Embracing omnichannel, machine learning, and hybrid approaches
The term omnichannel was coined 10 years ago in retail to signify meeting customers where they are in a channel-agnostic manner – giving the people what they want on their terms. Recently, we’ve seen the pandemic force life sciences (LS) organizations to confront change and adopt omnichannel as both a term and a necessary way to meaningfully engage with HCPs—driving digital-first and digital-only engagement models to the forefront. LS organizations are working to build better omnichannel capabilities, embrace agile marketing, and adopt a testing and learning mindset. Now that it has gained momentum, we anticipate omnichannel will drive more direct-to-patient relationships, thereby opening new revenue streams (digital health) and building brand equity in a time of change.
Next Best Experience (NBE) is the evolution of Next-Best-Action (NBA). NBE refers to the ability of an organization to use data and AI/ML models to predict the best customer experiences a brand should serve to its customers (HCPs, payers, patients, etc.) and systematically enable internal stakeholders across the Sales and Marketing organization with the information to execute seamless and meaningful interactions. NBE creates a scalable enterprise infrastructure to break the silos of having multiple recommendation engines (NBA, personalization/targeting) between departments that provide disparate views of the customer. NBE is applied on a common customer data set providing recommendations throughout the customer journey and across the enterprise, enabling marketing and sales systems and stakeholders to use the same information and cohesively target every interaction.
NBE is becoming possible as commercial organizations:
Invest in cloud data infrastructure, having realized the need for data integration, interoperability, and integrated operations between sales and marketing.
Actively explore avenues for using AI/ML infrastructure at the enterprise level and see the value of building internal institutional knowledge to reduce reliance on 3rd party vendors.
Recognize that NBA initiatives, though they have improved some aspects of the sales cycle, have not driven the promised value and face adoption challenges.
What we expect to see in 2023 is re-evaluation of NBA initiatives to review how the organization can enable the next best experience throughout the customer journey. We see sales, marketing, and omnichannel leaders coming together to evaluate how they collaborate and strategically invest to achieve NBE and drive adoption to create truly integrated and personalized campaigns across channels.
Across the industry, marketing leaders face challenges tied to media & agency operations:
Industry trends are placing more emphasis on customer intelligence, cost transparency, data governance, speed to market and tech ownership
The abundance of marketing analytics and data-driven insights have increased pressure on marketing leaders to ensure media investments are actually delivering a strong customer experience and positive business gains
Changing privacy regulations, the need for full consumer transparency and third-party cookie deprecation are forcing businesses to regain control of their data
Increased MarTech investments and reliance on first-party data are driving the need for alignment and integration of AdTech systems within the MarTech infrastructure
A new model is emerging in which brands and agencies share data in a hybrid agency model. In this model, critical data is both owned and resides with the brand. The brand owns the AdTech accounts, media accounts, and data repository facilities, and has in place a small team that oversees agency activities and clearly defined outputs. Campaign infrastructure and accounts all live with the advertiser (Brand), while the agency runs campaigns as before, but across advertiser accounts. The agency still has access to all necessary data, but it resides and is leveraged by the advertiser.
Given the cost savings benefits of a hybrid model (along with increased control of data and richer insights into performance), we anticipate more organizations will embrace it in 2023 and beyond.
Lefteris Grammatas, Rio Longacre
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