Personalization and individualized content have been a standard feature of the user experience across name brands like Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon for several years. In the process, consumer behavior has fundamentally changed as today’s consumers expect that their needs will be anticipated and addressed. This enables an extremely dynamic environment for brands and has created an opportunity for marketers to get closer to customers by delivering personal experiences.
As personalization mainstreams into healthcare, consumers and patients are demanding greater inclusion in healthcare decision making; accessing their own health data and connecting their healthcare experiences with Amazon-like personalization.
In terms of marketing mass, it’s clear that outside of the healthcare industry there is significant lift and improved profitability when brands tailor experiences. Studies have shown that data-driven personalization can increase sales by 10 percent and provide an ROI of more than 15 percent.
For healthcare marketers to meet the modern consumer’s expectations and subsequently improve sales and ROI, they need to move past old-style, broad-brush marketing methods that consumers have become resistant to. Effective healthcare marketing today means developing a new marketing algorithm, rethinking core business models, and developing unique experiences that competitors can’t easily duplicate — all of which is predicated on customer-centric thinking.
So, how exactly can healthcare marketers transform their marketing efforts to be more customer-centric and personalized?
- Make advertising more addressable — an opportunity to target customers one-to-one, efficiently, and at scale
- Make healthcare experiences more personal — data-driven marketers are taking advantage of the decisioning power technology provides to deliver more meaningful, relevant moments
- Manage healthcare customer relationships over time — the modernization of CRM and acquisition-conversion-loyalty programs help brands improve their understanding of lifetime customer value and prioritize marketing interventions and investment
To effectively implement these strategies, healthcare marketers should develop a framework to connect with their audiences. Danielle Bulger, a senior account executive on Google’s Health Systems team, suggested in a recent webinar an intent-based marketing framework, “See, Think, Do, Care” that looks to engage consumers with content and marketing deliverables that matches their intent.
The “See, Think, Do, Care” framework is broken up into four segments that delineate consumers by their intent, ranging from the largest addressable qualified audience that is not ready to become a customer right away to current customers with two or more commercial transactions.
Let’s take a brief look at how this framework might play out for providers, for example:
- See: people who are interested in maintaining their health (e.g., they wear sunscreen or maintain a healthy diet)
- Think: people who are seeking information on current health conditions and/or symptoms
- Do: people who are actively seeking medical treatment and caregivers
- Care: past and present patients
Using this framework, healthcare marketers can develop a strategy that will enable them to better understand their consumers and create relevant and personalized content that provides utility.
Want to learn more about how to implement personalization into your marketing strategy? View Merkle’s on-demand webinar with Google’s Danielle Bulger titled “Personalization is Now: Providing Utility to Win Moments that Matter.” Or, inquire about attending our annual Health Executive Exchange taking place February 22-23 in Sarasota, FL where we will discuss how companies can Transform and Disrupt…or be Disrupted.
