospital marketing, it is not meant to be — when engaging in a supply-side growth strategy, marketing is not an essential requirement for success. This is why so many providers have rarely gone beyond traditional brand pronouncements featuring caring physicians smiling at happy patients — they haven’t needed to. There are, however, more powerful levers of growth at their disposal once they choose to take a demand-side approach.

While many readers may be familiar with the concept of a “sales funnel” as a customer input-output metaphor, for others (especially in healthcare, an industry that has historically lagged behind others in marketing) it merits explanation. By definition, a funnel is the ideal process that consumers go through as they move from being someone who could potentially be a patient to an actual one. We say “ideal process” because we know that the funnel has “holes” in it — consumers looking for healthcare services go off to check ratings, prices, outcome information, and then search again.

They see ads or read U.S. News reviews. They talk to friends, over the back fence and on social media. But despite these detours, the metaphor is still a good one, because a motivated shopper inevitably returns to the funnel. Whenever and wherever they do, it is the job of brand to help move them through its different stages until they “fall out of the funnel” and become customers. Yet, this is where the traditional sales funnel metaphor does break down. Movéo believes demand generation should be viewed across a dual funnel that is distinguished from the old funnel in important ways:

First, the funnel should be viewed on its side (not vertically) as a reminder that there is no “force of gravity” bringing patients to your hospital or system — demand must be constantly generated to overcome market inertia or thwart competitive efforts.

Second, there are actually two funnels — one for the new patient journey and the other for the existing patient journey. The latter often receives scant attention from marketers, even though it costs many times as much to attract a new patient than to keep an existing one.

Third, demand generation involves an interplay among three drivers of growth — branding, lead generation, and customer engagement. Not coincidently, these three drivers overlap the entire patient journey. That is why we need to look at all three more closely.

The (real) role of brand

Brand is one of the most misunderstood ideas in business. The thinking in many organizations (and not exclusively healthcare ones) is that brand has to do with the marketing department as opposed to the firm’s total strategy. This leads to disconnects with the brand once it is experienced by patients. A bad personal exchange with an admission representative or an egregiously late lab result means the next time the patient sees advertising touting the brand’s bonafides, an eye roll (or worse) occurs, because a promise made in that ad has not been kept in practice. Other organizations may recognize the power of an internalized brand, but do not have the resources to implement it or, perhaps, the will — branding is not a “one-off” project but long-term strategy that requires continuous reinforcement.

Looking at the bright side, an enormous opportunity exists for many hospitals and health systems to enhance their brand if ALL stakeholders who work with the entity understand it and are living it. Nowhere is this more important than in healthcare, where there are thousands of touch points and interactions with the brand made daily. This is why in our dual funnel diagram, brand stretches across the entire patient journey. It is perceived by prospective patients and experienced by existing ones. If it is “broken,” the other two drivers of growth (i.e., lead generation and customer engagement) will also be hindered — if not rendered nonfunctional. On the other hand, a strong brand can lead to greater:

• Price leadership
• Quality perception
• Trust (involvement and esteem)
• Awareness
• Market share
• Intent to trial/use
• Engagement
• Satisfaction
• Advocacy/referrals

Plainly stated, branding (internal and external) can be a huge driver of growth.

The role of lead generation

The term “lead generation” is actually something of a misnomer in that it really involves a host of activities dedicated to the goal of new patient acquisition. The actual lead generation part of the larger process typically uses valuable content or other marketing efforts to engage anonymous individuals (suspects), identify them (leads), build the relationship (prospects), and then, by earning their trust, turn them into patients (customers), either immediately or over time.

The key to success for any lead generation effort is to provide the individual with a compelling reason to exchange his/her contact and perhaps other information (e.g., health condition of interest). This is accomplished through a content strategy that identifies and prioritizes content such as informative videos, interactive assessments, seminars or webinars, testimonials, eZines, or many other tactics all designed to facilitate the aforementioned exchange.

Such content works well in not only establishing but nurturing relationships — moving prospects through the funnel — with the goal of eventual hospital or health system trial. Developing high-quality content for different stages of the journey can be a daunting task for many lean marketing departments, but it is an essential one to successfully actuate a lead generation strategy. Luckily, technology such as marketing automation systems has made the distribution, if not the creation, of such content much easier. Lead generation, once successful, leads to an important event — usage. At this point, a prospect becomes a paying customer, and the relationship with the brand is set on an entirely new course.

The role of customer engagement

The first rule of any business should be to retain customers and build a loyal relationship with them. That is why it is amazing how little effort is expended by so many organizations in marketing to their existing patients. While the data may vary in healthcare, studies across industries show that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70 percent, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20 percent. Furthermore, existing customers are 50 percent more likely to try new products/services and spend 31 percent more when compared to new customers.

In light of this data, it’s easy to see why a customer engagement strategy that emphasizes customer retention and lifetime customer value will pay big dividends. That is why Movéo has included customer engagement as its own funnel, with an entirely different journey than that of a prospect. Here, the possibilities for growth not only include perfecting the customer experience to encourage repeat business and the crossselling of services, but the “holy grail” of customer engagement — advocacy. Loyal patients are those who keep going to your PCPs, your hospitals, your ambulatory centers. Advocates are those customers who do those things, but also actively champion your brand and influence the choices of others.

The concept of advocacy is hardly new — people have been recommending brands since they first existed. But today, the power and possibility of advocacy has reached a new scale thanks to social media. “Word of mouth” can become a massive amplification of your own marketing (and a free one at that).

Defining demand generation success

As the saying goes, that which cannot be measured cannot be managed, and demand generation strategies are no exception. Our first driver of growth, brand, is often perceived as an intangible that can’t be measured. While studies have been done by companies such as Interbrand that “prove” financial impact on the bottom line of organizations that have strong brands, these are still correlative. The problem is that it is difficult to quantify the human emotion created by brands. This emotion is what ultimately creates (in the words of Kevin Roberts, former CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi) “loyalty beyond reason.” Jeremiah Gardner, another brand expert and author of The Lean Brand, offers an interesting solution to this quandary involving measuring three metrics:

Interaction
Any time a person expresses some connection with a brand and an affinity for what it has to say, that’s interaction. Measuring interaction is simple: Does someone click on the banner ad? Do they watch the video? Do they open the email?

Engagement
Engagement is about the quality of the interaction. It’s how far someone is willing to go once they’ve interacted with your brand. Will they provide their email address? Do they comment on your post? Do they actually attend your weight loss seminar they registered for?

Participation
When a patient is devoted to your brand and performs actionsto exhibit that devotion, that’s participation. Does someone give your brand a high net promoter score? Does someone consistently show up to your events? Do they recruit others to the brand?

Through the lens of these three metrics, we can begin to form a model for estimating your brand’s emotional value. The diagram to the right shows an interesting way to look at this. Here, emotional investment (involvement and esteem) represents dimensions of brand health. When both measures are high (upper right quadrant), patients are likely to become advocates. When both are low (lower right quadrant), patients can be viewed as ripe for competitive poaching.

Compared to branding, lead generation is relatively straightforward to measure. Three metrics are key: conversion rates measure program efficiency, velocity identifies the time to move across stages, and volume measures the demand at each stage. Understanding each metric is important because it directly impacts resources.

For example, an inefficient lead generation process requires more activity (and budget) at the “attract” stage to reach a patient volume goal. But in most healthcare organizations (at least the ones we’ve had experience with), budget is a constraining factor, so maximizing the efficiency of the program by measuring and improving conversion (“engage,” “capture,” and “nurture”) is critical.

As for customer engagement, this driver can be the easiest to measure. Although most hospitals and health systems have implemented EMRs and revenue cycle management platforms, the most progressive organizations are also leveraging customer relationship management software to get a 360-degree view of patients. These systems excel at:

• Weaving together multiple sources of data, including patient demographics, psychographic, social, behavioral, clinical, financial, website, and call centers to provide a comprehensive view into patient and consumer habits and activities.
• “Crunching” the data to determine the best marketing opportunities, the best targets for those opportunities, and the best ways to communicate with those targets.
• Identifying the return on investment from customer engagement campaigns.

Many CRM healthcare vendors (e.g., Healthgrades, Oracle, Evariant, VerioMed, Influence Healthcare) use a selection of predictive models built at the program, service line, and procedure level to determine the appropriate customers to target with a high degree of accuracy. This helps determine what type of communication may be best received by patients. For example, it can identify at-risk patients for breast cancer, fill in engagement gaps along the care continuum, and encourage patients to stay current on healthy practices. A CRM program enables you to send the right message to the right people at the right time, thereby allowing them to take better care of their health — while you earn their loyalty through proactive, personalized communication.

Key Takeaway

Every hospital or health system is trying to grow — it is the strategies behind that growth that need to change. While supply-side growth can still work in some cases (e.g., mergers persist despite impediments), and growth can take other forms (e.g., new partnerships along the continuum of care or expanded physician reputation and referral programs, etc.), demand-side growth from increasing market share will yield the greatest returns in the future. Obviously, there will be winners and losers in such a strategy, and not every hospital or health system can succeed. Also, in markets where there might not be enough demand or too much competition around high acuity patients or lower margins, divestiture rather than “making a last stand” may be the best strategy. However, for most hospital and healthcare systems, recognizing the three drivers of growth — branding, lead generation, and customer engagement — and enacting a strong, integrated effort behind each one is the best way to significantly better their odds.

Author
Brian Davies
Managing Partner
bdavies@moveo.com

About Movéo
Movéo is a demand generation agency that focuses on three drivers of growth to help clients in healthcare and B2B attract, secure, and retain more customers. For more information visit moveo.com.

Learn how to build highly effective lead generation campaigns

Unlike consumer sales, where purchases are often made on impulse, most B2B sales are considered purchases with longer sales cycles, multiple buying influences, and larger investments at stake. Reaching these types of prospects in order to create interest around a company’s products or services is what demand generation is all about. Movéo believes in order for demand generation to be effective, three drivers of growth must be operating synergistically: Branding, lead generation and sales enablement. This eBook exclusively covers the second of these drivers.

Lead generation is a demand generation strategy that involves using content or other marketing efforts to collect names and contact information in order to turn them into prospects and buyers.

It’s about “feeding” the sales team, and doing it successfully requires significant expertise across a number of areas.

Movéo: Lead Generation Experts

For most of our B2B clients, Movéo is responsible for identifying strategies and tactics designed to drive, capture, and cultivate new business leads. Our experience and knowledge of lead generation best practices maximizes the amount of qualified leads generated, while also keeping our clients top-of-mind with their prospects at key points along the sales cycle.

We believe that the key to success for any lead generation effort is to provide the prospect with a compelling reason to exchange their contact information, and to that end, we work with our clients to produce campaigns that leverage offers and incentives that are relevant to their target buyers. This is done through a content strategy that identifies and prioritizes educational content such as video tutorials, webinars, white papers, case studies and testimonials, and eZines. We also understand the content that works well  in establishing and nurturing relationships — with both prospects and current customers.

What sets Movéo apart from other B2B agencies is not only our ability to produce and execute lead generation campaigns across a mix of media (email, search, social, display, etc.) — it’s our holistic approach to response-driven marketing. We have the experience and capabilities to produce and deploy virtually all lead generation tactics in-house, including:

• Prospect engagement solutions: white papers, eZines, videos, etc.
• Organic and paid search marketing
• Online display banners, rich media and video
• Landing page development and conversion rate optimization
• Cost-per-lead programs
• Web form lead capture and database development
• Lead cultivation solutions: Lead capture and scoring based on user-defined data and user actions
• Automated lead routing, CRM integration and nurture marketing campaign deployment
• 3rd party list acquisition (email and direct mail)
• House/opt-in list management and email delivery solutions including support for
  dynamic and personalized content and automated list hygiene
• HTML email design, copywriting, and programming
• Telemarketing/appointment setting solutions

Each step in the lead generation process has its own set of marketing and sales activities designed to move potential buyers through the sales funnel.

According to eMarketer, 36% of marketing professionals say lack of an effective lead generation strategy is their biggest obstacle. Oftentimes the problem is there is no process in place for generating and managing leads from first conversion through sales closing. Through Movéo’s 7-step process, we are able to design, implement, and execute lead generation programs that deliver a quantifiable ROI.

1. Establish Definitions for a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)It is imperative that the sales organization be involved in defining what a high quality lead looks like. This definition will include explicit characteristics such as industry type, location and size of company, annual revenues, etc., but it also needs to include implicit behaviors that better indicate their need or purchase intent.In the end, an MQL should answer “yes” to as many of the following questions as possible: (1) are we interested in doing business with this company (2) does this prospect have the authority to make or influence a purchase decision, and (3) does this prospect appear to have accelerating interest in our product/solution?
2. Establish Lead Qualification ProtocolsSuccessful lead nurturing requires the following dependencies:A Clear Data Process and Strategy
   What fields are required to segment the database for ongoing lead nurturing and how will we go about securing this information reliably?A Standardized Scoring Process
   What numerical values should be assigned to the various activities a prospect might perform along the buyer journey? How heavily should we weigh each demographic/firmographic criteria?A Defined Lead Routing Process
   Once a qualified lead has been identified, who will be alerted on the sales team, and how will they be held responsible for this lead? Will we allow sales the ability to pass leads back for future nurturing?
   
3. Identify the Marketing Automation SolutionVirtually every marketing automation platform provides three core capabilities: email marketing, website visitor tracking, and a central marketing database. From there, vendors begin to differentiate by providing additional tools — that may be included in the base price or premium priced — that offer advanced functionality. The best-fit solution in each case depends on the sophistication level required based on the steps above.Movéo has experience working with a number of marketing automation vendors, but the majority of our clients currently use Eloqua, Pardot, or Act-on.
4. Identifying the Right Content for Engaging BuyersContent mapping is required so that we can effectively automate the promotion and discovery of selling materials based on the prospect’s buying stage. Strategies we might leverage in this step include mining customer data, asking customers their opinion, or talking with sales.
   
5. Architect the User Experience and Nurture FlowsAccording to Gartner, by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human. Once we’ve gotten a prospect to raise his hand and opt-in for information, the “nurture marketing” process will need to begin — through database-driven communication. The nurture marketing process — which can take weeks or months and eventually involves a sales contact or personal consultation — is intended to turn the prospect into a customer. What are the triggers that we can use to accelerate cadence of communications when a prospect is “warming up?”
   
6. Develop the CampaignOur lead generation program would need to be very direct, comprising three fundamental elements: (1) the Offer, (2) the Campaign Promotion, and (3) the Lead Capture Process.The Offer:
   While lead generation programs can help build brand awareness — they are fundamentally about compelling prospective customers to take action. In our experience, the offer can represent the most important variable in the success (or lack thereof) of a lead generation program. We create assets (white papers, infographics, videos, etc.) that exhibit an understanding of the prospects’ challenges and offers solutions. As a result, prospects willingly exchange their contact information for them. As a first step, we identify the offer that will be most effective at convincing prospective customers to register online.Campaign Promotion:
   We maximize reach through integrated communications, while delivering immediate calls to action. Our plans balance the overall quantity of leads with lead quality.

   We control lead quality through the lead capture process, but also through careful tool selection. Our final recommendations may include CPL (cost-per-lead) vendors, display publishing networks, PPC (pay-perclick), social channels, email, direct mail, and pre- or post-tradeshow marketing. They are based on a thorough process of research and planning aimed at determining the most appropriate overall mix — both in terms of the tools selected and the frequency of their deployment.

   Lead Capture:
   We create a permission-based and highly targeted way to interact with qualified prospects. In determining the most efficient method for converting a visitor into a lead, the first question we ask is: “What is the best environment to facilitate lead capture activity?” Should we modify the existing website to accommodate a lead generation campaign, or is it better to develop a campaign-specific landing page, built entirely around the offer?

7. Deploy, Measure, and OptimizeIn addition to leveraging best practices in strategy, content, creative, media and technical deployment, Movéo is very focused on metrics and optimization. We measure everything through to sales conversion and use data to optimize our efforts and improve ROI. We believe that a successful lead generation campaign is one that spends the appropriate amount of time planning up front, but benefits most from ongoing (post-launch) campaign optimization. Movéo has experience working with a number of analytics vendors, but the majority of our clients are using Google Analytics. Additionally, we’ve seen that one of the challenges with getting data to actually mean something to business stakeholders is in its visual complexity. For this reason, in some instances (and depending on the client), we might also use a visualization tool such as Tableau to help tell the analytics story.

Sparton is an industry leader in designing, developing, and manufacturing some of the world’s most complex electronics and electromechanical devices. It serves medical, military/aerospace, and industrial markets.

The company engaged Movéo to develop a lead generation program from scratch. Movéo created a series of content assets around the theme Conquering Complexity™ and promoted them through a targeted lead generation program. In the first nine months, we were able to drive 3,381 qualified leads — and Sparton never looked back.

To date, Movéo has generated $152,200,885 in CRMqualified pipeline opportunities from its lead generation efforts for the company. A recent study shows that for 85% of B2B marketers, lead generation is the most important KPI for their organization.*

With results like Sparton’s, it’s easy to see why.

Movéo has generated $152,200,885 in CRMqualified pipeline opportunities.

Measuring ROI

Difficulty measuring the success of lead generation is surprisingly widespread. Although campaign delivery metrics (e.g., impressions) and response metrics (e.g., click-through rate) are important in understanding the penetration of a message, the real value of analytics is that they allow the management of a campaign at a much deeper level. Movéo’s optimization efforts for a lead generation campaign focus on efficiency metrics, such as cost-per-contact and cost-per-MQL, as well as the ratio of MQL-to-SAL (sales-accepted lead). For example, certain efforts might be highly effective at generating contacts for the marketing database, but we might find they become less effective when you look at how these contacts actually turn into selling opportunities. We look not only at the quantity of the leads being generated, but also at the quality of those leads, and we fine-tune our media mix and message based on efficiency metrics in order to maximize the impact of our efforts. We understand that there’s far more value in driving 100 highly qualified leads than 1,000 unqualified leads — especially given the bandwidth limitations of most B2B sales teams.

Ultimately what our clients care about is the cost of investment versus revenue generated. That said, at times we find that the true ROI can be influenced by factors that are outside of marketing’s efforts. For that reason, Movéo works with its clients to establish a realistic expectation for any lead generation campaign in terms of ROI. We take historical conversion (e.g., lead-toclose data) and revenue data (e.g., average deal size) to develop a model for how a campaign should perform. In this way, we can identify if any aspects of the campaign did not perform as expected, and we can make recommendations for course correction if necessary.

The end of guesswork: three steps to improving marketing predictability through data

Today’s marketers face new pressures to prove the value of their work. With the advent of big data and advanced marketing analytics tools, there’s no excuse for failing to demonstrate how your work is tied to tangible bottom line business growth.

But forward-thinking marketers are already realizing the need to move beyond ROI and into the even more complex territory of marketing predictability. They’re focused not only on demonstrating how their marketing efforts are driving business growth today, but also on predicting the impact their campaigns will have in the future. In fact, 66 percent of the global CMOs surveyed in IBM’s 2015 CMO Study said they plan to increase their use of predictive analytics in the year ahead.

This is no easy task. Developing and acting on predictive analytics requires a high level of data proficiency, and 71 percent of those same CMOs say they’re underprepared to deal with the “data explosion” that has taken place in the last few years.

In order to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the complexity of predicting the future through data, use these three straightforward steps to improve your marketing predictability efforts.

66 percent of the global CMOs surveyed in IBM’s 2015 CMO Study said they plan to increase their use of predictive analytics in the year ahead.

Assess past performance

Historical data from past campaigns must serve as the foundation for every marketing prediction. If you’ve been utilizing a CRM and a marketing automation tool, you should have historical data about the source of each of your recent leads and the tactics that nurtured them down the sales funnel. By assessing which tactics generated the greatest quantity of leads, which tactics impacted the conversion of those leads into customers and how much you invested to make each sale, you should be able to gain a relatively clear understanding of the potential impact of the various components of your marketing strategy. Based on data from past campaigns, develop an estimate of the number and types of leads your current campaigns will bring into the funnel, compare against strategic plans and goals and optimize your marketing mix accordingly.

Develop scoring models to predict buyer behavior

As you bring your marketing mix to life, how will your leads and prospects react, and what does their behavior tell you about what you can expect in the future? This is the next question you must ask yourself in your effort to make marketing more predictable. In order to begin predicting which leads and prospects will react in what way, it’s essential to develop scoring models that will help you separate your strongest leads from the weaker ones and identify the criteria that makes them most likely to buy.

What content does a prospect find most relevant? How might they have answered specific questions on specific forms? What role do they play at their company?

Again, historical data can help you do this. Analyze data from your marketing and CRM systems to identify behavior point patterns that indicate intent to buy. What content does a prospect find most relevant? How might they have answered specific questions on specific forms? What role do they play at their company? These insights can inform the development of a scoring model that attributes numerical scores to each action a lead takes based on your assessment of its potential to impact a future sale.

For example, you might observe that 60 percent of your recently closed leads visited the pricing page on your website, and 25 percent downloaded at least one of your case studies. Because of this, you’d assign a high number of points to those who visited pricing, and a not-quite-so high number to those who downloaded a case study. Conversely, you may notice that people who visited your careers page are (unsurprisingly) very unlikely to become customers: these people might get assigned negative points and be filtered out of the funnel so they never make it to your sales team.

Top of the funnel actions like visiting your homepage may receive a single point, while actions that typically take place further down the sales funnel, like downloading an in-depth white paper, viewing a case study or completing a form, might receive 10 points. Based on this scoring model, you can begin to determine which leads are most likely to buy and predict future sales weeks or even months in advance. With this created, you can identify opportunities not just for further marketing outreach, but for the sales team to reach in and help lead a particularly engaged prospect over the finish line.

You don’t have to be a data scientist to develop a lead scoring model, but enlisting one can certainly help. Consider working with a data consultant or analytics specialist, like the ones on our team at Movéo, when you’re ready to take your lead scoring beyond the basics. They’re the ones who can help you wrangle the many complex variables that typically come into play and improve the accuracy of your scoring models.

Measure, analyze and improve

Improving marketing predictability through data requires multiple trials (and often many errors) to determine what works. Be sure you’ve set your marketing and CRM systems up to deliver as much real-time data as you possibly can, and then analyze it carefully.

Data is no longer an optional add-on for your campaign — it’s a given. To demonstrate your ROI as a marketer and track your results, set every campaign strategy to include KPIs, measurements and metrics, and continually refer to these metrics to determine whether or not you’re moving in the right direction.

Ensure you’re tracking both tactics and strategy; keeping account of whether your tactics are working, whether your models are correctly calibrated and the success of your targeting is all essential to understanding the current and future actions of your campaign. Are the tactics you’ve employed in the past performing as you predicted they would? Is it time to modify your predictions or work new tactics into the mix to bring more leads into the funnel? Are your lead scoring methods accurately predicting a lead’s likelihood to close? Or do you need to modify your models based on new data and insights? These are some of the many questions we need to constantly ask ourselves in what must be a never-ending quest to optimize both the predictability and the performance of our campaigns.

Rather than making big, sweeping shifts to your campaigns and processes, try tweaking just one thing at a time, and testing that change during a period of focused analysis. As you become more comfortable predicting campaign performance and analyzing it in real time, this will begin to feel more like a science than an art. Stay at it long enough, keep making improvements, and soon you’ll be able to determine the impact of nearly every element of your marketing program with a fair level of accuracy. And isn’t that every marketer’s dream?

About Movéo
Movéo is a fully integrated communications company uniquely built to help its clients measurably improve marketing performance. We use data-driven insights to inform strategy and guide our use of creativity and technology. This results in integrated communications solutions that attract, secure and retain profitable customers for our clients. For more information on Movéo, visit moveo.com

What to expect from your new marketing partner

So you’ve decided to partner with a marketing firm. As you initiate such a partnership, various stakeholders at your company may have certain expectations in mind: that your partner will deliver a certain amount of new leads in a specific amount of time, that they’ll take work off your plate, or that they’ll double revenue by the end of the year.

But how can you establish what is actually realistic, both with your new partner and with people inside your organization? And what should you do to ensure that this new relationship helps you achieve your goals?

Both before you begin searching for a new marketing partner and after you’ve signed the contract, you need to accurately set expectations for yourself, your team, and your firm about what the new partnership will bring to the table. It all begins with knowing what to ask for. Here are a few key things you should expect from any marketing partner you’re considering working with:

An understanding of your goals.

In the first meeting you have with all prospective marketing firms, clearly outline your most important marketing goals. Be as specific and quantitative as possible: are you planning to redefine your brand?

Are you looking for new leads in the next year? Or are you more interested in driving referrals and upsell from current customers, with a goal of making new revenue from these efforts? And what proportion of these leads or this revenue are you expecting your new partner to directly contribute?

You should also be prepared to explain how you came up with these goals and what you’re currently doing to achieve them. If these are numbers arbitrarily picked by you (or your CEO), the firm needs to know that. If they’re derived from a minimum revenue figure your company needs to reach to expand into a new territory, they need to know that as well.

Once you’ve communicated your goals and where they came from, look for the marketing firm that can demonstrate a solid understanding of where you’re looking to go and can explain how they will help get you there. If the firm staff you’re working with simply nod and promise that they can deliver, don’t just take their word for it. Ask about the strategies they’ll establish and the tactics they’ll employ, their timeframe, their measurement tools, and how much it will cost. Make sure they can show you that they’ve delivered similar results for other companies with similar budgets. In the proposal stage, watch for marketing firms to develop their strategy around your goals. Their recommended tactics and KPIs should illustrate that they’re aligning their approach with your objectives to produce the metrics that really matter to you.

But with some pushback.

It can be tempting to work with a marketing firm who promises to deliver on everything you want, but these “yes people” aren’t always the best people for you. In fact, they may take a look at the current state of your company, your operations, and your budget and recommend reevaluating your internal goals.

Remember: you hired an outside firm to get an outside, expert perspective, and that often means that your prospective partner will bring a new idea to the table that you haven’t been able to see internally. Pushback on your original goals isn’t a sign that your new partner is difficult to work with, it’s a sign that they’ve done their research and are realistic about their abilities and your potential. So if they recommend a strategy predicted to bring in fewer new leads this quarter, but can assure you they’ll be top-quality, high-conversion contacts, try taking their advice. It may save your company time and money in the long run.

An effort to further your goals.

The best marketing firms won’t just accept your goals as their end game: they look a step further. Say, for example, you need to drive X amount of revenue in order to expand into a new territory. A good firm will look at that goal and ask “why?” and “what’s next?” In this case, it might be that you’re interested in solidifying an international presence within the next five years so that you can compete with bigger players in your industry, or that you’re looking to fill a void for a product you produce in a particular region. These goals may be far-off and vague, but a great marketing partner will help you flesh them out and lay the strategic foundation to achieve them in the future.

An average marketing firm will show you how they’re going to help you meet your most immediate goals. The marketing partner you want will give you recommendations that show how they’ll help you exceed those goals and prepare for the next steps.

Transparency.

Do you know what work your new prospective partner firm has already done? Have you checked out the background of their key staff members? Do they have references, testimonials, or online case studies? When it comes to their impact and work style, don’t just take their word for it. Ask for references from past or current clients, and actually call them. If they don’t give out references, walk away — it’s a major red flag.

If you get in touch with the firm’s references, don’t just ask about the bottom-line impact the firm has made. It’s just as important to get a sense of how they work as it is to understand what they produce. Are they prompt in responding? Did they implement a clear process for approvals, making recommendations, and implementation? Did they provide clear, understandable metrics, fess up to mistakes, and celebrate wins? Were they simply enjoyable to work with? All of this information is important to know before you sign a contract, and it’s not always the kind of information that can be gleaned from business development meetings.

A process.

A firm may present you with a compelling strategy and a series of tactics that make sense, but they need to be equally able to articulate how this strategy becomes reality. To do this, they need to present you with a set process, including deadlines, information, and input they need from you and a breakdown of who’s responsible for what.

Be prepared to discuss who on your team will be the primary point of contact for the marketing firm, and who on their side you should go to with questions or concerns. A marketing firm with a good process makes it clear how the strategy will work, how much time they’ll need from your team, and what kinds of resources they’ll need from you to achieve your combined goals.

One of the most important processes your new firm should lay out is an approach for reporting results. Expect your firm to deliver a monthly metrics report to you that doesn’t just include KPIs that show how their work aligns with your internal goals and priorities, but also gives you a solid overview of where they’ve spent their time that month and how it’s helped bring their strategy to reality. Ask to see a sample metrics report from another client, and ask them to explain what you’re looking at as it relates to the client’s strategy. A marketing firm that can articulate what metrics they’re including, how they’ve changed month-over-month (and why they’re changing) and why these particular measures are important is one worth a longer look.

A timeline.

Your new partner firm knows you’re focused on ROI, but a marketing strategy isn’t executed overnight. They should set expectations with you on what front-end work needs to be done (content creation, website design, SEO strategy and/or research may be needed) as well as how long it will take before you start seeing real results. You should be prepared to point out key dates where you or your team will be unavailable to review of key deliverables. This will avoid any unexpected delays, and help keep everyone on track.

Fun.

You wouldn’t enter into a friendship with someone you don’t like, so why would you enter into a business relationship with someone you don’t “click” with? Don’t discount the “fun factor” and chemistry when choosing a partner: do you actually like the people in the marketing firm? Have you met their team, and do you all get along?

If your teams are unhappy working together, the quality of the work and the results it produces will suffer. You may have wildly different styles (a creative agency can add depth of perspective to a conservative company, while a more formal marketing agency can add legitimacy and structure to a laid-back startup) but if you wouldn’t get a coffee with these people, don’t bother working with them.

A partnership with the right marketing firm offers access to expertise, time, and resources that can take your company to the next level. However, it’s essential that you, your company, and your prospective firm understand what to expect from such a partnership in order to maximize productivity, results, and ROI throughout the duration of your time working together.

What do you look for in a marketing partner?

How to address your prospects’ pain points with your next piece of content

Are you seeing fewer inbound leads than you should be? Are your marketing emails consistently achieving open rates in the single digits? Are the e-books and white papers you’ve painstakingly developed gathering “dust” on the digital shelf?

The reason for all of these problems may be that you’re not sufficiently addressing your prospects’ pain points with your content, giving them little incentive to invest their time or money in your brand. If you feel this could be the case, it may be time to rethink both the form and function of your content.

The good news? Improving your content to properly address your prospects’ pain points is not as difficult as it may sound. We’re letting you in on our go-to approach to planning, drafting and placing content, and to ensure it is uniquely tailored to the things your target customers care about most. Next time you need to develop a new piece of marketing content, try our step-by- step process and see how it impacts your results.

Step one: Use data to determine existing pain points

Your initial problem may be that you don’t fully understand your prospects’ challenges and pain points. Reflect back on where you got the information that informs your buyer personas: was it based in real-world research you and your marketing team conducted or received, or did you just make semi-educated guesses?

You’ve already got a wealth of information at your fingertips, so there is no excuse for failing to ground your buyer personas on actionable data. The content your website visitors search for, download and consume can tell you about their pain points—as well as what they’re looking for in a solution. Use Google Analytics and website visitor tracking to determine what pages of your website, existing gated content and emails are most popular, and work from there to glean information about where your prospects might be seeking solutions to their problems. Then, schedule a meeting with the sales team to see if your insights align with their in-the-field experiences. In conversations with prospects, they may find there are certain needs that just aren’t being met.

After you have this information, you can start planning content pieces that directly address your prospects’ most common pain points. However, there’s more initial work that needs to be done.

Step two: Define the goal of the content

What is the most important thing you hope your new piece of content will achieve? Are you looking to move a lead from awareness to consideration? Do you want to compel them to contact a sales representative, or are you simply looking for a prospect to give you their contact information?

Your content will look radically different depending on what you hope to achieve. A piece for prospects at the top of the funnel should be accessible and easy to consume. It should let your audience know about your solution and compel them to continue exploring your site and other content to learn more. On the flip side, a piece for those who are almost ready to make a purchase needs to address specific pain points and go into depth on why your business is uniquely positioned address them. It should also end with a call-to-action to contact your sales team to move forward.

Step three: Determine why your solution is unique

Driving prospects to buy requires setting yourself apart from the competition. Keep your key differentiators at the top of your prospects’ minds and make sure they come through in every content piece. How will your solution help them save more money, more time, or both?

If you’re not clear on your key differentiators, go back to the data. Look at your existing customers, and assess what it was that made them choose you over your competitors. Was it a particular feature, your reputation, your pricing, or something else entirely? Find out by revisiting the content that led prospects to become leads and, again, by staying in active communication with the sales department. Since they’re the ones who close the leads you bring through, they have a wealth of information on what’s moving the needle.

The best content finds customers where they are already spending their time.

Step four: Determine how your content will be delivered

How will prospects find your content? Do you intend for it to be discovered via an internet search, site search, drip nurture marketing workflows, advertising, lead generation campaigns, or some combination of those channels and others?

The best content finds customers where they are already spending their time. Where do they go to seek out solutions to their challenges and pain points? Again, rely on data from past efforts to build your strategy. Are many of your current customers active on social media? If so, a strategy that revolves around sharing white papers on LinkedIn and posting testimonials on Twitter may make sense. Have your marketing emails historically led to sales? Consider building more email campaigns into your content marketing strategy. Are users who arrive at your site via organic search converting into leads and sales? Invest more in SEO. The best campaigns rely on a strategic mix of channels like these, and allocate budgets and efforts based on data about what has driven results in the past.

Look at every prospective customer as a person who is looking for a solution to a business challenge, and develop your content accordingly. Use data to gain a deeper understanding of their pain points, differentiate your offering from others, and meet your prospective customers when and where they’re seeking information. They’ll be happy to further investigate your solution to their problems, and you’ll be happy to watch your pipeline fill with new leads.